[3] Sidney Wade was an executive at Union Carbide and her mother had inherited family money.

She earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1952 and was top of her class in copy editing.

[3] She joined The New York Times as a copy editor in 1956, becoming the first woman to edit news for the paper.

She became a member of the union's International Executive Board, and in 1978 became the first woman president of the Guild's New York local.

[1] The Times' reporting on the Pentagon Papers, which Wade helped prepare for publishing, won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

[1] Wade told Nan Robertson in her 1992 book The Girls in the Balcony, "The copy desk did not put a screen around me.

[1] A collection of her columns was published in book form as The New York Times Practical Traveler Handbook (1994).

[1] Wade was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017, and died on December 3, 2020, at age 91, at her home in New York City.

[1] Manuscript collections relating to Wade are held at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives,[12] and by the State Historical Society of Missouri.