California State University , Northridge a 8TUDY of WOMEN IN

Home , Herb Sargent, James Creelman, Jane Swisshelm, Nell Brinkley

California State University , Northri dge

)

A TUDY OF WOMEN IN AMERICAN JOURNA8 LISM FROM 1696 TO 1972

A thesis submitted in par tial satisfaction o£ the requirements £or the degree o£ Master o£ Arts in

Mass Communication

Vicki Lee Brumagin ----

June, 1972 r··------I i

The the sis of Vicki Lee Brum�qin UOaooroved:

California State University, Northridge

June , 1972

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

...... ABSTRACT ...... lV CHAPTER

• • • . • • • • ·• • • • I. INTRODUCTION. • 1

. . . . . II. PRINTERS ' WIDOWS : 1696-1800 . . . 7

III. TERlvrA.GANTS AND TEMPTRESSES : 1800-1890 • . . 21 Publishers Reporters and Editors Changing Times Magazines

Women 1 s Club s War Correspondent s·

•• . . . 81 IV . STUNT WOMEN : 1890-1900 . .

SOB SISTERS : 1900-1910...... 99 v. .

• . . . . 1 3 VI. SUFFRAGETTES : 1910-1920 . . 1

VII. TABLOID HEROINES : 1920-1930 • . . . 135 . .

VIII. PROFESSIONAL COMPETITORS : 1930-1960 • . . 159 . War Correspondents Publishers

IX. BEYOND EQUALITY : 1960-1972 . • • • • • • • • 193 Publishers Magazines Activist Reporting Broadcasting Fore gn Correspondence Washin� gt on Press Corp s

CONCLUSION . • ...... 243 . x......

BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • ...... 249 . .

iii ABSTRACT

A STUDY OF' WOMEN IN AMERICAN JOURNALISM FROM 1 9 1972 6 6 TO by

Vicki Lee Brumagin

Master o£ Arts in Mass Communication

June , 1972

The purpose o£ this thesis was to identify and describe those women who received professional and/or pub - lie recognition as Amer ican journalists from to 1972 . 1696 The focus was on reporters , editors and publishers

(excluding for the mo st part columnists, society and women 's page editors ), tracing their careers an d their role within the mainstream of journalistic history in America.

Data were gathered £rom a variety o£ sources , in- eluding history texts, contemporary biographies and auto- biographies and, in the main , £rom such trade publications as Editor & Pub lisher , Quill, The Matrix, Journalism

Qu arterly, and news magazines , Time and Newsweek .

Of particular value was a 1936 text , Ladies o£ the

Press : The Hist ory of Women in Journalism By An Insider .

iv Written by Ishb el Ross , the volu�eLis the sole definitive book written on the subj ect to date .

Over 300 newswomen are identified in this survey ,

tracing their invo lvement in journalism from colonial days through the nineteenth century , then spotlighting their contributions as "stunt women ," 11 sob sisters" and 11tabloid heroines ," before going on to analyze their role as highly professional competitors within the news media of modern

America .

The study reveals that. women indeed have played a larger part in American newsgathering than many journalism texts have given them credit for . In addition , certain historical patterns are identified and described under various chapter headings .

v ------�- :______

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Women 's Liberation Movement--born with the

decade o£ the 1970's--surprised many Americans into taking

a second look at the nation 's female population . At few

times in history has the feminine role been so thoroughly

scrutinized : Who is the American woman ? •••wh ere has she

been and where do es she go from here?

One of the places she 's been £or a long time is in

the newspaper city room. Though her presence may not al -

ways have been conspicuous to readers, the lady journalist

has long labored behind the scenes, risking life and limb--

not to mention reputat ion--to provide the public with what

it had ria right to know ." Since 1696, when the first

colonial printer 's widow decided to carry on her husband 's

trade , women have played a part in gathering and reporting

the news . Yet, "journalism texts refer to women most o£- 1 ten in footnotes and only briefly in texts, 11 points out

Il Marion Marzolf, journalism lecturer at the University o£ Ii Michigan . I L

1 2

Thousands of pages could be devoted to these news- r!wom en , chronicling everything from their dr ess to their .il courage, their individual writing styles to their political views . However , this study will concern itself pri-

mar ily with simp ly identifying chronologically those women

who achieved professional and/or public recognition as

news reporters or editors in America during the period

1696 to 1972. It will att empt , too , to enlarge upon the

little that can be gleaned from the footnotes of tradi - 1I tional texts and, to some extent , to interpret the roles j wh ich these women have played in the history of American �� journalism. Since the period under investigation spans nearly I three centuries , two factors had to be dealt with at the outset . First, implicit in a survey of this scope is the

exclusion of hundreds of women who , regardless of their

contr ibutions to the field, did not receive "professional

an d/or public recognition" and are therefore lost to

record.

Second, a decision was made to deliberately omit

those women--wi th rare exceptions--who worked solely as

columnists, social page, or "women 1 s page" editors and

wr iters . Admi t.tedly , these women too have contributed to

the nation s news media but for th e p rpos f his_ stu<:Iy , 1 u._ � o. _:t::_ . only those who worked 1n the competitive world of the

"hard news" and "feature stories" of the front and near-

front pages of American newspapers and magazines were

included.

Marion Mar zolf 's preliminary biblio graphy , "Women

I in American Journalism," provides a useful tool 1n ana-

J.yzing the available literature in this field. While the

bibl iograp hy is by no means complete, it suggests some of

the difficulties implicit in a survey of this type;

specifically it points up the dearth of detail available

on the vast majority of journalists in general.•

Professor Marzolf lists 256 sources; of these,

mo re than one-third are concerned solely with a handful of

the few "well-knowns" in the field: Nellie Bly (6),

Dorothy Dix (4), Mary Baker Eddy (4), Margaret Fuller (9),

Marguerite Higgins (5), Sara Josepha Hale (6), Clare Booth

Lu ce ( 3), El eanor "Cissy" Patterson ( 3) , Anne Royall ( 4) ,

Agnes Smedl ey ( 6), Gloria Steinem (3), Anna Louise Strong

(12), Ida Tarbe l (4) , Dorothy Thompson (3) and Margaret f Bourke-White (9) . Of the remainder , another third also

deal exclusively with individual personalities .

The �ingle history of women in American journalism

to dat e was written by Ishbel Ross in 1936. Entitled

"Ladies of the Press : Th e Story of Women in Journalism By An Insider ," the volume 1s a masterful coll ection of anec

dotes and a rich vein of informat ion about S. newswomen u. throu gh the early 193 0's. Miss Ross assemb led her mate

rial s primarily throu gh personal acquaintance and corres

pondence, thus the book gives heavy emphasis to East Coast

news personalities active during the period 1900 to 1930.

Research for this study was initiat ed by reviewing

·h istorical literature and trade publications to discover ,

insofar as this is possible, the names of those women who

were working journalists during the study period.

Besides those books listed in the bibliography,

the following references were invaluable in "uncovering"

possible candidates for this survey : Atlantic Monthly , . ··collier 's, Editor and Publisher , Harper's Magazine,

Journalism Quarterly, Th e Matrix , McClure's Magazine ,

Newsweek, Saturday Evening Post, Time and microfilmed back

issues of the New York Herald, Journal , Times, Tribune and

World.

Once this list of individuals was compiled, the

career of each was traced exhaustively (frequently the

biographies of male contemporaries yielded important clues

·to the women 's car eers ). Finally the material was or-

. ganized historically in an effort to place these newswomen 5

r- 1 and thc1.r. activit ies into greater perspective . Wh erever 1 poss ible, an alogies are drawn between women of different }l

1I eras . (

FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER I

1 11Women in American Journali sm: A Prel iminary

Bibliography" compiled and mimeographed Winter 1971 , I ( ) p. 2. I! I I CHAPTER II

PRINTERS' WIDOWS : 1696 -1800 "

The first daily newspaper printed in English , the 1 Daily Courant , app eared in London on March 11, 1702 .

Very little, except for a name on the sheet 's masthead and a signature affixed beneath the opening announcement , lS known about the paper 's pioneerin g publisher . Still, the name alone--Eli zabeth Mal let--gives English-speaking news paper women everywhere a starting point from which to trace their role in journalistic history .

The Daily Courant , printed on one side of a single sheet , was , according to its publ isher , "confin 'd to hal£ the Compass, to save the Pub lick at least hal£ the Imper - 2 ti.nences , of ordinary Newspapers."

Though its publisher gu ided the infant paper just two weeks before handing it over to the excellent care of

Samuel Buckley , she offered two policy statements to guide her successor: First, "at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign.Paper from whence 'tis taken , that the Publick, seeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government , may be better

7 to Judge the Credibility and Fairness of the l�ela- ;d> te

tion," and, second, nNpr will he take upon him to give

any Comments or Conjectures of his own , but will relate

on ly Matter of Fact ; supposing other People to have Sens e 3 enough to make Reflections for themselves ."

The circumstances of Elizabeth Mallet 's propri-

etorship of the Daily Courant are not known , however , if.

the experience of her Am erican contemporaries is any in-

Jication, it might be £air to assume that she was the

widow or daughter of an Eng lish printer .

The history of the newspaper, thus of journalism

itself, is inextricably bound in America and elsewhere

with the development of printing . "It might even be said.

that the newspaper was the mo st significant contribut ion

of the printing press •••" notes Dr . Edwin Emery , professor

of journalism at the University of Minnesota. "With a

publicat ion of this type, there was some incentive for

gatherin g and processing information of interest to the

general public--news . News thereupon became a commodity,

like food or merchandise, produced for profit to meet a 4 demand ."

Therefore, it is not unusual to dis cover that the

first newspapers in America were offered to the public by

colonial printers or that their widows and descendants

__ _ L_ ! figure prominently in the nat ion 's· earliest journalistic efforts.

The women included in this chapter , by and large,

were thrust into the world of newspapering quite by acci-

dent . Often , the so�row and economic hardship wrought

by a spouse's prematur e death accompanied the decision to

begin or to continue to "market'' that fragile commodi ty

known as "news."

During the late seventeenth century and into the

eighteenth , a parade of widows offered printing services

I' and newspapers to American colonists from New York to

South Carolina . Donning new responsibilities with their

widow 's weeds , the wives o£ colonial printers were £re-

quently forced to either sell or carry on their husband 's

bus inesses . A sturdy han dful o£ these chose the latter .

Th e first o£ these widows Dinah Nuthead, concen-

trated purely on printing, foregoing the complicat ions o£

news offerings . Mr s. Nuthead was living in St . Mary 's,

Maryland, when her husband, William , died in 1695 .

Gathering her courage and his printing press, she moved

her household to the newly -established state capitol in ! Annapolis and petitioned the Governor £or a printing l! . l�cense With �he help of friends , who posted bond £or 1 � ' her , Mr s. Nu thead was established. as a government printer --� - · ''·-·- �·�----� ''""·'·--- ·-··'>---�------·- --�---�------�-� · l .,. . . ------·- -·------��·"·---·-�----"•''''"�------�"-·"�--�---· · .. ---- in 1696 --thus- - ,- making------her the------first woman------to own ------and - ·-----· --- s···------l operate a printin g press in the New World.

Twenty-five years later , James Franklin, older brother of Benjamin Franklin, launched his innovative New

England Courant in Boston . Franklin1s crusades against the stern edicts of Massachus ett s1 Puritan leaders made him popular with readers but also established him as persona non grata with authorities . When the pressure became too gr eat in Boston , James moved his family and presses to Newport to become government printer for the colony of Rhode Island.

When James died in 1735 his widow , Anne Franklin, determined to continue his business. Aided by her two daughters and son , James youngest of the thr ee , she ( ) carried on as government printer . According to Isaiah

Thomas :

Her daughters were correct and quick com positors at case; they were instructed by their father whom they assisted. A gentleman who was acquaint ed with Anne Franklin and her family in formed me that he had often seen her daughters at work in the pr inting hou e, and that they were sensible and amiable women . 6

When James Franklin·Jr . died prematurely in 1762,

Mr s . Franklin carried on her son 1 s Newport Mercury--Rhode

Isl and1s first daily newspaper--until her own death in 7 1763 . Another of the colonies ' first-rank journalists,

Bradford, entrusted his printing business and the .. \:1drew Weekl y Mercu (Philadelphia's first newspap er , ,\merican ry 8 founded Decenber 22, 1719 ) to his widow . Bradford died, "after a lingering illness," on

Novemb er 24, 1772 . His death was reported in the 9 Ph iladelphia Gazette but i� was not unt il Decemb er 2, that a black-bordered issue of the Mercury app eared to explain the lapse:

As Mr . Andrew Bradford departed this Life on the 24th of Novemb er last , I hope those who 'Were pleased to be Customers for the American Weekly Mercury (of which my deceased Husband was the first Publisher ) will excuse the Omision of the last Week's Paper at the usual Time ; and for the futur e they shall be serv'd carefully: And all Persons who have any Printing Work to do , or have Occas ion for Stationary Ware, shall be thankfully serv'd at the lowest Prices . lO

Cornelia Bradford 11serv'd" her husband 's printing, books elling and newspaper clients for about four months, then took on a partner . Isaiah Warner , who called himself

"a young Beginner , 1111 took over as editor for a brief time before leaving Cornelia to go it alone once more. Accord- ing to Isaiah Thomas , Mrs. Bradford published the paper 12 from 1744 to 1752 , but accounts differ to such a degree that it is impossible to discover just how long the

Mer cury actually survived--its final issue might have appear ed anytime from 1746 to 1752�-13 Perhaps the best remembered journalist of the

colonial era is John Peter Zenger , a German immigrant , who

pub l ished the New York Weekly Journal . In Decemb er 1733 ,

New York Governor William Cosby charged Zenger with

I ; 11Scandalous, Virulent and Sedit ious Reflections upon the ' 14 ', Government , " then prodded a reluctant group of legisla- l tors into starting action against him.

It is generally acknowledged that Zenger 's

publication was financed by those whose interests it sup -

1 · ported--in particular Rip Van Dam, a Dutch colonial mer-

chant , and James Alexander , surveyor general of �he New

York and New Jersey colonies . Both of these men and the

growing faction which they led strongly opposed Governor

Cosby 's high-handed rule of the colony and urged his

removal .

While being held over for trial , Zenger was al -

lowed to talk only to his wife, and even she had to speak 15 through a keyhole. Still, du ring the thirty-five weeks

of his imprisonment , Anna Catherin e Maul Zenger kept the

Weekly Journal going, missing only one edition . Trial

chronicler Vincent Buranel li notes :

During all the printer 's imprisonment the Journal failed of but that one issue. The credit for it s punctual appearance every Monday there after belon gs to his wife, Anna Catherine Zenger , who stepped into his shoes back at the shop . Anna Catherine has a real claim to fame for standing by her husband, a loyalty by no means insignificant in a woman with a family. She may have been emboldened by her ab ility to keep the pres s goin g in his absence, but even so it would have been a crushin g blow if he had been given a har sh sentence as , for all she knew , might have been the outcome . The little evidence there is indicates that she never pressed him to give in and name the men who actually were re sponsible for the Journal . She must have known that the New York adminis tration would gladly trade the printer £or the editor, a comparatively minor figure for the archenemy--that is , Pet er Zenger for James Alexander--but there is no record of her ever complaining that the Zenger family was sufferin g for someone else. l6

Andrew Hamilton , a Philadelphia lawyer and out-

standing liberal , agreed to defend Zenger . He began his

defense by defying tradition --he admit ted that his client

1 had indeed published the off endin g articles , a confession

which would normally be construed as grounds £or convic-

tion . However , Hamilton went on to present a powerful

�rgument (against decidin g the case) on this basis alone;

iw persuaded the jury that Zenger was not guilty since he

simply printed the truth, and truth is not libelous . h<>.d ton's brilliant handling of the case remains a mile- i izuni l ,,tone in the road to press freedom and , incidentally,

Zenger to go free at last in 1736. •;11<'-bled

Ten years later , on July 28 , 1746 , Zenger died, 1-4

1,,,-win g his business once more in the capable hands of

Zenger supervised the Weekly Journal and her i\nna. Mr s . hu'-'band's printing house until 1748 when her stepson ,

was ready to take control . John, Something of the dif- of this task can glimpsed from her printed ficulty be i\'arning to unscrupulous comp etitors :

Th is is to acquaint the Pub lic that some Evil minded Persons have been pleased to spread a Report ab road that the Widow Zenger , Publisher of this Pap er , had entirely dropped the Printing Bu siness , &c . This is therefore to give Notice, that the said Report is Notoriously False , and that the said Widow still continues the Printing Bus iness, where any Person may have their work done reasonable, in a good Manner , and with Ex pedit ion. l7

The Goddard family of Providence, Rhode Island, was the next to provide women publishers. William Goddard, born 1740 , was a journeyman print er with an urge to wan- der . In June o£ 1762, he borrowed three hundred pounds from his mother, Sarah Up dike Go ddard, to finance the start o£ the Providence Gazette.

