‘Dame County’ Quip the Bane of Dane County Newspaper

There is nothing like a dame headline to get people calling for the headline writer’s head.

When Dane County voters elected women as county executive and Madison mayor for the first time ever, the Capital Times ran a bold, above-the-fold headline proclaiming: “Dame County!”

Then came the complaints and cancellations.

One caller found the headline “tasteless, stupid and offensive.” Another called it “an example of the worst form of sexism and chauvinism that I’ve encountered in a long time.”

At least two of the more than a dozen callers in this liberal college town canceled subscriptions to the Capital Times, circulation 22,000, even though the paper’s editorial board had endorsed both women.

Associate City Editor Ron McCrea, who wrote the headline, said he was just aiming for a playful way to report the story.

He toyed with “On Ms. Consin!”--a play on the state song, “On Wisconsin!” “Another one was ‘Femme Finale!’ and of course ‘Women Rule,’ but none of these looked very good when we put them on the page,” he said.

Before going with the headline, he took an informal poll of women in the office, and they didn’t find “Dame County!” offensive, he said.

“It is definitely slang, but it is affectionate slang,” McCrea said.

Mayor-elect Sue Bauman, who--along with County Executive-elect Kathleen Falk--made local history, said she generally doesn’t like the word but thought the headline was “kind of clever.”

But Kathy Maeglin, editor of the newspaper’s section geared toward women, didn’t like it.

“I think that dame is a derogatory term for woman. I guess I view it the same way I would view the word ‘broad,’ ” Maeglin said. “I always think of the ‘South Pacific’ song, ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame.’ ”

The Dictionary of American Slang defines dame as “a woman or girl, especially a troublesome one. . . . Depending on the emphasis, it can now mean a promiscuous woman . . . a sexually attractive woman, an unemotional, sexless woman worker, or even an ugly old woman.”

Webster’s New World College Dictionary notes that the word was “originally a title given to a woman in authority or the mistress of a household.”

McCrea said it was just the sort of “simple, bright headline” he wrote during five years at Newsday in New York, where newspapers battle for the snappy headline.

And Capital Times Editor Dave Zweifel still thinks it was appropriate.

“Obviously, we don’t like to lose anyone over the wording on a headline,” Zweifel said. “It was a very historic story, actually, in which for the first time in the history of our county and our city, the two top elected posts are women. So naturally we went with it.”