In 1964, broadcast journalist Marlene Sanders became the first woman to anchor an evening network newscast.

It was a breakthrough, but more or less accidental. Sanders got the chance to anchor the ABC broadcast because the regular anchor got sick and lost his voice.

“She had to fight a lot of stereotypes and a lot of ridicule,” said Bill Moyers, who worked with Sanders on a documentary series at CBS. “But she hung in there and did really good work. She caused the first tinkling of the glass ceiling.”

Sanders, who also broke through stereotypes when she covered the Vietnam War and became the first female vice president of news at a network, died Tuesday in a hospice facility in New York City.

The cause was cancer, said her son Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN.

Sanders, who won three Emmys for her work on TV documentaries, did in-depth reporting on topics such as the emerging women’s movement, the right to die and overpopulation. And in addition to the war, she covered the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the volatile 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and other national events.

A LONG WAIT

But she was also pigeonholed in many ways, especially early in her career. At the time she got the chance at anchoring, she had an afternoon show called “News With the Woman’s Touch.”

“Food, fashion, child-rearing, decorating, social events and the entertainment scene were all you could expect” as a woman in the field, she said in her 1988 book, “Waiting for Prime Time: the Women of Television News,” written with Marcia Rock.

Gradually, Sanders was able to get more hard-news assignments as a reporter. In 1965, she covered the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson, and a year later she was sent to Vietnam.

As the women’s movement became more prominent, Sanders saw her chance to make a difference on how the topic was presented. “In the initial phase of the women’s movement, reporting on it was done mainly by men, and it was snide and hostile,” she wrote in “Waiting for Prime Time.”

“Women’s lib was treated with humor at best and contempt at worst.”

In 1970 at ABC, she was the correspondent on “Women’s Liberation,” the first of seven documentaries on women’s issues she worked on at the network.

Her husband, Jerome Toobin, died in 1984. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.

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