The pap er was :fairly well read but when Goddard failed to make a go of his printing business he sou ght gr eener pastures 1n New York in 1765, leaving his mother to recoup what she could. Mrs . Goddard resurrected the

Gazette in 1766 and ran it successfully until November

1768 when she sold it to John Carter . ..JI Meanwhile William continued to move; he lived £or awhi le in Philadelphia, then settled in Annapolis to edit the Maryland Gazette. Stil l, by 1774 he was restless once. more and headed £or Washington , leaving the paper

"temporarily" in the han ds o£ his sister , Mary Katherine

Goddard . Mary waited a full year before she dropp ed his name £rom the masthead and threw herself into the task o£ ma king the "journal second to none in the colonies in 18 Int erest" du ring the Revolutionary War .

Wh en William returned £rom the war 1n 1784 , Mary relinquished the paper to him and stayed on as post- mi stress o£ Annapolis until 1789.

Just prior to and du ring the war years, a Mrs.

Mary Crouch, is beli eved to have owned and operated a 19 press 1n Charleston , North Carolina, and later established another paper in Salem , Massachusetts . Not much is known abou t Mrs . Crouch or her publications except that h er c h.1e £ concern was oppos1. t1on. t o t h e Stamp Act . 20

Nevertheless, despite the impressive array o£ female £orebearer s already described, modern newsgatherers would undoubtedly credit Elizabeth Timothy with being the first 11 true11 journalist o£ the colonial era.

While Anne Franklin was still stewing over the

in 1 s and out 1 s. o£_the_pr�nting-::-h�1J.s e_ bu_s ine_?s,_ Mrs . ,r- Eli zabeth Timothy , in 1738, slipped qu ietly into the

edi tor 's chair of the South Carolina Ga zette--a position

left suddenly vacant by the accidental death of her 21 husband, Lewis. Mrs. Timothy continued to publish the paper for�six or seven years before rel inguishing control to her son, Peter. Interestingly enough , Peter 's widow ! carried on for him as well, until their son , Benjamin , was 22 . old enough to acquire control .

John Green , founder of the Annapolis Gazette,

died in 1767 , leaving little but his newspaper to support

his wife and fourteen children . It is small wonder that

Mr s . Green 's announcement of her husband 's death holds a faint tinge o£ panic:

I presume to addr ess you for your countenance to myself and numerous Family, left , without your Favour, almost destitute of Support by the Decease of my Husband, who long, and I have the Satisfaction to say, faithfully served you in the Bus iness of Provincial Pr int ; and , I flatter mys elf, that with your kind �I dulgence and Encouragement , Myself and Son will be enabled to continue it on the same Footing. 23

Mr s. Green was obviously equal to the challenge , however . Still pub lishing the Gazette, she carried on her husband 's government printing business at a rate voted up on by the State Assembly: "Nine hundred and forty eight do llars and one-hal£ dollar ," and, thereafter , "48 , 000 pounds of tobacco annually for yea_�s when the �s�_�mbl:y was 24 in session, and 36, 109 pounds £or other years ."

Nevertheless, her eight years as government print

/ er were considerably less eventful than the controversies

in which the'p aper embroiled her . Mrs . Green , otherwise 25 known by h er maJ... d en name o £ ClementJ... na RJ..n. d , at one time

found herself forced into a political battle with a

correspondent £rom a rival paper . Signing his letters l 26 "Attentive Observer" her detractor threatened to smash

her press i£ she stopped printing his missives and con-

tinu ed to run articles championing views which opposed

his .

Mrs . Green replied that s�would reprint his letters only under his true name and only i£ he would ab -

solve her £rom any slander suits which might arise £rom

them . He refused to do either and , fortunately , the con 27 troversy died out before he could make good his threat .

Wh ile Mrs . Green backed the colonial cause in her wr iting, a rival paper, published by a Mr s . H. Boyle, 28 propounded the Loyalist position .

Another prominent Loyalist publisher was Mr s .

Mar garet Draper , widow o£ Richard Draper, and owner o£ the

Boston Newsletter .

In June 1774, Mrs . Draper assumed control o£ the

_ _ _ newsp ap er and filled her husband 1 s role as. prini:_er :f'or _ the Governor and Council . When the British final ly evacuated Boston , Mr s. Draper shut down her establishment 29 to Halifax . and fled .

·lt· "· ' ··u �- -'Yt-rm· ifi:c· ··1w··t&o.· ··M"'tr"WW'iAl

I l"OOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER II

1 Edwin Em ery, The Press and America : An Inter ve His tory of Journalism. 2d ed. (Englewood :-L'LI.ti ,·iiffs , New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, Inc. , 1962), p. 21 .

2willard Grosvenor Bleyer , Main Currents in the of American Journal ism (cambridge, Massachusetts : ::istory . Houghton Mifflin Co ., The Riverside Press , 1927 , p. 16. 3 Ibid. , p • 16 •

4 Emery, ££· cit. , pp. 5-6. 5 Mr s. Elisabeth Dext er , Colonial men of Affairs Houghton Mi££lin Co ., 1924), p. Wq (Boston: l6"t-. 6 Isaiah Thomas, History o£ Printing in America,

ols . (Worcester , Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 2 v p. 420. lBlO), 7 Dexter , cit., 169 . £E· p. 8 Emery, cit., p. 55 . £E•

9Anna Janney DeArmond, Andrew Bradford: Colonial Journalist (Newark, Delaware: Univer sity of Del aware Press, 1949), p. 37 .

10Ibid. , 49 . p. 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas, ££• cit. , p. 32. 13 DeArmond, �· cit., pp . 49-50. 14 Emery, �· cit . , pp . 75-76.

1�char les R. Hildeburn , Sketches o£ Printers and Printing in Colonial New York (New York: Dodd , Mead and Co., 1895), p. 22 . 20

16 vincent Buranelli (ed. ), The Tr ial of Peter Zenner (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1957), pp . 38-39. 17 Dexter , �· cit., p. 170 . 18 Ibid. , pp . 172-173 .

19Fred Hartmann , Checklist of Printers in the United States till 1783 (New York : Dutton , 1915), p. 17 .

20rshbel Ross, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York : Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1936) , p. 37. 21 Dexter , �· cit., p. 173 . 22 Ibid. , p. 174. 23 • Ibid. , p 17 5 • 24 Ibid.

25Julia Cherry Spruill, Women 's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill, North Carolina : The , University of North Carolina Press, 1938 ), p. 265 .

26According to Dexter , the pseudonym was ''Bystander ." 27 spruill, �· cit., pp . 265-266 . 28 . . Ros s, �· cJ.t. , p. 37 •

29 . Dexter , �· cJ.t., p. 177 . CHAPTER III

TERMAGANTS ill�D TEMPTRESSES : 1800-1890

If widowhood produced t.he majority of female

journalists in the 18th century , "self-expression" prompted a varied assortment of 19th century ladies to ent er the news profession . Unlike their predecessors or followers however , women journalists in the 1800's were not content to ref lect their age but strode boldly beyond it .

Reared in an age and culture which viewed the feminine role strictly in terms of homemaking and child bearing, these women shared a singl e attitude--"society be damned." They were mavericks one and all , from bel l icose termagants whose vituperous tongues gave con stant offense to alluring temp tresses whose company men cultivated . Yet they acknowledged their difference and strove to give pub lic light to their peculiarities . The medium for their expression was the newspaper .

Perh aps the best known of the early termagants was

Anne Rovall , a wealthy widow from Virginia who , following her husband's death , rampaged up and down th e Eastern

')l seaboard.

Mr s. Royall was critical of everything and every-

one; in fact , her displ easure was so apparent that she 1 was known as the "widow with the serpent 's tongue ."

Nevertheless , as disappointed as she was in humanity, she

persisted in proving herself right by perpetually prying

into the affairs of others . Appropriately her first

publication--begun in 1831--was called the Paul Pry . Described as a "four-page paper, spic�with invective, ''2 the Paul Pry carried advertising on the front page and editorials, political and local news on the in-

side . Mrs. Royall's editorial policy was stated in the

first issue: "No party, the welfar e and happiness of our 3 country is our politics ."

However , most of the news was fashioned in the

light of Anne 's own particular prejudices. "Her ob ses-

sions were Free Masonry , which she advocated fiercely;

Evangelicism, which she fought tooth and nail ; her pen-

sion , wh ich she never got; and propagation , in which she

. 4 h ad an abstract J.nterest . "

Mrs . Royall's chief claim to local fame was her

exclusive interview with President John Quincy Adams .

Washington was astonished at the amount of information she was able extract from the taciturn chief executive to . I

r ( regarding the Bank of the United States), until it was I discovered that she had interviewed him while he bathed .·.I in the Potomac ; she sat on his clothes and refused to

budge until he answered all of her questions . The Presi- 5 dent called her the "virago errant in enchanted armor."

Some historians, including Florence Finch Kelly, ' look back on Anne 's exploits as proof that she was far

ahead of her time :

She was more of a "newspaperman ," in the ' modern sense, than any man journalist of her time . � She saw at least a little of what a newspaper ou ght to do and be decades before the vision dawned on anyone else, and in her conception of what a woman could do in a newspaper office she was so blazingly futuristic that she defeated her

own purposes .••She went after corrupt politicians and all manner of rascality in public affairs

with such vigor and such spectacular methods that . I her Paul Pry deserves to be named the first yel low journal in this country. She set an example for the "stunt girls" of a later day that not even the most dauntless of them would have dared to follow, and she could have shown the muck rakers of two generations later how to do a really effective job of that kind; whi le no columnist o£ the present day wou ld be willing to emulate the "ginger " of unique indivi dualism, scathin g comment and untamed invective, with which she spiced her personal column . 6

Neverthel ess, most of her readers were fonder of a

local verdict , passed by a jury of peers in 1829, which pronounced that Mr s. Royal l was a "common scold," and fined her $10 ; she was saved from the ducking stool only because of her age (she was over sixty years old) . Soon after Mr s. Royall 's death in 1854, two more

female publishe�·s thrust themselves into the public spot-

light . Two sisters , Victoria Woodhu ll and Tennessee

. Claflin , caused commotion wherever they went ; like their

predecessor, they vigorously stirred the waters of public

opinion , bu t the ripples churned up in their wake traveled

farther than Anne Royall would ever have dreamed possible.

The reason , perhaps , could be attributed to

physical differences : While Mrs . Royall was "small and 7 stout ," with "glittering blue eyes ," the sisters were

acclaimed by friend and enemy alike to be "raving beauties"--angels or temptresses , depending on the p�t of v1ew .

Born 1n Homer , Ohio , eight years apart, the girls

shared a colorful parentage : "Ma Roxie, an illiterate

reli gious·fanatic, was regarded in town as a hexed luna-

tic . Pa Buck was a two -bit gambler , a horse trader , a

jug-totin g moonshine peddler and a general no-good whose

idea of providing for his family sel dom got further than 8 his own belly."

Throughout their teens , the sisters traveled about

the country with their flim-flamming family peddling ( home -made elixirs an d special izing in psychic readings which were guaranteed to cure cancer ). Then , in 1868 ,

the pair marched on New York, conquering that sophisticated,

city with astonishing ease.

Their entrance into society was guaranteed since

they started at the top , paying their first call on

"Commo dore" Cornelius Vanderbilt; Ir ving Wallace des-

cribes their reception :

It is not surprising that they were prompt ly admitted. Commodore Vanderbilt was an ailing man who had become impatient with conventional medi cine and was now employing the services of a Staten Island seer and an electrical wizard to give him hope and comfort . He was ready to listen to almost any miracle worker . Mrs. Woodhull quickly explained that she was a successful medium, an d that her sister Tennie was a magnetic heale who gave patients strength through physical con-\ tact . Th is last , as well as the provocative ap" pearance his Ialr th e of guests, convinced . blasphemous old Commodo re that he could do worse than put hims elf in their hands . 9

Thus , with the help of the 75-year-o ld Vanderbilt, the sisters launched a brokerage house, and, incidental�y, a pub lication called Woodhu ll and Claflin's Weekly . Ac- tually the paper was written and edited by Mrs. Woodhull's second husband, Colonel James Blood, but its editorial policy was purely a product of Claflin philosophy . The

Wec>kly advocated free love, women s ri_ght 1 s, female emancipation and abortion , editorial ized on such unpopular subjects as social disease and prostitution, and specialized in scandal .

On May 14, 1870, the Weekly vowed that it would

"support V. C. Woodhull for President with its whole

strength and will advocate suffrage without distinction ,lO sex.' of On the same day, the New York Herald du ly re-

ported Victoria 's announcement of her candidacy :

Wh ile others of my sex devote themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of this country, I assert my indivi dual inde pendence; while others argue the equality of woman and man , I proved it by successfully engaging in business. I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country and believing as I do that the prejudices which stil l exist in the popular mind against women in public � life wi ll soon disappear , I now announce myself � as a candidate for the Presidency .

While Victoria did nothing for her reputation as a prophetess--since neither she nor any member of her sex has yet managed to capture that high office--she di d succeed in bringing a great deal of public attention to herself and to her sister .

Some of the larger newspapers, including the New

York Daily Graphic and the Police Gazette, gleefully re- pr inted the scandalous tidbits which Victoria and

Tennessee carefully combed from their exalted circle of friends and acquaintances . Yet , the New York Times I repeatedly censured this dynamic duo , particularly for treatment of the city 's famous clergyman-orator tlwir !(pver end Henry Ward Beecher .

It was common go ssip in the city that the Reverend I

way wi th women. His name was linked to a dozen h.u! a his congregation , but Victoria was particularly 1 ,,, lies in interested J.n his rumo red all iance with the pretty wife o£

his closest friends , Theodore Til ton . o1w of Mr s. Woodhull broke the "social scandal o£ the century" on Novemb er 2, 1872 . She had ferreted out and

nuw reported each tiny detail of the affair. Her motive?

certainly did not obj ect to the preacher's behavior, She simply wished to censure him publicly for not openly she "' advocating free love as she did:

I condemn him because I know , and have had had every opportunity to know , that he entertuins on conviction , substantially the same views which en tertain on the social question; that he has I permitted hims elf to be overawed by public opinion, to profess to believe otherwise than he

do es believe •• • and that he has, in a word, con sent ed and still consents to be a hypocrite. The fault with which I ther efore charge him is not infidelity, to the old ideas , but unfaithfulness

to the new •••fo r failing to stand shoulder to shoulder with me and others who are endeavoring to hasten the social regeneration which he bel ieves in . ll

The Police Gazette reprinted the entire Woodhull

SC'Lf -interview the next day under the headline: "Pew

Converts Pu lpit." Subsequ ently, this scoop was to result in more

ty for the sisters , for they were arrested on a ;n1blici char ge of sending obscene literatur e through the mail ,

i.e. their descrip tion of the Beecher-Tilton affair . In

fact , they were arrested, tried and freed on this charge

five separate times . The accompanying trials were frought

with moral and political overtones .

Originally the char ges brought against them were

made by Anthony Comstock, head of the Young Men's Chris

tian Association (YMCA) Committee for the Suppression of

Vice. Comstock had devoted his life to erasing unrigh

teousness and he was particularly obsessed with the not� of destroying those materials-- especially erotic ma

terials --which might sully a young man 's imagination .

Comstock 1 s moral wrath against Woodhull and Claflin was

mirrored in a Thomas Nast cartoon widely copied at the 12 time which pictured Victoria as "Mrs . Satan ."

The moral indignition which surrounded these court

appearances was matched only by the furor aroused by

Victoria 's choice of victims : Th e Reverend Henry Ward

Beecher was both po litically powerful and a very popular religious figure._ Thus , while the sisters faced the bench on obscenity charges, they were simultaneously tried

public an d found guilty of libel and moral turpitude. in Harriet Beecher Stowe demanded, with no success, that th e sisters cease their chronicle of her family's . activities . Even the cuckolded husband, Theodore Tilton, wen t to Victoria to beg her to hold up further publica- tton . Yet , the New York Sun reports that Mr . Tilton returned from the interview smitten by the publisher :

"She has entertained angels , and not unawares," he said.

