She worked as editor of women's pages in Houston, Miami, Philadelphia; and in Boise, Idaho, as an assistant managing editor. While working as women's page editor for the "Philadelphia Bulletin," she took a five-week leave of absence to edit "Xilonen", the daily newspaper of the 1975 United Nations World Conference for International Women's Year in Mexico City. She considered her time there to be the most important work of her career. As a result of that work, she was honored with the AWC's Headliner Award. She helped create the National Women and Media Collection, which documents media coverage of and by women in the United States. She was one of four women's page journalists selected to participate in the Washington Press Foundation's "Women in Journalism Oral History Project." After more than four decades of working to reshape the definition of women's news, Paxson finished her career as a newspaper publisher in Oklahoma.