NEWS ETHOS

Journalist who redefined ‘women’s issues’ for her readers

Rita Henley Jensen, who after escaping an abusive marriage with two young children became a well-regarded journalist and founded digital news service Women’s enews, died on 18 October in Manhattan, New York. She was 70.

The cause was breast cancer, her daughter Ariel Jensenvargas said.

Jensen was in her mid-20s in Columbus, Ohio, when she broke free from her troubled marriage, relying on food stamps and other government aid to survive. She enrolled at Ohio State University, graduating in 1976, and then moved to New York City with her two children to attend Columbia University. She received a master’s degree in journalism in 1977.

She began what seemed as if it would be a promising journalism career, but things took an odd detour in October 1981 when the woman who was sharing Jensen’s Manhattan apartment was involved in the notorious Brink’s robbery in Nanuet, New York, in which two police officers and a guard were killed. The roommate was Kathy Boudin, a member of the radical Weather Underground in the 1960s and ‘70s.

In the aftermath of the robbery, Jensen, at 35, was fired by the daily newspaper she worked for, The Advocate, in Stamford, Connecticut, and ended up in a protracted legal dispute with its parent company, Times Mirror. The newspaper contended that she had allowed inaccurate information about her knowledge of Boudin’s identity to be published in its pages; Jensen argued that the real reason was her refusal to write a firstperson account of her life with Boudin.

“She was blacklisted,” her daughter said. “We were living in poverty for years.”

But she gradually got back into journalism, working for The American Lawyer and The National Law Journal, among other publications. In 2000 she became the first editor-in-chief of Women’s enews, started as a non-profit body by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

About two years later, when the fund withdrew its sponsorship, Jensen took the site over, turning into fundraiserin-chief in addition to editorin-chief to keep it afloat and further its mission of writing about women’s issues, which she defined expansively. “It’s not just about abortion,” she said in a 2007 interview. “It’s about economic opportunity. It’s about the nutrition programmes. It’s about who’s going on the Supreme Court next. It’s about everything that impacts women, which is everything.”

Rita Jane Henley was born on 1 January 1947 in Columbus.her father, Justin, was a journalist, and her mother, the former Mary Elizabeth Downey, was a housewife.

Her first journalism job was with The Paterson News in New Jersey, where she was a reporter from 1977-1979. Then came the position at the Stamford paper and the Brink’s robbery. Jensen brought legal action against the company. Central to the dispute was whether she had known the real identity of Boudin, who was using the name Lynn Adams. Jensen said at the time that she had known who Boudin was and had informed her editor, but that later news accounts had misconstrued the careful wording they had devised to skirt the issue.

“The media picked up the story, added and subtracted a word here and there, and suddenly I was quoted denying that I knew Lynn Adams was actually Kathy Boudin,” she said.

As Jensen eased back into journalism, she was writing about women’s issues even before she started Women’s enews. Her personal experience with spousal abuse made her a lifelong advocate for providing women in difficult circumstances with support.

Violence against women was only one of the issues Jensen and the journalists she edited and mentored dug into at Women’s enews. Single motherhood, health, women’s legal status and more received scrutiny, and the site looked far beyond the borders of the United States. In 2003 it started an Arabic version after noticing that its articles were drawing a lot of readers in countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Most recently, Jensen had been concerned with high mortality rates among women giving birth in parts of the US, a subject she wrote about for cnn.com in May. She had recently left Women’s enews and started the Jane Crow Project to combat that problem, especially among African-american women.

She also occasionally wrote about her breast cancer. In a straightforward, often droll article for sheknows.com in 2016, she recounted her decision not to have reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy.

“I do not regret that I decided to drop a boob,” she wrote. “I do regret that the post-mastectomy bathing suit I bought is ugly, by my lights. I would really like my black Speedo back.”

Jensen’s marriage to James Jensen in 1965 ended in divorce. In addition to Jensenvargas, she is survived by another daughter, Shasta Jensen; three brothers and four grandchildren.

Jensen was always quick to acknowledge the help she received in hard times, whether from an aid programme or the good Samaritan who got her to orientation on her first day at Ohio State.

Having no money for transportation, she hoped to hitchhike to the university, dropping her two girls off at two different day care centres on the way.

That improbable plan succeeded when a man in a red sports car pulled over in the rain; the stranger dropped the two children off, then dropped her off, even letting her cadge one of his cigarettes.

“When he let me out, I thanked him,” she recalled. “He nodded, revved his engine and sped off.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service