"These gracious guests have been her constant companions

. .. They dictate her life with daily revel-ations . 1113

Later Tilton wrote Victoria's biography and enobled her further in his own magazine, The Golden Age , thus :

If the woman 's movement has a Joan of Arc , it is this gentle but fiery genius ••.Lit tle understood by the public, she is denounced in th e mo st outrageous manner by people who do not appreciate her moral worth ••.Her bold social theories have startled many good souls, but any body who on this account imagines her to stand below the whitest and purest of her sex will misplace a woman who in moral integrity rises to 1 the full hei ght of the highest . 4

In May 1873 , just before the Weekly ceased pub - lication altogether and before Victoria and Tennessee traded New York society £or the excitement o£ London and

new husbands , the � York Times intoned its final dis - approval : " •••li cense never had been carried to such an extent as in the free love journal o£ Woodhull and 3C

C lafl in , and the female name never had been more dis - . 15 gr

As usual , however , Victoria had the last word :

Let him who is without sin cast his stone . I do no t intend to be the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society by those who cover the foulness and the feculence of their thought with hypocritical mouthing of fair pro fessions , and by diverting public attention from their own iniquity and pointing their finger at

me ••• I shal l continue to make it my business to analyse some of these lives and will take my chance in the matter of libel suits. 16

PUBLISHERS

Like the 18th century , the 19th century in America

produced an unusual numb er of women publishers. Besides

th e redoubtable Mr s. Royall and the Claflin sisters, the

1800's saw a succession of women in control of growing pub lications .

Some, like their pre-Revolutionary War predecessors, rode the coattails of male relatives to gain pub -

lishing power . El len Browning Scripps was the daughter of an English couple who crossed the Atlantic to settle on a farm in Ill inois . Ellen was a middle child--born some- where between her oldest brother James and the Scripps ' thirteenth child , Edward. Despite parental and societal disapproval , El len determined to go· to college and she I 3

r- araduated £rom Knox College in Galesbur g, Illinois in 1 17 She then taught school 1n Galesburg before moving · lH58. Detroit to aid brother James in launching his first ·to

!newspaper , the Detroit News . ;

Ellen proved to be o£ considerable help, besides

her writing and �diting skills (she worked £or a short

time as an editor on the Detroit Tribune) , she offered her

savings as well. Gradually the Scripps family acquired

News , the Buffalo Evening Telegram, the the Detroit Press, the St . Louis Chronicle, and the Clev,eland 18 . . t• ost • C1nc1nna 1 p

Another publishing pioneer was 11 Minnie Lee" Wood.

i>linni e and her Kentucky-born husband were pioneers in

every sense of the word--they trekked to Sauk Rapids ,

i>linnesota in 1849 when that tiny village was nothing more

than a trading post o£ the American Fur Company. Minnie, whose maiden name was Julia Amanda Sar gent, combined her

flair for sentimental -folksy writin g with her husband's printing expertise, to found the Sauk Rapids Frontiersman .

Later, they added a second publ ication, the Sentinel , and

a son , Delacey, who would one day create a chain produced o( thirty-three papers in Minnesota, Dakotas, Michigan,

. 19 ;uH 1 W.1s cons1n . 3

Also hailing from Minnesota, and a contemporary o£

Wo od s was Jane Grey Swisshelm. Though she "attained i\trs. 1 j some fame by her clever editing o£ the Pittsburgh Saturday

Visiter [sic ] in 1848-52, her letters £rom the national capitol in her own paper and the New York Tribune earned

distinct ion as the first woman of the Washington her 20 press corps ."

Mr s. Swisshelm literally opened the door for £e- male political writers when she crashed the Congressional

Press Gallery in 1850 . She described the coup upon her return to Pittsburgh :

There was yet one innovation I wanted to make, although my stay in Washington would necessarily be short . No woman had ever had a place in the Congressional reporters ' gallery . This door I wanted to open to them , so I called on Vice Presi dent Fillmore and asked him to assign me a seat

in the Senate Gallery . · He was mu ch surprised and tried to dis suade me . The place would be very unp leasant for a lady , would attract attention, I would not like it ; but he gave me the seat . I occupied it one day , greatly to the surprise o£ the Senators , the reporters, and others on the floor and in the Galleries ; but felt that the novelty would soon wear o££, and that women ould 2 work there and win bread without annoyance. y

Unlike the enchanting Mr s. Woodhull, however , Mr s.

Swisshelm scorned such per sonal enhancements as fashion- abl e attire and pleasing demeanor in her battle for increased opportunities for women . "When a woman starts out

on a mis sion , secular or religious ," she said, ''she should

'·" _.,._ 3

22 lt'ave her feminine charms at home ."

Jane was a crusader long before women were ex- pccted to "bother their heads " about social and political

She specialized in exposes and gleefully took i l.ls. ' credi t for ruining Daniel Webs ter's shot at the presi- ckncy (she reprinted some rumors which were circulating

the capitol regarding his dr inking habits ), drove in �linnesota' s Governor Lowrie into a sanitarium by exposing corruption within his administration, and campaigned for abolition , co-edu cation of the young, woman suffrage,

better health care. and She won the aloof Mary Lincoln's support when she toured army hospitals after Chancellorsville, handing out cups of lemonade to the wounded to ward off gangrene.

Yet , her first words to the country's Chief Executive were hardly soothing: "May the Lord have mercy on you, poor man , " she said to Pres ident Lincoln, "for the people have 23 none . 11 ·.

Another lady publisher of this era , Cornelia Wells

ter , of the Boston Transcript, could easily equal Mr s. \val Swisshelm in the acerbity of her pen . Though she con- centrated on lit erary , social , dramatic and musical news ,

made her pres ence felt. she She scorned Ralph Waldo

E1wrson in print , and when Edgar Allan Poe spoke in Boston october 1845, she judged the performance a flop , n 16,

1 ,-1ying particular blame on the "singularly di dactic 24 ,•-.::cordium" of Mr . Poe 's recitation of "The Raven ."

A story, signed "Straws Jr. ," appeared in the New

Picayune in 1848. It was the work of the eight .. 1r1eans ._.,.,�.r-old dau ghter of Joseph M. Field, one of the founders

the newspaper and a frequent contributor to its pages 0( 25 t:nder the pseudonym , "Straws ."

· That story was the ·first published work of Kat e

Field, a woman of extraordinary tal ent and varied in-

terests . Dur ing her fifty-six years, Kate traveled throughout Europe , gathering as close friends such notables as Anthony Trollope , the Brownings, George Eliot , llenry Ward Beecher and Horace Gr eeley . She wrote books and comedies and played, among other roles , Peg Woffington at Booth's Th eatre in 1874.

Kate's performances as an actress seldom received critical acclaim but her melodious voice and the logic of her lectures brou ght) her praise everywhere she went .

Once, speaking on Charles Dickens in an Alaskan dance hall , an audi\_ence of miners showed their approval of the 26 beauteous Kat e by presenting her with a bottle of gold.

Mi ss Field was a crusader and a feminist and when

launched her own publication in 1890, she was she ------l motivated by urge for "self e::\..'Pres- �ndoubtedly the sa.me 1 l w!1ich purr d Anne Royall and the Woodhull and �ion " s e \veeklv publishers . Yet Kate l"i eld 1s Washington , ,' laflin 's kly review, was a far more credible journalistic � wee product than the flamb oyant journals of her predecessors .

K�te' s style was delicate an d vivid, yet her interests

as varied as they were short-lived. She peppered were her publication with news of whatever current cause

struck her fancy:

Her aim was to mirror the men and events of the time but she rode her own hobbies hard. She campaigned on Hawaiian annexation , international copyright , temp erance, and prohibition of Mormon po lygamy , and dress reform . On her return from one of her trips to Europe she decided that the dr ess of the American woman was ugly and over burdened. She established her own Cooperat ive Dr ess Association , but it made no dent in fashion and di ed a natural death within a year . 27

- In addition , she dabbled in spiritualism and animal magneticism , advocated cremation and a national marriage law, fought to preserve John Brown 's farm as an historical site, and championed civil service reform.

Her inter est in popular science "involved her in a historic moment , for the first time Queen Victoria picked up a telephone recei ver it was Kat e Field who sang to her over the wire. Th e Bell Telephone Company gratefully gave 28 her shares that helped to amass a fortune of $200,000. 11 36

The New Orleans Picayune alsc• 1 -:mnched a young poetess, El iza Poite vant , who , <)re her twenty- :�-� l• eighth birthda\' became the paper s '� r and pul 1 P ; i •,her. Better known under her pen name , PeaL� .. ;(ivers , EL " sub - mitted her first verses to the Picayune and the � York

Journal in 1863 when she was just fourteen years old.

Soon her poetry adorned the Southern pap er 's pages regularly and its owner, Colonel Alva Morris

Holbrook, invited Eliza to join his staff as literary editor . Ignoring her family's protests, Eliza braved the terrors of New Orl eans ' business district and showed up in the newsroom daily--first as lit erary editor, then as women 's page editor , and finally as the wife of the pub - lisher .

Eliza married the sixty-four -year-old Colonel in

May 1872 and two months later became a "news item" in New

Orleans when the ex-Mrs . Holbrook paid her a visit :

Learning of the marriage, Mrs. (Jennie) Bronson returned to New Orleans , scourged by jealousy an d hate; and on the morning of June 17 , 1872 , entered the Holbrook home on Constance Street , just above Orange , when the bride was alone in her bedroom, and at point -blank range, shot at her twice with a revolver , and missed; then beat her over the head with a bottle of bay rum . Two ser vants ran in and saved the young woman 's life. While she fled, covered with blood , to the protection of a neighbor, Mrs. Bronson ru shed into the yard, seized an ax and vented her hate on the furniture. 29 37

-- ··---- -· - ·--·--- ·------·---·- · ------. ·-- ·------,' Holbrook, who had sold the paper in 1872 and

bought it back a year later , died in 1876--leaving his

widow with an $80, 000 debt and a difficult dil emma . She

could declare bankruptcy or take the helm and hope to

reverse the newspaper 's £ailing fortunes despite the

"carp etbagging" which still plagued the South .

Overriding family disapproval once more, Eliza

chose to stick with the paper and she assemb led the

Picayune's sta££ to tell them so:

I am a woman . Some of you may not wish to work for a woman . I£ so, you are free to go, and I no hard feelin gs . But you wh o stay--will you give me your undivided loyal y, and will you ad 3 vise me tryly and honestly? 6

A numb er o£ her husband's former employees did

leave , but those who stayed proved their loyalty. Jose

. Quintero , the paper 's chief editorial writer , "polished _up his pistols and passed out the word that i£ anybody

craved satisfaction £or what the Daily Picayune said, come 31 to h:i,ml "

Thus Eliza Holbrook became the first woman pub -

lisher o£ an important U. S. daily and she soon proved

herself an ab le newsp aperwoman. She never shied away from

controver sy and she gathered around her the best people

sh e could find--including two Yankees , Maj or Nathaniel

Burbank and Maj or Henry Robinson . Both o£ these writers executive posts on the Daily Picayune, working side- ;1cld :'\'-side with a veteran o£ Lee's army , Major Thomas E.

[!,-..vis .

Mrs . Holbrook valued her employees and they returned her admirat ion . ''My boys work hard to please me ,"

she told El iza Putnam Heaton on October 8, 1887, "and I verily bel ieve, value a word o£ commendat ion from me more 32 than they would the same praise coming £rom a man ."

El iza also proved herself a capable administrator .

She put the paper back in the black and watched with satisfaction her growing subscriber lists. According to the American Newspaper Directory, the Daily Picayune 's circulation in 1878 was approximately 6,000--the September

1880 edition (containing the annual business review ) 1, required a press run o£ 40, 000 copies.

Still, Pearl Rivers--who became Mrs . George

Nicholson in June 1878--is perhaps best remembered 1n newspaper circles for her innovative approach to a daily's i content s: While James Gordon Bennett was experimenting wi th society coverage in the New York Herald, Eliza loosed the "Society Bee" on New Orleans ' "best famil ies" on 33 March 16, 1879. She inspired the popular "Weather Frog ," drawn by cartoonist L. A. Winterhalder , which became the

''Peanut s" of its day , hoppin g onto the paper 's front page ·.. .

on January 13, 1 894. 34

Moreover , Mr s. Nicho lson made the Daily Picayune

real :fami ly reading £are: She added Lilliput Land £or

youngsters, Sunday funnies and the daily comic strip , ! the ular fiction , househ ld hints, health care suggestions, !I pop � jI popular science topics, and men ' s and women 's fashions . l l She also launched the career o£ Dorothy Dix and sent a ! woman reporter, Catherine Cole (whose real name was ! Martha Field) to cover the World's Fair in Chicago in 1 1893. When Pearl Rivers died in 1896 it was appar ent

that she had established for herself and her newspaper an I unparalled reputation in New Orleans . The Times-Democrat paid her this tribute:

Hardly a philanthrop ic institution in the city, hardl y one of the many benevolent schemes constantly set up in New Orleans to benefit the deserving poor or the helpless found in Mrs . Nicholson an ardent symp athizer , a powe £ul helper with voice, money, labor , time and pen. E5 - While few women anywhere in the country could

equal Pearl Rivers' entrepreneurial journalistic sense,

two more lady publishers reigned in the South du ring this

era .

Mr s. El ia Goode Byingt on saw to it that the

Co lumbus (Georgia) Eveninsz -Ledger employed as many women jI i s J0�-�ibl e. Mr s . _:i.:n � , ho wa o q_:f_j:h � 2 By g ()I1 -� _ �_ 9.2_� �!_!.?:(.__ _ _�-P �l 2er

-.· _ ..... ' gton , hired with her hu sband Edward Telfair Byin women at

"equal pay" to take on . su ch tasks as typesetting, proof

reading and reporting; sh e also employed a :female :foreman ,

artist and mail clerk.

Another Georgia native , El len J. Dortch , decided

to buck traditi�n and prejudice and, at age 17 , launched the Carnesville Tribune . At first Miss Dortch was obliged ! to run the newspaper singlehandedly but , before long, ! ! circulat ion grew and sh e allowed to spend the balance o:f . 36 her career as the paper's owner and managing edltor .

REPORTERS ill�D EDITORS

Not all the :female scribes o:f the ninet eenth I century were publ ishers , however , some were simp ly hard- I!

wo rking reporters and editors. One of these was a Miss

Sally Joy , who began her journalistic career at age 18 in

1870.

A mal e reporter on the Boston Herald was so im-

pressed with Miss Joy's presence at an 1871 suffrage

convention in Vermont that he incorporat ed her into his

account of the eve'nt :

Miss Sally Joy of Boston has a portfo lio at the Reporters' table in the Convention for the POST of her native city . She is pretty, piquante, and dresses charmingly. She has a high regard for 4

l'vlrs . Bloomer , although she diverges from that good lady on the science of clothes . Miss Joy has made a reputat ion as a newspaper corres pondent and reporter of which any man might well be proud . And this is saying a good deal for a woman . Mi ss Joy is as independent as she is 37 self-supporting and she votes for Women 's Suffrage.

Later Miss Joy left the Po st to join the Boston

Herald and called herself Penelope Penfeather , writing a

column on fashions and the home .

Better known to Bostonians , perhaps, were "Old

Lady Ma gennis" and Mildred Aldrich . Mrs. Margaret J.

rla

from 1874 until 1918, edited the paper 's weekly religious

review and at the same time covered the municipal court

beat . Mildred Aldrich , wrote for the Boston Journal and

later for the Boston Herald, at the same time publishing

·her own paper , The Mahogany Tree. The Tree was not a

success and Mildred, at age 45 , left Boston in 1898 to

join Gertrude Stein 1 s group 1.n Paris . Her subs equent book,

i l the Marne, described the 1914 battle from the {!_ H l �

vantage point of her hilltop house in France.

In Baltimore, the city which first read the

Declaration of Independence in Mary Goddard 's Maryland

. Journal, was still unaccustomed to a woman laboring in the

newspaper field in 1888 when May Garrettson Evans signed. I on as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun . ·-·------.. ··--· ··· -···----· --·· ·--·····- -- -···-···- ···--·-----·-·-··-·--J Miss Evans was so mu ch of a novelty that she to e::-.11 lain herself everywhere. She was always had being interviewed on her own emotions , and what family thought of her hazardous undertaking. her general opinion was that it was a shame to The expose a girl to such fearful pitfalls. One warm evening she arrived in the office unexpectedly. Sh e saw that something was wrong. The city editor was over come with amusement. No one would tell what was up . So she lingered about and finally her went out on an assignment . Later she learned that the assistant city editor had been caught in his shirt sleeves and suspenders. On seeing her coming, had dived quickly under the city desk to conceal he this dis graceful disarray from the SUN 's Miss Evans . He had stayed doubled up in great discom fort until she went away .

'Now look here, ' she announced to the city . room at large after hearing this story . "This will never do . You simply mu st treat me like one of the boys. n38

Miss Evans ' plea was echoed i� city rooms throughout the country but tradition died hard. A woman reporter was a novelty on even the largest newspapers and, by and large , an unwelcome one .

In the Midwest , Minnie Roswel l Langstadter became the first woman reporter in Chicago . Minnie, aQed 15, landed a reporting job with the Chicago Record in 1878--a position which brought her an opportunity to interview some of the top financiers of the day , including John D.

Rockefel ler, J. Pierpont Mo rgan , and William E. Vanderbilt .

In 1868 Mrs . Emily Verdery Bettey joined the Sun . as the first female general reporter in New York City . 43

earlier Fr ances ''Fanny" Wr ight had charmed the For ty years I with her editor ship of the Free En uirer , a publica- ci t�· g wh ich supported--among other social issues- -the cause tion 39 of organized labor .

