I stumbled across this article while searching for something else (research is like that) and was stunned. When I started at The Times in the late 1980s, the Women of the Year Awards were viewed as something of  a joke, one of Dorothy Chandler’s  pet projects begun in 1950 and dropped by Otis Chandler in 1977, who explained that they were “unnecessary in today’s world.”

In truth. the Women of the Year Awards were unfairly viewed as a plaything for clubwomen, patronesses of the arts, etc. Agness “Aggie” Underwood, for example, was shocked that she was a recipient because she worked for a competing paper.  Opera singer Lotte Lehmann, Olympic athlete Martha Watson and actress Lily Tomlin were also honored.

This is Digby Diehl’s 1976 profile of Anais Nin, who lived "in a lovely home in the Silver Lake district" (2335 Hidalgo, according to a little Web sleuthing).

Nin says: "The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for self-development. She will be a woman in harmony with her own strength, not necessarily called masculine or eccentric or something unnatural. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity, a woman who will know how to talk to children and to the men who sometimes fear her… The woman of the future will never try to live vicariously through the man, and urge and push him to despair, to fulfill something that she should really be doing herself. So that is my first image — she is not aggressive, she is serene, she is sure, she is confident, she is able to develop her skills, she is able to ask for space for herself."