Colonel John A. Cockerill, who a decade later

would become managing editor of the New York World, hired

Calista Hal sey as the first distaff reporter on the . 40 Wash1ngton Post .

Iowa-born Mrs . Em ily Edson Briggs , was among the

first to take advantage of the political portal forced

. open by Jane Grey Swisshelm . Mrs . Briggs headed east in

1861 to cover the Congress ional Press Gal lery first for

the Washington Chronicle and later £or the Philadelphia

Press. Mr s. Briggs ' dispatches were known to her readers 41 as the I 'Ol1 • v1a • letters.'I

Two more women followed Jane Swisshelm's steps

into the Washington Press Corps : Gail Hami lton and Grace

Greenwood. Miss Hamilton 's real name was Mary Ab igail

• Dodge ; she was a New Englander , the product of a strict

:Calvinist upbringing, and her writing was scathingly

. satirical . One o£ her contemporaries, Fanny Fern , char-

acterized her in this way :

A lady , at whose mention stalwart men have been known to tremble, and hide in corners; who i JI I r r 'keeps a private graveyard' for the burial of those whom she has mercilessly slain ; who respects

neither the spectacles of the judge , nor the sur olice of the oriest: ' ' ' w� � ��l�s t� 2 =� ==2= o� =2='s because fa!:i��s t�:l ��e; ha�e ��eir wi ves merely they belong to her sex.42

Gail was a cousin of Mrs. James G. Blaine. Blain�

a former newspaper editor, was a long-time Speaker of the

House of Representatives ; he failed to capture the

Republican presidential nomination in 1880 and in 1884

but went on to serve both President Garfield and President

Harrison as Secretary of State. Gail wrote Blaine's

biography and the book suggests that much of her political

acumen comes from the fact that he welcomed her into his

inner councils .

Grace Greenwood, actually Sara Jane Clarke , found

a far warmer welcome from the capitol 's citizens . Grace

had been a regular contributor to Godey s Lady ' s Book 1 . before her twentieth birthday . A collect ion of her

articl es for Godey 's and various newspapers were released

in 1850 under the title Gr eenwood Leaves . In 1852 she

went to Europe as a traveling corr espondent , sending back

chatty letters describing the doings of such American

favorites as Thackery and Dickens .

When she returned to America she married Leander

K. Lippincott but she was one of the few newspaperwomen of

- ··----�-� ----� · .. ------··----- __ -- ..I 4:

her era who managed a career as well as a hous ehold.

During the Civil War years she toured the country, lectur-

ing and writing. President Lincoln called her "The

Patriot,"43 and women across the <;:ountry began to identify

"newswoman" J.n the image of Grace Greenwood.

One of the most colorful reporters of this period

was a six-foot-two, gun -slinging Irish lass named Marie

"Midy" Morgan . Midy 's journalistic special ty was as un-

usual as her appearance--she was the livestock reporter

for the New York Times from 1869 until her death in 1892 .

Midy was born in County Cork, in 1828 ; her father

was a large landowner and horsebreeder . By her fourteenth

birthday, Midy was already an exceptional rider , an animal

expert , and demons trated an amazing flair for language .

In 1865 she put these tal ents to use, touring Europe and

crowning the trip with a visit to King Victor Emmanuel of r Italy. Introduced throu gh a family friend, Midy left the

royal presence with a commission to buy six mares £or the

King 's stable.

Wh en Midy delivered the animals several months

later , the delighted monarch "approved of her choice and

gave her a doublecase hunting watch with his initials en 44 crusted in diamonds , a token of his gratitude." 46

Despite this royal es teem, Midy found no special

welcome when she traveled next to America . She worked

as a chambermaid until Manton Marble of the New York Wo rld •

gave her a crack at reporting on the Saratoga races in

1869. Th e resulting story earned her only "probationary"

employment at the Times as livestock reporter (it was the

only job open ), but within a week there was no doubt that

the position was hers for as long as she wanted it . Midy

knew her subject ; she rose before dawn , tramped through r mud, and traveled hundreds of rural miles to gather the minute details which earned her the respect of breeders

and livestock judges throughout the United States and

Europe.

Two more ladi es deserve special mention before moving on : Jennie June and Fanny Fern were wayfarer s in the female press corps , receiving only incidental ly, a modicum of recognition in their own time .

Jennie June (Mrs. David Goodman Croly) specialized in the woman ' s point of view , but she was first and foremost a reporter . Unlike most of her predecessors and many of her contemporaries she went out to get the news instead of creating her own . She worked for the � York Wor ld,

Tribune , Herald, Times , Graohic an d Noah 's Sunday Daily Times and brought to each a style and point of view which 47

Leagues for she avowed : "There is no sex in labor and I

want my work taken as the achievement of an individual ,

with no qualificat ions , no indul genc e, no ext enuations

simply because I happen to be a woman , working along the 45 same line with men ."

Two things brought Jennie into the public eye :

First , she became an authority on women 's fashions--a

sp eciality which culminated with an article for the New 46 York Daily Graphic cal led "Returning to Town ." Second,

she played a big role in establishing the Sorosis Club

in 1868--the feminine equivalent of the New York Press

Club --at a time when clubs, particularly women 's clubs ,

, were very rare.

Jennie pioneered wh at would now be termed the

''shopping column , 11 comparing various brands of merchandise

and listing the stores and shops where they could be found.

The "Town" article mentioned above traced the transition

of trade from small shops to the big department stores and

established the daily newspaper as an important factor in

popular merchandising.

Like Kate Field, Jennie June disapproved of the

way American women dressed. She campaigned in 1873 for -·----�) 48

�--- i un iform evening dress and devo ted many co lumn inches to

scorning the "foreign" fashion £ads wh ich sent American

females scurrying to the yardage racks in an effort to be

up -to-the-minute.

If her disapproval o£ their attire did not make

any lasting impression on her countrywomen , her activities

as a clubwoman did. Jennie was a sophisticate; she was

conversant on most o£ the maj or issues o£ her day and she

debated them with friends who numbered among the country 's

mo st important personages. Thus, when the New York Press

Club held a special banquet honor ing Charles Dickens and

• barred the ladies o£ the press £rom attending, Jennie was · provoked enough to do something drastic in retal iation.

Jennie "made it clear that i£ women writers and

editors could ride in the same hansoms and sleep in the

same beds as their lords and masters who belonged to the

Pr ess Club , they could also join them in honoring

Di ckens ."47 Her rebuttal was the £ormation o£ the Sorosis

Club .

Jennie June also earned herself a place in academ-

ic annals as "the first known woman to teach journalism

at th e college level •••at a time wh en there were no 48 schoo ls o£ journalism ." Jennie 's journalism course in

was a "novel feature" o£ the New Ru tger 's Institute 1R96 l for-- Young Ladies in New York . Wh ile Jennie earned her reputation step by step,

! weaving an impressive count erpane o£ achievement s, Fanny

I Fern attained overnight notoriety . Fanny 's popularity 1I I rested solely with her extravagantly sent imental treatment I o£ 'topical subj ects . She wrote a regular co lumn , first for 'I � �Flag, then for the Ph iladelph ia Ledger ; these short I jpieces were eventuai ly collected and bound into a best

I seller , Fern Leaves from Fanny 's Portfol io , published just I - I three years af ter Gr ac e Gr eenwood's less su ccessful

Gr eenwood Leaves . j Immedi at ely following the book 's release in 1853 , ! Harper 's Magazine acknowl edged Fanny as the creator of a new literary style:

She has won her way unmistakably to the hearts o£ the people ; this we interpret as a triumph o£ natural feeling. It shows that the day for stilted rhetoric ; scholastic refine ments and big dictionary wor ds , the parade , pomp and pageantry o£ literature is decl ining.49

Fanny , born Sara Payson Willis in 1811 , came £rom

a literary family in Maine . Her father edited the Pu ritan

Reco rder and You th 's Companion , an d her brother , Nathaniel ,

became a wel l -known poet and editor of the Home Journal .

1Still , Fanny herself showed no interest in journalism tI !until two broken marriages left her in need o£ funds . She ! L ··---··---· ····-··· ·-···-···--· ··--··· . ··---- . ···------··· · ·•·l ' had never had any particular regard for the talents of I

her brother , so it wa s characteristic that she vi ewed

. writing as an easy way earn livlna . to a. She d

piece on the "model minister ," sold it to the , a Mo ther 1 s

As sistant £or fifty cents an d, at age 40, was launched on

a new career .

Fanny 's £irst ' editor on the True Flag , wo rked hard

to translate her prose into print . He describes her

wr iting style thus :

Th e manuscript was characteristic·--decidedl y Ferny- -dashed all over with astonishing capitals and crazy italics- -and stuck as full with stagger ing exclamation points, as a pin cu shion with pins . In print , the italics were intended to resemble jolly words , lean ing over and tumbling down with laughter , and the interj ections were supposed to be totterin g under the weight of double-entendre and puns . At first sight , the writing looked as if it might have been paced off by trained canary birds--driven first through puddles of ink , then marched into hieroglyphic dr ill on the sheet like a militia company on parade . All Fanny 's manuscripts demanded a good deal of editorial care to prepare them £or the press; her first productions , particularly, requiring as thorough weeding as so many beds of juvenile beets 50 an d carrots .

Still , by the time Fanny transferred her column

an d her allegiance to the Philadelphia Ledger , editor

Robert Bonner proclaimed : "We never think of cutting down ,

51 · or even al tering a word in Fanny Fern 's articles .

Either her manuscript preparat ion had improved or the 5

pr ima donna 's power as a circulat ion getter forbade any

tampering with the unv.-\X"tLi sh cd 1•en1 .

The latter explanation seems the mo st app ropr iate

for Fanny 's literary outpourings , from 1851 unt il her

wer e awa sh with hearts and flowers , a I death in 187 2 ,

.harbinger of the "sob sisters" of the early 1 9 00' s.

CHANGING TIMES

The last hal£ o£ the nineteenth century was an era

of extraordinary chan ge in American life. Every facet of

, the century -old United States was under going dramatic

,metamorphosis --the nat ion 's social , political an d

' cu ltural institutions were being reshaped by a burgt!oning

'industrial economy .

The galloping technofo gy of this age invaded the

newsroom too , bringing not only el ectric light bulbs and

fantastic new presses which printed thousand� of sheets

per hour , but also the telephone and an increasingly prac

'tical instrument known as the typewriter .

Innovation was the by-word of the late 1800's and,

whi le railroads and tel egraph lines were fast connecting

al l parts of the nat ion , a soon-to-b e-famou s journalist

named McClure imported an En gl ish concept known as s. s.

"syndication . " In 1884 Mc Clure began to seek �c:>P�?a1:_ ' rather than timely materia l. market "fit l.crs ." to as

the end of the year McClure was supplying his custom- By

" ers wi th approximat ely 30,000 words week , 52 . a most o:f 1 t

in short stories and general int erest articles . In 1885

he launched one of his mo st popular .features--a weekly

sampling of his own favorite recipes appearing under the

name " Patience Winthrop ."

Edward W. Bok, wh o later became editor of the

Ladi es Home Journal , initiated a second American syndi -

cate two years later . Mr . Bok started it off wi th a

·weekly article penned by Victoria Woodhull's victim,

Reverend Henry Ward Beecher , an d followed up with "a

bright letter of New York gossip •••cal led 'Bab's Babble. '"

This last item helped him to "secure a clientele of some 53 ninety newspap er s in various parts of the country ." ""'

The nature of t�is syndicat ed mat erial reflects

another current of social upheaval --the "woman 's role" in

American life was under going a dramatic change. Women

inside the home were finally being recognized as an

important "consumer group" by merchandisers and, equally

signif icant , growing numbers of women outside the home

were demanding larger responsibilities , wages and political

vo ice. Historian Willard G. Blyer notes :

In the ear ly nineties , three New Yor k papers, the Wor ld, the Sun , and the Hacorder , were all devo ting consi derabl e at tention to their depart ments for women . Ar ticles on fashions, cooking recip es , and similar mat er ial were group ed to gether , often with society news , in women 's de partments or women 's pages . In 1892, the New York Recorder , a well-edited gener al newspaper , was characterized by the New York Herald as 'pre eminently a women 's paper' that was read by a hundr ed thousand women . The large Sunday editions of the New York papers gave considerable sp ace and prominence to dep ar tment s primar ily of inter est to women . In the latter part of the year 189 6, the New York Journal added to its Sunday edition a supp lement , the Woman 's Home Journal , part of wh ich was printed in co lors . With the aid of the first newspap er syndicates , newspapers the country over were ab le to follow the examp le of the New 54 York papers in app ealing to women readers .

Bok hims elf identified this theme in exp laining the premise upon which he based his syndicat e: He had de cided ''tljat the American woman was not a newspaper reader ," and "the ab sence of any distinctive material for

55 women was a factor ."

Ella Wh eeler Wi l cox , the author of Poems of

Passion , was perhaps the best known authoress of the time to contribute to Bokts syndicat e but the most famous by- line to emer ge f rom this venture was "Ruth Ashmor e."

Bok hit upon the idea of a column devoted to the mo re del icat e probl ems in a girl 's life. He ran two trial co lumns under the heading "Side Talk With Gir ls ," then

'·" _.P- 54

promptly turned the whole proj ect over to "Bab Babbles"

·authoress Mr s. Isabel Mal lon .

Later Bok wr ot e of Mr s . Mal lon : "She was th e mo st

·ridiculed writer in the magazine wo rld, yet the mo st

helpful edi tor that ever conduc ted a department in period-

, 56 ical literature ." During her sixt een years as "Ruth

Ashmore ," Mr s . Mallon received and answered 1 58�000 let

l ters , blazing the trail for generation after generation of fol lowers- -from Beatrice Fairfax , throu gh Dorothy Dix and !I · ·1 1 r bb y 11 Van Buren . !AI b 1ga1 'Dea A I I Magazines Th is growing awareness of a feminine reading

I au dience was al so evidenced by a mounting numb er of pub - ! / lications created solely for "m'lady."

As early as 1834 a penny pap er , patterned after

jBenj amin Day's famous New � Sun , was introduced--it was .. /I called, simply , Woman , and was edited by "Ann Oddbody ."

Its raison d' etre: "There is a paper Man published ," JI stated the first issue of Woman , "why shal l not a paper 57 ljW oman al so be seen dai ly in the city of Gotham?" ' The next of these early efforts was The Ladi es

:Morning Star , published by William Newel l. Mr . Newell i

;outlined his purpose and philosophy in the first issue , I J 55

�---· ------� I jprinted Ap ril 23 , 1836: ------1 I Th e Ladies Mo rning Star wi ll sustain the charact er of a Literary Mo ral Newspaper , wh ich - it shall be the endeavor of the proprietor to j_. enrich wi th every variety that may improve and adorn the female mind, en large and strengthen the understanding, purify the soul , and refine the senses ••• S8

Staggering under the weight o£ so heavy a load o£

virtue, the Mo rning Star lost reader s an d advertisers and

soon fol ded . Numerous magazines and papers aimed at the

; woman 's int erests were begun du ring this period, then

ab andoned, but Ladies Magazine , founded in Boston in 1828

by Mr s . Sarah Josepha Hale, was the first to survive its

fifth birthday .

When Sarah 's husband, David, died o£ pneumonia

in 1822, 'the thirty-four-year-old widow £or some reason

chose not to return to the work she had trained £or--

teaching. Instead, she labored listlessly at millinery

eeking out a subsistence £or herself and her five children ,

and secret ely poured her gr ief into verse.

Mr s. Hale's book, Th e Genius o£ Ob livion ; and

Other Original Poems , signed decorously, "By a Lady o£ New

Hamp shire ," dr ew little interest but it did provide her

with enough income to start another work. Th is volume ,

No rthwood , wh ich appeared in December, 1827 , brought her

wide _recogr1 i tion and sufficient conf idence _:t o _la,gncb, _ the 56

Ladies 59 Mi3-

"fema1e educat ion," bu t she proved herself a capable editor, guiding the literary efforts of her contributors with such skill that she attracted the attention of publisher

Louis A. Godey .

Nine years after its first issue appeared on city newstands , Ladies Maqazine was joined with Go dey 's to become Godey's Lady's Book, owned by Godey and edited by

Mrs . Hal e. To gether they determined to capture the

American woman 's interest an d, incidental ly, her subscrip - tion , but Mr s. Hal e was fearful of stepping on masculine toes . Her reticence is obvious 1n the very first issue :

"Husbands ," she promised, "may rest assured that nothing

found on these pages •••sha l l cause her (the wife) to be less assiduous in preparing for his reception ," or en- courage her to irusurp station , or encroach on the pre 60 rogatives of men . 11

In the same issue she outlined a goal for herself from which she never deviated :

••. The work will be national American •••a miscellany which , although devoted to general literature, is more eA.rpressly designed to mark the progress of female im rovement . 6l p Thus , "the progress of female improvement " remained 57

the underlying theme of the publication which enjoyed an unprecedented half century of success from January 1828 to

Decemb er 1877 . Mr s. Hale, gingerly juggling her subj ects , rarely failed to delight her audience and just as rarely gave their husbands an opportunity to take offense at this

} female periodical . Her success by any reckoning was outstanding ; a simple quantitative measure proves the point-- the magazine 's circulat ion exceeded even its owner 's hopes by piling up an unprecedented 150,000 readers .

During Godey 's "best literary period" (1837 to

1850) , Mrs. Hale managed to attract to its pages the foremost popul ar writers of the day �

Among the "authoresses" were Miss (Eliza )

Leslie, at one time an assistant editor •••a trio of prolific writers of serial fiction, Mrs . Anne Stephens , Mrs. E. F. Ellet , and Mr s. Caroline Lee Hentz, a trio of much admired poetesses--Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, Mr s. Seba Smith, and Miss Hannah Gould; "Grace Greenwood, " who edited Godey 's Lady's Dollar Newspaper for a tim? ; Miss Catherine M. Sedgwick, author of Hope Leslie , and mu ch else; Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, notable for her s. western sketches and stories ; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, not yet famous . This was a great galaxy

in the forties •••

Also associated with Mr s. Hale at that time was the most popular poetess wh o ever wrote in America--Lydia H. Sigourney . Her popularity was equalled only by her industry; her posthumous memoirs record over two thousand contributions to more than three hundr ed periodicals , and she published forty-six volumes all sorts--poetry , of essays, travel , fiction , historical sketches , 58

( ... l cookbooks , etc. She is omnipresent in the magazines of the period, an she had editorial 2 connections with several •••g I One of the mo st successful of the Godey 's copyists I! :was Peterson 's Ladies Nat ional Magazine, financed by

Charles J. Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post, and

edited by one of Godey's contributors , Mr s. Ann S. ) Stephens . Mrs. Stephens , who started work . on Peterson 's

in 1842, was "a prolific writer of serial fiction who had 63 been editor a few years before of the Portland Magaz ne " i . In 1854 Frank Leslie 's Gazette Fashion , par ent £f of the popular Frank Leslie 's Lady 's Magazine was born .

The Gazette took to task ideas espoused by Mrs . Amelia

Bloomer in her publication--Lily, A Ladies Journal ,

Devoted to Temperance and Literature. Taking up where

Kat e Field and Jennie June left off, Mr s. Bloomer intro-

duced the Lily in Januar� l949 and soon became associated

in the public mind with a costume advocated by the pub-

' lication consisting "of heavy , extremely wide trousers ' sometimes bound at the bottom by an ankle cuff and some- ( times open and pract ically covering the foot and a heavy ) 64 coat with its skirt coming well below the knees ."

On July 1, 1856, ydia Sa:Ter initiated still Dr . L another publicat ion aimed at reforming feminine costumes .

She called her magazine published in New York) the ( 59

Sibyl : A Review of the Tastes, Errors and Fash ions of

Society an d kicked o.ff the first issue with this broad-

side :

We do decidedly obj ect to such a pyramidal redundance as the present fashion suspends over hoops , destroying all idea of the beautiful form of woman ; and since the bottom of the waist has been located just beneath the armpits while the hoops reach above the hips , the once huge cone of dry goods looks mo re like a hogshead shuffled along by some propelling power save feet (for such articles are not supposed to be on ladies nowadays ), wh ile a pair of arms and a head stick out over this redundance of dry goods and cooperage.

Among the magazines tailored to satisfy the

American woman 's "new" interests were: Genius of Liberty, ( published monthly fro� 1852 to 1854 by Mr s. E. A. Aldrich ,

of Cincinnati ; Pioneer and Woman 's Advocat e (1852 ) begun by Anna W. Sp encer an d Paulina Wr ight Davis ' UNA (1853 )

both of Providence; Mr s. F. H. Day's Hese.erian ( 1858-62 ) begun in San Francisco, and Anna McDowell''s Woman 's

Advocat e (1855-60 ) in Philadelphia •

.Frank Luther Matt in his impressive "History of

American Magazines" also notes :

Th� Family Newsp aper is interesting for its claim that it was 'the first and only successful paper ever published by a lady'--but it was not the first , and it was not successful. The lady in qu estion was Marie Louise Hankins . Her paper was an eight-page illustrated folio--'a mammoth pictorial '--issued monthly in New York at seventy- 6(

five cents a year ; it a big circula cla imed tion in 1855 , but soon thereafter was lost to . 65 VleW.

new emphasis on women 's rights were reflected in A a spatter o£ new publicat ions born in the 1870's and

1880's. Su san B. Anthony and Elizab eth Cady Stanton launched their Revolution in 1868 ; Boston 's Woman 's

Journal was edited first in 1870 by Mary A. Livermore and thereafter (£or more than twenty years) by Lu cy Stone;

Mr s. Helen Barnard, o£ New York, began the Woman 's Cam- paign in 1872 and one presidential term lat er Mrs . Sarah

Langdon Williams , former woman 's department editor o£ the

Tol edo Blade , launched a new publication called the Ballot

Box. The Box moved £rom Ohio to New York in 1878 , and there , under the direction o£ Matilda Joslyn Gage, met 66 success under the name Nat ional Citizen and Ballot Box .

Mr s. Charlotte E. McKay 's was the lone voice o£ dissent among the lady publishers . Her True Woman

(1870-73 ) was a monthly magazine published in Baltimore.

Mr . �1o tt point s out that during this era there were an unusual number o£ publications "published, edited, and sometimes set in type and printed, by women £or 67 Women •" Among these·. l · .. ur1ng ·on s St-. L ou1s· J u la �·''! P · t 1 Ladies Magazine (1871-1892) ; Inland Monthly Magazine 61

(1872-1876) published by Charlotte Smith ; Mary Nolan l issued the Cen tral Magazine (1872-1875) wh ich "was wr itten , set in type, l printed and mF"'il (�rl (JU t '�nti r{:l y t,y vJ r ,rrH�n . It printed pictures its ! of cornr�(Jsinr.:; rr;r;rrl'-, , ', h r;vt i nr.:; vtrJmt:n I r

wo rkers, to prove its compl ete . . . 6B I femln:lza.tlon ." In ad- 1 di tion , the Ladies Ow in I n Magazine ( 1869-74) Jndi

was edited and published by Mr s. M. Cora Eland, and ! I Woman 's World: An Original Review of What Women Are Doing i • I j ( 1877-81 ) was edited by Mrs . Juan Lewis of Philadelphia. I Jennie June joined forces with publisher William

1 Jennings Demorest 's wife to edit Demorest 's Monthly

Magazine in 1865 but Harper 's Bazaar , first issued in

1867 , rapidly took the lead in the fashion world. I Mary Mapes Dodge and Harriet Beecher Stowe teamed

'�

' --_J I up editing Hearth and Home in 1868 but no publication of Ii

this era was des tined to great er success than the Ladies I1 I Home Journal , founded in Philadelphia in 1883 by Cyrus

H. K. Cu rtis and edited by his wife under the name 11Mrs .

Louisa Knapp ."

By the late 1800's and well into the infancy of

the -twentieth century , an interesting phenomenon can be

observed : While the number of monthly women ' s magazines

soared , fewer and fewer of th ese were either published or

edited by women . Women 's periodicals had su ddently become 62

big business, thus making this part icular lit erary :field both attractive and respectable :for men with ambition .

Edward in<\tion of Bok note(l in UF)O th;1t "•m (�;.c.-un subscription lists o£ showed sevc!n-eighths magazines of 69 the subscribers to be women . 11 Numerous explanations were offered for this fact , but Mr s. Belva A. Lockwood (a presidential candidate twice nominat ed by the Equal

Rights Party) explained it thus : "The em;:--'ncipat ed wom

·under Bok 's editorship the Ladies Home Journal thrived; Morris Phi llips editPrl ilrJm<:_ Jr,l�-�_;.:_� with '-.; r,mk success wh ile Char les Dwyer h(�Cid(::!d l�ut tc.:ric k Comp<.UJy ' s popular Delineator . Clarke W. Bryan issued the first Good

Housekeeping from Holyoke , Massachusetts in 1885 and

Frank A. Munsey backed a mediocre publication ent itled the

Puritan : A Journal for Gentl ewomen (1897-1907).

Arthur Capper edited the very successful House- hold Magazine soon after Karl Edwin Harriman (who would later become editor of Redbook Magazine) began his term of office as associate editor of the Pilgrim (1899-1907).

Th e mo st exceptional success stories, however , centered around McCall's and Cosmopolitan . Frances M. Benson was editor of the Qu een of Fashion when James H.

Ottley took over the McCall Company in 1893 ; three years

later she yielded to a newcomer , Miss E. B. Clapp , and

the fashion house' s publication became known as McCall 's

Magazine: The Queen of Fashion . Under Miss Clapp 's reign

circulat ion reached 100,000 in 1899, doubled dur ing the

next two years and rose to one million in 1908 . Dress

patterns still ab ounded in the book, but Miss Clapp intro

duced modern typography and page layout and added articles

and short fiction as well as a bonus of 11tWo · big fashion

plates in each number , produced in brilliant chromolithog- 71 raphy. 11

Co smopolitan , on the other hand , was begun with

the woman in mind but soon gained general recognition and

readership as a literary periodical . In Volume 1, Number

1, issued in March 1886, Cosmopolitan's founder , Paul J.

Schlicht , described the new monthly as "a first-class family magazine ...Th ere will be a department devoted ex-

elusively to the interests of women , wi th articles on fashions , on household decoration , on cooking, an d the

care and management of children , etc . 11 However , under the

editorship of Frank P. Smith, the publication was chiefly devoted to the wo rks of popular authors of the day ; in

1912 Cosmo was purchased by William Rando lph Hear st and 6

ely on a mo re sensat ional tone-- ' the magazine immediat took and general interest articles to its ;hhlin0 1 the :from which many predicted it might never recover- - slump it took a flamb oyantly innovative new 11edi tress'' Helen

Gu rley Brown to turn it around--but more about that later .

Women s Clubs 1 The emerging feminine self-consciousness mirrored in this sudden wealth of women 's magazines was also re flected in a great ground swell of women 's clubs across the country. Heretofore, women had generally sought no greater contact with one another than the random associa tion provided by church and social activities; they left

11organized interests11 to the men . However , just about the time that Jennie June was campaigning for the formation of the Sorosis Club (1868), other American women were beginning to glimpse the potential benefits o£ such or ganizations --and womeh journalists led the way with a sudden spattering of special interest groups throughout the country .

Mrs . Emily Briggs , known to the Washington Press

Corp s as 110livia, 11 founded the Woman 's National Press

Association in 1882. 73 65

Sally Joy , of the Boston Herald, and a Vermont

reporter , Helen Winslow , whose by-line app eared in the

Transcript , the Beacon, the Herald, and the Globe, or

ganized the New England Woman 's Press Association in

1885. 74

When Jennie June, Fanny Fern, Kate Field and Alice

Cary organized first the Woman 's Press Club in 1889 , then a national associat ion known as the General Federation of

Women 's Clubs in 1890, Helen Winslow was an enthusiastic support er . It was Helen who pub lished and edited the first really successful woman 's club "house organ ," Club 7 5 Woman , created in 1895. V.tr s. Eliza "Pearl Rivers"

Nicholson , publisher of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, served as the first president of the Women 's International

Press Associ ation, formed in 1885. 76

Out West, Mrs. Isabel Worrell Ball, a pioneer woman journalist , formed the Western Authors and Artists

Club in Kansas City in 1885. Mr s. Ball, born in Illinois, was a teacher by profession , but wh en her husband moved his family to New Mexico she pestered the editor of the

Albuquerque Journal into giving her a job. From 1881 to

1883 , when the family moved to Kansas City , Mrs. Ball earned her reportorial strip es by covering everything 6(

:from Indian raids rt o blizzards--all the while do dging

bu llets and the danger s of wo lf In Kansas rovi ng packs . she saddle o a carriage became exch anged her horse f r and editor o:f the Chronoscope , then moved briefly to the Daily Commonwealth and Kansas City Times, and :finally

covered the Washington Press Gallery for the Kansas City 77 Star in 1891 .

WAR CORRESPONDENTS

Grace Greenwood's chatty missives :from Europe

became a popular newspaper st yle in the late 1800's.

Henry J. Raymond, edi�or of the New York Times , sent

Nancy Johnson to Europ e in 1857 as a traveling correspon-

dent an d Times readers avidly :followed "Minnie Myrtle's"

ccounts of Europ ean social life. 4 Raymond first thought of hiring Nancy when he

read her Letters :from � Sickroom , penned wh ile she was

recuperatin g from the amputation of one of her legs .

Nancy dedicated her book, Myr tle Wreath, to the Times � editor.

Another popular European correspondent was Laura

Catherine Redden , from Maryland, who wrote for the Times

soon after Nancy Johnson 's return to America. Laura also

wrote for the St . Louis Republican and the New Ma il . --·-�--· - 67

Her dispatches from the Congressional Press Gallery during.

the Civi l War were enjoyed by many who had no idea that I 78 Glyndon" was a woman . Miss Redden 's journalis- "Howard tic achi evements, though impressive , were almost secondary ·

to her per sonal victory over physical handi caps. Spinal meningitis left her dea£ and dumb at an early age and it was not unt il her return £rom Europe in 1868, when she

studied with Alexander Graham Bell, that she learned to . I speak once mor e. She married Edward Searing in 1876 w. and gave her newsp aper career to travel with him to the up healthier climate o£ California.

While these lady correspondents were well read and well received abroad, none laid claim to pioneering the political and war coverage which would later characterize the glamorous "war corr espondents" o£ £act and fiction.

There is some dispute over which woman owns the honor of being the .first true American war correspondent of her sex. Stephen Crane 's wife, Cora, has been nominat ed on the basis o£ three articles which she penned for the New Journal regarding the Spanish American con Ydrk 79 flict. This claim is di scount ed by some , however , be-

cause Cora Crane "was not a professional journalist and ••• another woman , Boyd , a volunteer nurse in the war , Harriet also wrote stories for the Journal , one about her nursing 6E

training on April 25, 1897 , an d one about the -fighting 80 on May 5, 1897 ."

Actually the front-running candidat e for this

honor comes from a much earlier era. Mar garet Fuller,

who wrote for the New York Tribune, reported on Louis

Napoleon 's siege of Rome in 1849 .

Margaret Fuller is probably more properly classi-

. . fied a literary figure than a journalist ; her poetry and

prose is ranked among the best effort s of such notable

contemporaries as Carlyle, Emerson , and her arch -rival

Longfellow. Yet it was Margaret 's preeminence in this

group which brought her the editorship of the Tran•

scendentalists' quarterly publication , the Dial - -and it

was her sparkling writing in the Dial wh ich prompted

Horace Greel ey to offer her a position on the staff of his

New York Tribune.

Margaret joined the Tribune as literary editor in

1844 , irking and delighting the fussy Greel ey with Mr. frequently tardy deli very of excellent copy . Later , he

ranked the following essays , as among the most important

of her contributions to the Tribune: "Thomas Hood,"

"Edgar A. Poe," "Capital Punishment ," "Cassius M. Clay,"

"New Year 's "Christmas ," "Thanksgiving," "St . Day ," Valentine 's," "Fourth of July," First of August" "The 69

..--- ... - . ----- ·····------.. 1 (commemorating the anniversary of slave-emancipat ion in i 81 the Br itish West Indi�s ).

Following the fad of the day Margaret c;ailed for

Europe in 1846, eager to meet those whose works she had

so fearlessly reviewed. And she did meet them--the

Brownings , Wo rdsworth , DeQuincey , George Sand , Rachel ,

Mazzini , Carlyle--and, an obscure Italian nobl eman as

well. Margaret became the Marchessa Giovanni Angel o 82 Ossoli in Decemb er 1848 and followed with intense in-

terest the military and political contests being waged

wi thin her husband 's homeland .

Margaret 's dispatches traced the downfall of the

republican cause and wh en Fr ench troops march ed into

Rome , the Marchessa fled with her husband and young son .

The ship on which they were traveling to America was wrecked on Fire Island beach in 1850 and all aboard were

lost .

Perhaps the first female forei gn correspondent to

draw notice and comment from her male counterparts, however , was Anna Benj amin , writing for Leslie 's on the

Philippine uprising against the United Stat es in 1899 .

James Creelman , corresponden t for the New· York Journal

commented:

.- 7<

-····------�------Time was wh en the war corresponden� � --- only men to cont end against, men--and censors. l� The adventurous scout of the Press could swing hims elf into the saddle and ride on the rim of g:reat events with a light heart , knowing the 111 ways and weaknesses of the male intellect. But ,I_ with the advent o£ woman came sorrow . The swish o£ the journalistic petticoat on the edge of the military camp meant the hidden leaking

of news ..•f� 'or woman , forth a wh t'n sh e ci\nnot dri:l.q the secrets of i m. \1(( • <• n

Wh ile Fanny B. representin g the �' New O:cl (�

Maine explosion, three other ladies are actually credited with covering the Spanish American conflict : Miss

Benjamin for Leslie 's, Mrs . Kathleen Blake Watkins, for the Toronto Mail and Express , and Mrs. Katherine Wh ite, of the Chicago Record. Neverthel ess , one important dis - tinction separated Miss Benjamin's reporting efforts from those of her colleagues . Mr s. Watkins and Mrs . Wh ite specialized , � la mode, in the "woman 's angle" while Miss

Benj amin ' s dispatches could be interchanged imperceptibly with copy being sen·t by the seasoned Creelman for Mr. example .

Mrs. Watkins , "in the sob-sister convention of the time, arran ged a reunion between a maid working in the hotel who had followed her husband to Ta.'llpa and wrote a tears and sunshine story on their meeting or described the 71

- - life of the women with the Cuban exil es .11 84 �----Mr�---�----s. Whi�� -te,------] I meanwhile, "had joined the staff of the Red Cross and served on Cl ara Barton 's rel ief ship the 'State of Texas ,' I originally chartered to take food, clothing and medical supplies to the starving Cubans before the war . Her articles dealt mo stly with heal th problems and later with 85 the care of the wounded and sick in the hospitals."

Anna Benjamin, on the other hand, wrote from a man's point of view--at least from what was traditionally considered a man 's point of view. She wrote critically and intel ligently on what she saw and she was a keen ob - server wherever she went . She cover ed preparations for the Cuban invasion from Tampa and Key West in Florida , and prepared to follow the expedit ion to Santiago .

When British correspondent Charles E. Hands asked if she hoped to fol low the American forces to Cuba, she replied : "Oh yes . I know what you think. You think it ridiculous my being here, you are laughing at me wanting to go that 's the worst of being a woman . But just let me tell you . I'm going through to Cuba , and not all the o± d 86 generals in the army are going to stop me."

At least one old general --General William R.

Shafter of the Fifth Army Corps--did indeed try to stop her . But Anna, undaunted, begged passage on a coal scow headed for Santiago and not only accomplished her goal

but beat out many of her comp etitors by sending back some

of th e first dispatches chronicling the defeat of Spanish

forces .

Anna 's first important story from this theater o.f

war was critical of the army , it was titled, "The Truth

. About Army Rations ." Another of her pieces took to task

the famous Rough Riders group , commanded by Colonel

Leonard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt .

In truth they did make so free with every thing that they came across on the down that way their fame spread before them, and when they reached Tampa, Colonel Wood was greeted 1¥i th a petition from Tampa citizens requesting him to keep the Terrors (T ddy's Terrors) within camp 7 grounds and he did. g .

Anna was just twenty-three when she went to war .

The Nevv York Tribune described her as "sl ight and girlish

in appearance,"88 a deceptively innocent covering for an

adventurous soul . After the Sp anish-American War and the

Philippine insurrection , Anna traveled to Japan and China

(escaping on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion which brought

to a quick end the lives of many foreigners visiting in

that part of the world) . Next , she rode alone the brand new Trans -Siberian Railroad .from Siberia to Moscow, then went on to Paris . Her reports, sent back to Leslie 's,

the New York Tribune , Outlook, the Atlantic Monthl , and � . 73 .j

were factual and concise.

Unlike her contemporary Nellie Bly, Anna Benj amin

· foreswore the temptation to include herself' as part of' any

news story . Though she was frequently the only woman

within miles of' the conflicts she chronicled, her readers

were given no inkling of this :

•••he r news articles did not dramatize her own exploits. Her most cxcitin

I had been in Manila so long that I felt I should also know something of the islands at the north, so I determined to board a train going to Dagupan at the end of the line (130 miles ), and carrying soldiers and supplies. The train was a tiny and ancient affair and I took my place in the officer 's car.. I was the only woman there, and rather expected to be put of'£ , but I got through the lines . The train was wrecked by in surgents and I was forced to make part of the trip in army wagons , burned flat cars, and cattle cars . But it was a great experience and I don 't regret it. 89

Miss Benjamin 's life was crammed full of such

experiences ; she marched boldly wh ere no woman had dr eamed

of goin g before. She tarried in her quest for adventure 74

only once : She stopped briefly in France to visit her

sister at Chateau de la Lande , Vi lliers-sur-Marne and to begin work on a book--the book and her life were suddenly

cu t short , for there she died of a tumor on January 22 , 90 1902, at the age of twenty-seven . 75

·---·-·------

FOOTNOTES FOR CHAPTER III

1 Ross, cit. , 28. �· P • 2 Ibid. , 29. P • 3 Ibid. \ 4Ross, cit., 29. �· P · 5 Ibid. , p. 28 .

6Florence Finch Kelly, Th e Flowing Stream (New York : E. P. Dutton and Inc., 1939 ), pp . 448-449. Co. , 7 Ross, �· cit., p. 29. 8walter Davenport and James Der ieux , Ladies , Gentlemen , and Editors (New York : Doubleday and Co ., Inc., 1960), pp . 111-112 .

9 Irving Wallace, The Nympho and Other Maniacs (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 19 1), 324 . 7 p. 10 Davenport , op . cit., p. 115 . 11 Ibid. , 120. p. 12 Johanna Johnston , Vr r s. Satan : The Incredible Saga of Victoria Woodhu ll (New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons , 1967), p. l�U.

13Davenport , cit., 123 . 2£• p. 1 4Jo hnston , cit., p. 115-116. ££• 15 Ross, £12.• cit., p. 35.

16Emanie Sachs , The Terrib le Siren : Victoria Woodhull , 1838-1927 (New York : Harper & Brother s Publish ers, 1928), 96-9 . pp . 7 7e

,- � 17 Di s I Oliver Knight (ed. ), I Protest: Selected s_i_t_i_o_n _s _o_f_E_ ._ v_v_._s _� (Madison The University of _q ._t _l J_· __ _cr_i_..P_.I�)-s : ! Wisconsin Pr ess , 190 6) , p. 27 . 1 18 Emery , cit., pp . 359-60 2£· 19Ross, p. 558 .

20Frank Luther Mot t, American Journalism: A Histozy j of Newspapers in the United St ates Through 260 Years 1 1690-1950 (New York : Macmillan Co . , rev. ed. 1950), p. 313 .

21Arthu r J. Larsen (ed. ) Crusader and Feminist : Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm (New Yor�: D. App leton and Company , 1934 ), p. 171.

22Ishbel Ross , Sons of Adam , Daughters of Eve (New York : Harper and Row Publishers , 1969) , p. 131 .

23 Ross, �· cit., pp . 131-132.

24Ross , Ladies, p. 482 .

25Thomas Ew ing Dabney , One Hu ndn--d Gi� PC\t Ye�u�s : of' _ _ _ , Th e Stonr _ 1_!: �.; the· Ti m�,� -P i�;�_,:'�':.�l_l'_< ' l�'-'·,lm l•\11111<1i 11_1J 1<1 l11t.lll ·· (1'\l:"w York: c� t' <..'l..'l1W<.hhl 1'•·,,�;:: , l'11l ' 1 i ·.1\,., � 1 •Ll4 ). I'• 1 �"I , 2 6Ross, Sons of 1\ d.\m , p. l. '(l •

27Ross , Ladies , 37 . p . 28Ross , Sons of Adam, p. 126 . 29 Dabney , �· cit., p. 265 .

30rbid. , p. 266.

31Dabney , p. 266.

32rbid. , p. 306 .

33Dabney, it ., p. 308. ££ • c 34 rbid. T

35New Orleans Times-Democrat , February 15, 1896, Sec . II, p. 2, col . 4.

36Ross, Ladies , p. 597 . 37 Ross , a L d"1es , · p. 3 .

38R oss, Lad" le s , p. 494.

· 39E�m ery , c1. t. , 202 . £1?..· p. 4°Homer W. King, Pulitzer 's Prize Editor : A Biography of John A. Cockerill 1845-1896 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1965), p. 188 .

41Ross, Ladies, p . 326 . 4•? . � Ib d. , • l p • 3 2 9

43Ross, Sons of Adam , p. 133 .

44Ross, Ladies, p. 146 .

45Ross, Ladies , p. 44.

46New York Daily Graohic , Septemb er 11, 1873 , Section II, p. 1, col . 1.

47 Ros s, Sons o£ Adam , p. 129 .

48Henry L. Smith, "The Beauteous Jennie June , Pioneer Woman Journalist," Journalism Quarterly, Spring, 1963, pp . 173-174 .

49Ross, Ladies, p. 42 .

50Ross, Ladies, p. 41.

51Ibid.

52Peter Lyon , Success Story : The Life and Times of S. McClure (Deland, Florida : Everet t/Edwards , Inc. , s. 1963 ) ' p. 79. 78

·-·------··· . -- --- · ····--···----···· ·--�-- - ·----·· --·····--- ··-�-- --·------···------. ---- ·-· ··------� 53 � Edw rd Bok , The Amer icanizat ion of Edward Bole : The Autobiogra�ph� of a Dutch Box Fifty Years After New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons , 1920 , p. 105. ( ) 54 Bleyer , �· cit., p. 399 . 55 Bok, 2£• cit., p. 104 .

56Davenport ; cit., 178. �· P · 57 Bleyer , cit., • 168 . ££.· P 58Bleyer , cit., p. 169. 2l?.. · 59 Ruth E. Finley , The Lady Godey's: Sarah of Josepha Hale Philadelphia: J. B. Lipp incott Company , 1931 , p. 61. ( ) 6 ° . . F·�n 1 ey , 2£... c� t. , p • 39 • 61 I b.J.d . , p. 40 •

62Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741-1850 Cambridge, Mass .: The Belknap Press of Harvard University( Press, 1957 ), pp . 584-585 .

63Ibid. , p. 352 .

64Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol . II: 1850-1865, pp . 50-51. 65 . Mot t , £E_. c� t. , p. 58 •

66carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler . Woman Suffrage and Politics : The Inner Story o£ the Movement New York : Charles Scribner 's Sons , 1923 , p. 123 . ( ) 67 Mott, �· cit., p. 95. 68 Ibid. 69 woman 1s Column v. 3, Feb . 4 , 1890, p. 4 .

70Mo tt, Vol . IV : 1885-1905,, p. 353 .

'·· --

'·· .- 79

71 Ma t t, Vol . IV : 1885 -1905 , p. 582 . 72 Ibid. , p . 492 . 73 Ros s, Ladies , 326 . p. 74 Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas o£ the Woman s. Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia Univer sity Press 1965), p. 31. 75 Kraditor , £R· ci�. , p. 48 . 76 Dabney , cit., 306 . s:E..• p. 77 Ross, Ladies , pp . 331-332.

78Ro ss, Ladies , p. 332. 79 New York Journal , Apr il 26 , April 29, and May 9, 1897. 80 Cha.rles B. Brown . "A Woman 1 s Odyssey : The War Correspondence of Anna Benjamin, 11 Journalism Quarterlz., Autumn , 1969, p. 523 . 81 Julia Ward Howe, Margaret Fulle;_ (Marchessa Os�oli) (Westport , Connecticut : Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1970; originally published in 1883 by Roberts Brother s of Boston ), p. 133 . 82 Ibid. , 234. p. 83 Brown, £R• cit., p. 522 . 84 Ibid. , p. 523 . 85 . Brown, cit. l.o c. 86 cha.rles E. Hands , 1'The Lady War Correspondent and How She Proved Her self One of the Boys ' London 1 11 i ly Mail , June 13, 1898 . 87 Brown , 2£• cLt., p. 523 . 88 New York January 22 , 1902 , p. 23 , Tr ibune, col . l. 89 New Yor'K T ·b J anuary 22 1902 23 . r1 une , , , P• , col . 3. CHAPTER IV

STUNT WOMEN : 1890-1900

Around 1890 two pheno;nena combined to forge a new

era for the lady journalist . The first was the lady her

self. Up until this time, except for those unusual women mentioned in the foregoing section, the vast majority of female newspap er contributors were simply "letter wri ters.H

These women , often from wealthy families, toured North

America and Eur.ope, sending back a deluge of letters for the edification of the folks back home. These missives described in the elaborate, flowery Victorian vein of the day , the places , customs and people they encountered.

As the turn of the cen tury crept closer , however , editors found themselves faced with a new and inexplicable breed of femal e--the "working girl ." Particularly in New

York, a new generation of women were everywhere in evi dence; by choice or necessity, these ladies were in pur suit of a living, and many saw in news writing an occupa tion peculiarly suited to their interests and abilities .

Some editors dismissed them out of han.d ; others were willing to employ but wonde them, red vaguely just how to

81 8

The answer to this dilemma was , in part, provided

Ear ly in the 1890's, by William Randolph Hearst . Mr. Hearst decided to invade the New York newspap er fiel d,

1 building up the failing Journal to compete with Mr . ! I· Pulitzer 's World. Both publishers went in heavily for

sensat ionalism, and their editors were quick to realize I iI i tha·t th@ simple addition of a girl reporter to a story

could add spice to an otherwise humdrum event .

Soon these 11yellow journal ists" perfected a brand

new recipe for increasing readership ; using the newswoman

as the key ingredient, they whipped up elaborate, tooth-

some concoctions around her--all designed to whet the

public 's appetite for even more sensationalism. Thus , the

11 stunt11 era was born .

Wh ile many male reporters added greatly to the

fine art of the trump ed-up news event , thes e outlandish

/ bids for the reader 's attention--created to amuse, enter-

tain and flabbergast- -offer ed the woman reporter the

chance she had been seeking.

The girl most closely identified with this era was

an ente:=prising young lady from Pennsylvania named

Elizabeth Cochran e whose pen name was Nellie Bly. World

editor John Cockerill's biographer , Homer King, providesi A. , an interesting picture of the mal e domain into which Miss

Cochrane thrust herself :

Prior to the invasion of a pint -sized, hazel-eyed, auburn-haired girl of twenty, the Wo rld newsroom was a stronghold of toug� proud masculinity , its atmosphere polluted by cigar smoke and profanity. Placed strategically among the desks, chairs, wastebaskets, and littered papers were brass cuspidors that occasionally provoked testsof markmanship . The misses added nothing to the cleanliness of the room. A decent girl had to be a little mad just to show up . The prevailing view was that respectable girls stayed home until they were married, or failing to snare husbands they could teach or take up nursing. There had been stirrings of discontent in feminine circles but trouble maker s like Susan B. Anthony, Belva Lockwood , and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were not to be taken seriously. Womanhood was noble as long as home ties held it in check. I£ such bonds gave way , in the orthodox male vi ew, the who le fabric of society cou ld be ripped to shreds . Th is of mean t, course, that hiring women to g�thcr news was simp ly out of the question . 1

Despite the prevailing convention , Col . Cockerill was so impressed with Miss Ely's life-and-death earnest- ness that he promptly gave her a job .

During her tenure with the World, Nellie handled hundreds of stories but in 1889 she made headl ines and history when , at age twent y-two , she circumnavigated the globe faster than the fanciful record of eighty days set by Jules Verne 's Ph ileas Fog9·--she circled the world 1n seventy-two days , six hours an d eleven minutes. B.-!j.

On November the carried this small 14, 1889, World story on page one :

On £our day's notice Bly starts out 1V1iss with a gripsack for ·the Lo11gest journey known to mankind--she knows no such as :fail, and will word add another to l1 er list of triunphs--circum navigation o:f the globe. The World today under takes, the task o£ turning a dream into a reality.

With all the millions now invested ih methods and modes of communication , interstate and inter nat ional , the story of Mi ss Bly will give a valu able pointer in enabling the reader to appreciate these avenues o£ intercourse at their full value, to see their merits and their defects a�d note the present advanced state of invention in these lines of human effort .

As a news event it was not much of a story , for, despite her age and sex, the trip simp ly required that

Miss Bly stick to her schedule and make the transport connections which had been prearranged for her in New York .

Nevertheless, the Wo rld' s editors worked hard to j dramatize Nellie's :first-person reports; :for seventy-two days, copywriters ben·t their b.cains to come up with suit- able heads for Nellie's on-going travelogue. Their efforts usually resulted in such inspiring prose as "Nellie Bly's

Rush" or "Nellie Bly on the Fly ."

On those dreaded occasions when Nellie's copy

:failed to get through, the men at the World simp ly created stories, ike "Some the Things Nellie Bly Will 1 o�f Qu ec:c r·· ! Still, toward the end of her journey , Nellie I found that she had indeed succeeded in attracting atten- j; tion. By the time she had traversed the requ ir�d 24,899 if mil es, she was mobbed at every stop by reporters and l l !. wel l-w:i_shers. The World welcomed her back on January 25 , 1890 , I with the entire front page and most of the inside pages

devoted to her exploits, leading of£ with a series of

exub erant headlines :

FATHER TIME OUTDONE !

Even Imagination 's Record Pales Before the Performance of "The World's'' Globe Circler

Her time: 72 days, 6 hrs ., 11 min., -sec.

Thousands Cheer Thems elves Hoarse at Nellie Bly's Arrival g( ·

Wel come Sal utes in Nc-w Yor k and Brooklyn

The Whole Countcy i\

Nellie Bly Tells Her Story

The male report er assigned by the World to cover

Nellie's return was obviously touched by the solemnity o£ the occasion. He wrote:

It is :finished.

Sullen echoes o:f nnca on across the gray waters o:f the bay and over the roofs and spires o:f three cities.

People look at their watches� It is only 4 o'clock . Those cannot be sunset guns .

someone dead? Is Only an old era. And the booming yonder at the Battery and Fort Greene tolls its passing away. stage-coach days are ended, and the Th e new age o£ lightening travel begun .

And , a.TJl id all the tumult walks the little lady , with just a :foot of space between her and the madly joyous mob . She is carrying a little walking stick in one hand and with the other waves her checkered little £ore-and-a:ft cap , and laughs as her name merr ily is hoarsely shouted from innumerab le throats. Tense :faces stare from the lon g galleries that bend ominously be neath awful load humanity . their of The tops o£ . I passenger coaches lying upon the side tracks 87

are black with men and boys .

But the little girl trips gaily along. Th e circuit of the globe is behind her . Time is put to blush . She has brushed away dis tance as if it were down . Oceans and continents she has traversed.

Even Jules Verne contributed to the publicity of the occasion by cabling to the World: "I never doubted the success of Nellie Bly. She has proved her intrepidity and courage. Hurrah :for her and :for the director of the

World. Hurrah ! Hurrah !" The welcoming committee , wh ich met her at the dock went even :further , saying: "Miss Bly has done for American journalism what Stanl ey did :for it 2 in 1873 ."

Actually this was neither the first nor the last of Nellie's stunt s. She launched herself as a prototype for her sisters in the journalistic prof ession and her style was assiduously copied throughout the country.

Nellie "manufactur ed" news wh erever she went ; she assumed dis�1ises , posing as a shop girl, a lunatic, a beggar, a factory worker and Salvation Army lass--she would try anything and everything, from riding in a high- flying balloon to descending to the ocean :floor in a new diving bell.

Still, there was more than a little o£ the social crusader in Miss Ely's character , and more than one of her 88

j- stunt s paid of£ in positive l I York 's Grand Jury , following up her eX'_t)ose the lunatic I of . I I asylum on Blackwel l's Island, egged the state legislature into voting $3 ,000 , 000 for improvements to that institu-

11 tion . Similarly, when she took on Albany 1 s ''lobby king,

Edward R. Phelps, she smashed his career with a single

article which began :

For I'm a Pirate King ! I'm in the Lobby Ring! Oh � what an uproar ious Jolly and glorious Biz :for a Pirate King!

; I was a lobbyist last week . I went up to I I Albany to catch a professional briber in the act . I did so. The briber , lobbyist and boodl er whom I ca·u.ght was Mr . Ed Phelps . I pret ended I wanted to have him help me kill certain bill . a Mr. Phelps was cautious at first and looked carefully I into my record, He satisfied himself that I was 3 honest and talked very freely for a king ••• . I

Dozens of girls, anxious to land jobs on the 11big11

papers, followed Nellie's example, risking their lives and

reputations on any stunt which might bring public atten-

tion.

Of course there were many lady scribes who re-

fused to succumb to the self -immolation of this era; their

work appeared modestly the women s pages o:f less ill,. 0:1 1 sensational publications- -their beat was clothes or

cookery. They resented the stunt girls and one embittered 89

colleague wrote that Nellie had ''prostituted her womanhood 4 :for the j sake of story. 11 Neverthel ess, the girls a good I who risked all earned from $50 to $100 a week, while their l more conservative counterparts coillroanded only $25 to $50-- 5 i:f they were lucky enough to have jobs at all.

Two. more of Colonel John Cockerill's "finds11 --

Eli zabeth Jordan and Polly Pry--gained widespread recognition as representat ives of this stunt age.

Miss Elizabeth Jordan , born in Milwaukee in 1867 , trained :for her World role on Milwaukee, St . Paul and

Chicago papers. Her work on the Chicago Tribune attracted :

Cockerill's attention and it was at his invitation that she crashed _New York in 1890. Ishbel Ross describes her arrival :

She made an impression from the fir st moment. She had an elaborate wardrobe and lvas dashing in appearance, and she mana:;;�ed to get into the most inaccessible places . She was never bothered with minor women 's page assignments, but combined the best :features o:f the stunt age with sound writing. She tested the accommodations of jails and asylums , rode an engine cab , interviewed social leaders, and covered the news of the town . She traveled through the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee on horseback, fording rivers, climbing .forgc�s, forcing her way through thick forest , her only companion a Negro guide. She visited a lonely mining camp in the mountains , in which no woman had ever set foot . Armed with a Spanish stiletto she explo red the camps of the raoonshiners and did a series for the Sunday that was copied --· World widely.6 90

- e T was gle :: ::: : � : t� : � ::r s :�ce I courts, �an::d tenements":� ::: and� pr ov�::::ided the::: backg1:-::ound�::: for a I book she later wrote called Tales From the CitY- Room.

In Ap ril 1892 Miss Jordan was appointed assistant Sunday editor of the Wor ld, working with Arthur Brisbane. She held this post for nine years be-fore moving on to edit

Harper 's Bazaar , but during the first few weeks she was a const ant source of amazement to her co-workers :

She used to bedazzle the compositors by showing up in im..'llaculate shirt-waists and sling ing type with an experienced hand. When every one else was sweating and in a state of collapse from heat and overwork, Mi ss Jordan would look co�pletely self-possessed. At the end of a particularly frenzied night one of the editors exclaimed ferociously as he waited for the eleva tor : 'Good God! Wn at a job. Can you imagine anything worse?'

10h yes , 1 laughed Miss Jordan , waving her dummy pages . 1To lose it . 1

Leonel Campbell, who la·ter adopted Po� Pry as her

� de plume , Cru'lle to New York just a few years prior to

Miss Jordan . Also unlike Miss Jordan , Polly had more going against her than for her wh en she knocked on John

Cockerill's door: First she was just seventeen , she had married a rich Mississipian two years before and she was determined to carve out an exciting career for herself, never to return to the dr udgery of housewifery . Second,

'·" _.,._ :_ .

Cockc-ci ll had not in\' i.t�,d hl't� . '\

thus : "Give you a job? I ought to �-> pank you an d �; end 8 you home to your husband.11

Instead he sent her to South America, launching

-I her writing career at $6 week . Polly soon established a

'hersl£ as an able reporter and when she met Fred G.

Bonfils on a train trip West he offered her a job on the

Denver Post. Polly hesitated; she wa s both repelled and

fascinated by stories which were already circulating about

Bonfils , his partner Harry H. Tammen , their raucous gaudy

publication , and the topsy-turvy world which centered

around their office, known locally "The Bucket o£ as 9 Blood. 11 Fascination apparently prevailed for Polly ac-

cepted Bon£ils o££er and thereafter iilli1lersed herself in 1 the Post's crusading spirit .

It was Polly who carried the Post 1s banner in a

prison reform campaign which ultimately lent a certain

grisly validity to the name 11Bucket o:f Blood.11 Polly

toured 1 ! Color ado s jails and prisons and interviewed numer-

ous inmates as she gathered material £or a series o£

articles aimed at improving the state's penal institutions .

On one o£ these inside trips she met Alfred Packer , a . ______I,...... _ 92

.. --···· ·--- ·--·- · . 1 "lifer" who had been convicted of cannabilism--he j,--· I allegedly ate five prosp ectors during the winter of 1873. Il Polly convinced herself th,>.t Mr . Packer w;\s Ln no - cent , and, with the backing of her editors, she set out , to free him--presenting his appeal directly to the public

through the pages of the Post. Public interest and sym-

pathy was aroused and, with the help of a lawyer named

Anderson, Mr . Packer was freed. However , Mr. w. w. Anderson was not satisfied wi th a mere legal triumph--he

had been led to hope, he later testified, for a sub -

sta�tial monetary reward from the Post edi tors. When it

was not forthcoming, he visited their office. Polly was

present when the counselor demanded additional remunera-

tion from Bonfils and Tammen and it was her screams which

startled a petrified office staff into action when Mr. 10 Anderson pulled out a pisto1. The lawyer fired, hitting

Bonfils twice (one bullet g:razing his heart , and Tammen ) three times , then gJ:appled with Polly over possession

of the gun .

"I'll kill you," he said.

11Go ah ead," said Polly, guarding the kneel ing

Tammen behind voluminous skirts. her "Then hang for ' 111 1 1.t • 93

Fortunately Anderson did not fire again and Mr. sub sequently gave himself up to the police. Nevertheless,

ep isode neither of the Po�:;t ' s owners--both o:f af ter this whom recovered from the experience--were able to back Mi ss

Pry 's proj ects quite so wholeheartedLy. According to

Bonfils and Tammen biographer Gene Fowler :

Bonfils never entirely forgave Polly Pry for saving his life. She had do ne something for him which he had been unable to do for himself. He was under an obligat ion, a condition abhorrent to his strange, defiant nature.

He picked quarrels with her over small matters. Finally he accused her of lying to him. A woman who wrestles with a smoking pistol --a beautiful woman from Virginia--does not take the lie when passed . Nor did Polly. She left Bonfils and passed to other literary fields--a great and ten der character, with coura9e unbounded. 12

Polly left the Post in 1902 to publish a short-

lived periodical known as the Pollz PrY-· Vaguely

reminiscent of Anne Royall's Paul Pry: , the new publication

devoted itself chiefly to scrapping with the Western Fed-

eration of Miners and lasted just two years. Miss Pry resumed her reporting career , this time working for John

C. Shaffer at the Rocky Mountain New�.

Another New York Wor ld reporter, Dorothy Dare, claimed to be "the first woman to take a spin through the streets of New York in a horseless carriag�::Q" According to Frank Luther Mott, "Miss Dare's vehicl e at one time

-.· _.,.._ 94

------,..--- .. ------· - - · · ·· ·· -·· · - -- -·--- I ------] - at tained the -dizzy speed of thirty miles an hour , but for . ·· . -·- - I . - I , I j I ! the most part proceeded at one ]third of that rate; it i :finally broke down and had to be towed to a livery stable, l but Miss Dare had had her ride and wrote her story. 1113

The story app eared in the World on May 3, 1896.

Meanwhile in California, Helen Dare outdid her

like-named rival by riding a lumb er :flume in the Sierras

tied to a log! Helen , born Elizabeth Brough , was a re-

1 porter on Hearst 's San Francisco Exa�iner at the time ; lI she willingly parti cipat ed in whatever stunts her editors I I could dream up and worked successively :for the San I Francisco Call , Examiner , and Chronicle. A rare handful o:f lady journalists managed to

mo ve :forward their careers whil� remaining aloo£ :from the

exploitive news stunt s. One o:f these worked with Helen

Dare on the San Francisco Chronicle, her name was Mab el - l - I i Craft . Miss Craft , a law graduate o:f the University o:f I I California, was made assistant Sunday editor in Novemb er

1899 ; she was a good reporter but her specialty was in

depth :feature material. Miss Craft a:1d Al ice Rix, also o£ the Chronicle, went to Hawaii in 1899 to cover its

annexat ion to the United States :for the Chronicle, the

Tr ib-; the New Sun , and the New York Oakl an d ..me , York 95

Tr ibune .

In Boston i better known as Mr s. A. L ncoln Bowles ,

Na11CV took up ·where W. Wa l left off at Hanks , Cornelia tee the Boston Transcript as reporter and literary editor,

while Lilian M1 iting labored quietly at the Boston Travel

er before earning a spot as .editor-in-chief o£ the Boston

Budget .

Another important by-line which emerged from this

era was Beatrice Fairfax . Thougb Beatrice never got

( around to passing judgment on the ex:urberant antics of her

fellow journalists, she was never reticent about cxpress· ing her views on the manners morals and of the :n)st o( L11c female population . Beatrice was a columnist, special izing

in letters from the lovelorn. She was the "Dear Abby" o£

many past generations , descended directly from "Ruth

Ashmore,,, she was popular from the moment she was born-

full grown--in the office o£ the New York Journal in

August 1898 .

Arthur Brisbane, managing editor of the J '  is credited with siring this phenomenal young lady . He

brought two letters--both seeking advice of a personal

nature--to the editor of his women 's page, Marie Manning,

and asked her if they might provide the basis for a

column o 1. 96

Miss Manning responck�d enthusiastically that they

would and prompt ly created pseudonym , "Beatrice" the (taken from Dc1.nte wh ich she happen ed to be reading), and

"Fairfax," (the name of the county in Virginia where Miss

Manning owned a home) .

Neither Miss Manning successor nor her Li li

was heap ed on their fictious mouthpiece. For decades

Beatrice Fairfax was the nation 's chief mo ther-confessor .

Wh ile Nellie Bly raced to circumnavigat e the

globe faster than Phileas Fogg , another girl reporter ,

Elizabeth Bisland, sped in the opposite direction com

peting with - Nellie herself . Miss Bisland, who started her

career with the New Orleans Times-Democrat , was repre

senting Co smopolitan as she headed west , hoping· to beat

her rival . She lost by four days (though she did manage

to better Fogg 's imaginary feat ) and soon thereafter qu it

her career to marry �harles Wetmore of Washington . w. Nevertheless her attemp t was not made in vain for her de parture from San Francisco provided Winifred Black with her first big assignment for the San Francisco Examiner .

Mrs . Black, also kno·.vn as Annie Laurie, might be

seen in this survey as a transitional figure, for her

career began in the sttin t age, bu t she gained the greatest ·.. .

'sob sisters .11 public attention 0 >ne of the origin. 9B

FOOTNOTES PO!( CI !i\PTE!\ IV

1 . K:tng, op . cit., p. 147 . 2 Ross, Ladies, p. 56. 3 Nenrvv Yorr''-,.. Wo·.rld, Aprl·l - ' ' 1888 p 2 ' 1 • • 1 • co 3 4 rshbel Ross, "Those Crazy Ladies," The Matrix , Winter 1938, p. 16.

5Ross, Ladies, p. 53 . 6 Ros s, �dies, pp . 177 -178 .

7 Ross, Ladies , p. 177 .

8Gene Fowl er, Tirnr)_r·r l in<· : A ',f·•ry ,.J"_ J:, .,, r; I�� F' '''' Tammen (New Yo rk : Co ,;ici--l•ri•·d· · l'•tl• l i·. J,., , ., , I'J 1 1)1 p. 101 . 9 Fowl er, £12..• cit., 10 p. 7 . 10rbid. , p. 155. 11 Fowler , £]2.• cit. , p •.15 7 .

12rbid. , p. 159.

13Frank Luther Mo tt , Ameri can Journalism: A History of Nev!_spapers in the United St_?-tes Through 260 Year s : 1690-1950 York: MacMillan Company, revised edition 1960) 599(New. ' p. ?

CHAPTER V

SOB SISTERS : 1900-1910

Winifred Black , who even tual ly married Charles A.

Bonfils younger brother of the Denver Post founder , en - joyed a newspaper car eer that might well arouse the envy of even the most experienced of today 's reporters . Wr iting for Hearst 's San Prancisco Examiner, she covered the biggest news stories of her day--from the Galveston flood to the San Francisco earthquake. Her very presence at so many maj or events might have made her a newsworthy figure but it was the character of her paper 's policy and her own social convictions which pushed her into the national limelight .

Mi ss Black 's career paralleled in many ways the professional life of Nellie Bly. Once she landed a job with the Examiner , Winifred copied Nellie 's example and promptly "fainted" in front of a receiving hospital , emerging four hours later with a full expose of the hospital 's personnel .

Annie Laurie, as she was known primarily in the

West , was amazingly resourceful and thorough in her

99 100

ariy event ; her style, like Nellie' s, mverage of wr iting

>Jas first-per son and she brough·t to life for the. reader

the maj or protagon ists in an y conf lict . often as no t, As she was one of the protagonists.

Red-haired and strikingl y attractive, Miss Black was a chorus girl with a to·:;.ring theater company when she first saw San Francisco . She had written a few letters wh ich were p l ished in the Chicago !r and on the ub ibun'El strength of thes e she went job hunting�

She app roached Sam Chamberlain , the Ex aminer 's

aanaging edi tor . The newspaperman was dub ious about her

�alificat ions but Winifred rarel y failed to bring a man

.round to her point of view. Chi3.mberlain was no ex - Mr.

.eption ; he even took time out to critique her fir st news

tory :

Th is is a bad story . Very indeed . We bad, do:tl 1 t want fine wr iting in a e a e . n wsp p r Remember that . There 's a 9:c ipman on the Powell s·treet line--he takes his car out at three o'clock in the mo rning, an d wh ile he's wai ting for the sig nals he opens the mo rning paper . It 's still wet from the press, and by the light of his grip he reads it . Think o£ him wh en you 're wr iting a story . Don 't wr ite a single word he can't under 1 stand and woul&11t read .

Winifred quickly acquired the necessary knack and

·en the Examiner 's famous owner , Wil l ia::n Randolph Hearst ,

ccumb ed to her charms . Th ey met , not in the news room, 101

but in a park wh ere he helped her to qu iet a barking do g.

Later he welcomed her into his inner councils--one o£ the few women to be so honored--and insisted that she alone write the obituary when his mother , Phoebe Hearst, passed away .

Though she is perhaps best remembered by Examiner

readers £or sentimental human interest stories such as the ·

"Little Jim ward" articles written to aid raising :funds in 2 £or a children 's hospital, was li erall Winifred 's beat t y the world. She cover ed natural catas- everythin g fcom trophes to first ladies, and from royalty to vi siting the It was most sensat ional criminal trials o£ her time . her coverage o:f the Thaw trial i 1907 that earned £or her the n dubious title o£ "sob sister ."

The Thaw trial was a sensational rape case--its central characters were Evelyn Thaw and Stanford \IJhite.

Evelyn was young and naive, "a pal e and trembling child,11 while \�ite was characterized as a villainous rich man-- the case had every ingredient required the sensational by press o£ the day and it was played for every bit of reader interest they could find. (

By this time the fine journalistic art o£ capturing each heartb eat and quick intake of breath had been perfected by the lea?:_ ng lad� writers o:f the e � ti_1ll ; __ .(g_ur _Q :( 102

them sat at a table in the center of the courtroom taking

notes. One of their colleagues, Irvin Cobb, ''looking a

little wearily at the four fine-looking girls who spread

their sympathy like jam, injected a scornful line into his

copy about the 'sob sisters. 1 113 The four thus branded

were Winifred Black, Nixola Greeley-Smith, Dorothy Dix and

Ada Patterson.

Nixola Greeley-Smith, the granddaughter of famous

editor Horace Greeley, was perhaps unfairly classified when she was lumped with the sentimental writers of her

day. Nixola joined the staff of the New York Evening

World in 1901 and wasted no time in proving her skill as

an interviewer; in fact, New York was so agog over

Nixola 1 s artful sketches of its leading citizens that one would think the interview a new art form~

Perhaps the reason for Nixola's success can best be gleaned from an excerpt of a speech which she gave at

the Waldorf-Astoria. Addressing the Entertainment Club,

she remarked:

I describe myself as a cream-colored journalist because I prefer the rich cream of fancy to the skimmed cream of the baldest fact. Some people I know don't like cream in their journalism any more than they do in their tea and I have no quarrel with them if they prefer lemon in both ••• A cream colored journalist is one who interviews a distinguished clergyman in the morning, stops by the Tombs to obtain the 1 02

of a condemned mu rderer , gets a pen vie�vs pic t;ure of' a big W2.1.ll Street man , and then goes out of town and gets the opin ion of a prima donna ab out some tal subj ect and tel eg:caphs it vi in _for the first edition the following morning

••• a man you are interviewing hasn 't a per I£ sonality, it is the correct thing to give him one, and if he hasn 't sense, or tact enough to express an opinion, you should branch out with a brill iant ep ig.ram or some other pearl of thought and wind up with the qu estion, 'Don't you think so?14

Whatever her technique--be it personal charm or outrageous impertinence--Nixola was renowned £or her ab ility to capture the substance of her subj ect . Thedora

Bean , reporter for the New York gave public light a �' to this skill wh en she quoted society matron Mary Heaton

Vorse:

I pity the unwary who are interviewed by Nixola Greeley-Smith. She has the smile of a happy child, the inscrutability of a sphinx ; she has wisdom and philosophy , yet behind the sweetest smile she hides a disdain and a bitter ness that in point and scope can surpass anything 5 I have ever known .

Evelyn Thaw's counsel , Delphin Delmas , was in- trigued by the ladiep 1 coverage o£ the trial :

What strikes me most forcibly in the ac counts of the Thaw trial is the power of analy sis and description displayed by the women

writers •••I would say that the writing o£ Miss Nixola Greel ey-Smith is a most remarkable illustration of feminine intuition brought to a logical conclusion. 6

In the pub lic mind Joroth:;<: Dix took up where

Beatrice Fairfax left off; both played adviser to the 10

hear·tsick, but Miss Dix:, who se real name is Elizabeth

Meriwether Gilmer , was a flesh-and-blood reporter long

before she became a lovelorn columnist.

j Startin g out on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, !I under the aegis of Pearl Ri vers, Miss Dix covered mo st of the "big news" stories o.f the day . In 1901 she left the -I Picayune to join Hearst 's New York Journal and from there

went to the Philadelphia before attaching herself Ledger I to the Vfueeler Syndicate as a column counselor . I Miss Dix was in her sixties wh en she covered the

1I Thaw trial ; scarcely five feet tall , with silver hair, she looked strangely out of place among her more robust con-

I temp oraries.

Ada Patterson, youngest of the four sob sisters, i I began her career on the Louis Repub lican where she was I s·t . I known as the "Nellie Bly of the West ." Though she per- l formed her share of stunts, Miss Patterson 's real forte

was crime news ; the New York American encouraged her in

this talent and soon her by-line was a sure clue to the

most important or sensational criminal trials of the day . I With grandmotherly concern, Dorothy Dix spent a portion o£ her Thaw trial sojourn instructing a .f ledgling

illustrator na.rned Nell Brinkley ln the intricacies of 105

. I Miss Brinkley , who sold her first sketch- trial coverage . es at age thirteen, was nervous but determined to make good on her first big assignment the YoJ::k Journal . for �

spent hours working on sketches o£ Thaw , She Evelyn the jury, judge and the defendant . Apparently she need not have worried quite so much £or it seems that her talent was obvious to everyone but Nel l herself . Several years later she was per suaded to create the Fluffy Ruggles girl and thereafter :

Her pictures spread romance and glamour over the country like spun sugar . Her lovely girls, her dimpled babies , her :fields of :flower s, her floating bubbles , her young Adonis , became familiar wherever the Hearst syndicat e feature appeared. She took the town by storm . The Nell Brinkley girl succeeded the Gibson girl. She started an era of curls, dimples and cuteness. There were Nell Brinkley hats , blouses and per:fumes. Mae Murray launched the Nell Brinkley girl in a

Follies scene, with the chorus in white satin , . I their costumes outlined in black. The same idea 7 was repea t e d ln. a arlsla. . n revue. p All this was pretty heady stuff for a girl who started out in Denver with only a vague idea of what newspapering was all about . Right out of high school

Nell timidly approached the reigning monarchs o£ Denver--

Messeurs Bon£ils and T��en--and asked if they might be able to use one or two of sketches . The Post 's her managing editor, Jos iah agreed with the owners that Ward, the paper could use some illustration offset the gaudy to _ red and black headlines and Nell was asked to submit some

sample sketches . Soon Mi ss Brinkley was illustrating

editorials as well as turning out quick likenesses of news

personalities .

Sam Chamberlain , who pro ved such a boon to ha.d Winifred Black 's car eer , noticed the Post sketches and

' mentioned them to Hearst . Nell was promptly in vi ted to

New York, working first for the Journal then devoting her

time exclusively to the Hearst syndi cates.

Though Denver 's Bonfils and Tammen were still a

bit female-shy after Polly Pry , the shooting spree wh:i. ch

climaxed her career with the Post did not sour them com-

pletely on lady news gatherers; ln fact , the Denver and

t') Kansas City Post 's probably e� p loyed more ladies of the

ress than any other publications of this era. One o£ the p most prominent of these was Frances "Pinky" Wayne.

The red-haired Mrs . Wayne started her newsp aper

, career as society editor for the Denver Post and soon ex-

panded her activities to include drama criticism (her frark

reviews alienating both theater owners and advertisers) .

When the stage and social whirl became too tame, Pinky

convinced the Post mvners that she had earned a nlace.< on --- the paper 's reportin g sta-f:t: . She covered strikes and

politics , interviewed Presidt�nts and murderers, then mo ved 107

to Bonfils ' and Tammen 's Kansas City Post and donned the cloak of a reformer .

Mrs. Wayne campaigned fo r i�1ro ved ps hiat i �c r c care and a l i tude of other mu t humanitarian cau�-;es wh ich earned her numerous commendations and awards. civic A number of Bon£ils ' and Tamme1! ' s best reporters divided their efforts between the Denver and Kansas City

Post 's. Elizabeth Kelly was one of these.

Elizabeth star-ted her career on the Denver Times , working out a probationary period as society reporter before she was allowed to assume a regular reporting role.

Her sp ecial "beat" became the cL'iminal courts and her

"sob -sister" style was app lied to most of the maj or trials in the Post circulat ion area .

Malvina Lindsay landed a job on the Kansas City

Post while she was still attending the University of

Missouri ' s School of Journal ism. She wo rked as a general reporter -photographer enjoying to the fullest the free range of assignments allowed by the Post . Her city editor, she remembers, would instruct her daily to 11Go out and get a feature story. 8 Each day she did just that , poking her nose into the comical and the criminal , wr iting human interest stories and "hard" news . In 1921 , when the 108

Kansas City Journal bough t out the Post, she moved east to become women 's page editor for the Washington Post .

In Boston , Per is Dw·ight �ah talked her way into a reporter 's job on Frank Mu nsey 's Boston Journal .

Starting out at nothing-a-week , she worked her way up to

$40 a month , writin g sob-type features and covering a variety of news beats. Later she wrote under the name

Phoebe Dwight for the Boston Traveller and finally found her niche as "Ruth Cameron" a syndicat ed columnist.

Nell Brinkley was not the only woman whose·artis- tic talents led her in·to newspaper work during ·this decade . Marguerite Martyn 's di stinctive sketches enabled her to hurdle the formidable obstacles put in her way by

Oliver Kirby Bovard, city editor of Pulit zer 's St . Louis

Post Dispatch. According to Bovard' s biogra:;::>her , James

Markham , the editor's aversion to women on his staff may be attributed to his basic chivalry toward the fair sex.

It was only fair to subject women reporters to the same rigors of the job as men , but he per sonally could not bring himself to do it . Two men were to be hanged for and £or some mu rder , un accountable reason, Bovar d decided that the story might be more interesting if written from a woman 's vie\Vl;>oint . He asked Marguerite Mar tyn to go , and she reluctantly agreed. the day of the hanging On she gathered up her copy paper, pencils , and hat , knowing the boss was watching her but paying no at tention. It was an assignment , and she had a wholesome respect for K. Bovard. few minutes o. A

�. - ..... 109

before she was to leave , Bovard cal led out , 'Miss Mar tyn, take your hat. o:ff . Hurd, g(�t over to the cou�ty jail and cover that hanging.

Carlos Hurd went and repor ted it the worst hanging 9 he had ever witnessed.

Bovard reluctantly employed at least two more _l ady wr iters; Rose Marion became a city-side reporter and

Mabel Gr een "pestered Bovard un til he gave her a difficult detective job promising her a news staff position if she succeeded. She did succeed--by finding the missing 10 defendant in an alienation of affec-tions suit o" A third girl, Lorene Sguire, also owed her career to OoK. ; Lorene was a photographer and her sp ecialty was wildlife subj ects.

During his reign the Post Dispat ch ran a number of rota- gravure displays of her photoes an d Bovar d "per suaded her to- make a photographic expedition to his own favorite 11 hunting grounds in Saskatchewan . "

Following in the footsteps of Nixo ia Greeley-

Smith , Mar gu erite Mo oers Marshall joined the Sunday World in May 1909 . Like Nixola, Miss Mar shall was an adept interviewer but unlike her predecessor, who died before her thirty-ninth birthday , she was not trapped personally or professionally in the sob-sister style of her early car eer . Like mo st good reporters Mi ss Mar shall simply

•.· -- •.· _ ... - •.· -- 11

adjusted her style to fit the mood of her readers and the

policy her paper--she started as a sob-sister but as of her audience and editors demanded greater sophisticat ion

she provided it. During her long career, Miss Mar shall

produced an impressive variety of fine writing including

editorials, straight beat coverage , original trials, in-

depth features and finally , in 1922, joined the sta££ o£

Hearst's Journal to write a column titled "Just Like A

Woman ."

Helen Dare, the derring-do-girl-reporter o£ log-

riding fame on the San Fr ancisco Examiner , showed a

similar adaptability. Her early days with Hear st were

devoted to stunts--the wilder the better--but her career

. reached a turning point in 1906 when she was first on

the scene with reports about the San Francisco earthquake :

•••sh e put across a neat piece o£ work on this occasion by sending through the first de tailed story o£ the disaster . She started out £or San Jose, looking :Eor a telegraph o.f£ice that was still intact. But the wires were down there, just as they were in San Francisco and Oakland. So she detoured through the San Joaquin Valley to Stockt on , knowing that she had the story o£ a century , desperat e to get it on the wire. At Stockton the tel egraph office was ab out to close. But she happen ed to �now the opera tor . She had once done him a service, so she dr agooned him into action� o.f£ice stayed The open . She managed to file 4, 000 words o£ graph ic copy before this wire petered out too . It was the first coherent eye-wi tness story of the ear thqu ake to reach the outside world.12 1

Therea-fter she d(�voted most of her energies to

covering social re:form movements and events .

Another Cali-fornia girl, Sophie Tr eadwell, upheld

the sob sister tradition by writing personalized serials .

Her best known appeared in the San Francisco Bu lletin ;

it was called "An Outcast at the Christian Door ." In

spir ed by her editor, Fremont Older , Sophie dressed as a

'"fallen woman" and went door to door to the city 1 s leadin g

Christian churches and institutions . "She was given a

meal , advice, prayer, condemning looks , requests to depart 13 --everything but a chance to make a living.11

In the Middle West Winona Wilcox Payne, daughter

of the Cleveland Press editorial wr iter John Wilcox , be

gan her newspaper car eer in 1905 when sob-sistering was

at its height . Yet , Winona's work on the Penny Press £rom

the very first was dazzingly interpretive and logical ; she

wrote out o.f' a deep understanding and sympathy with the

Prog1:-essive Mo vement which was then sweeping the country

and, as part of this, she heralded another movement- -as

yet unpopular --calling for woman suffrage . 1

/ ri FOOTNOTES !'OR CHi\PTER V I I'

2 Emery , 4l8 . �· £i!. , p.

3 Ross , Ladies , p. 65 . 4 Ro ss, Ladies , p. 87 . 5 New York S�, Ap ril 12 , 1903 , Sec. III, p. 3, col . 1. 6 Ross, Ladies , P• 90. 7 Ros s, Ladies , 416. P• 8 Ross, Ladies , p . 506 . 9 Jaqes W. Markham , Bovard of the Post Disp_c;.tch (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press , 1954) , 159 . p. 10 I b":u!. , pp • 159 -1 6 0 • 11 Ib" J.d. , p. 1 59 . 12 Ross, £E.• cit. , p. 577 . 13 Evelyn Wells , Fremo:1t Ol_der (New York : D. , App leton Century Co ., Inc., 1936), p. 47 .

,_. -- -.- _,.._ VI CHAFIEl{

1910-1920 SUFFfU \GETTES :

Fro� the beginning this survey in 1696 to o£

ab out 1 890, women 's role in newspapering--and in mo st

other lines of endeavo r save teachin g and nursing--remained fairly static . Women were a rarity in the news- roo.::n; those whose ener gy, ab ility, ambition and enthu siasm

earned them a place ip the foregoing sections of this

study were the exception rather than the rule in A..'llerican

life. However , in 1890 the situation was beginning to

change.

"The Era of Women has dawned, " proclaimed Arena magazine in 1891 , "bearing the unmistakable prophecy of a far higher civilization than humanity has ever known be- 1 fore.11

By 1910 "women ' s rights" had become, if not a popular cause, at least a frequent top ic of discus sion .

As pointed out previously, newswomen had long been in the vanguard of this movement , both as organ izers and sym- pathizers ; they formed clubs and fostered new publications , dealing with everything .from fashion to social reform ,

113 11

but all with one underlying theme--the oneness of woman

kind .

Some of the mo st outstanding of these early

feminists have already been dealt wi th in this survey :

Jane Gr ey Swisshelm carried the women 's banner into the

Cong.ressional Press Gallery , while Kat e Field, Jennie

June and Grace Gr eenwood strove to awaken their "sisters"

to the latent potential within their. own lives .

Mr s . Mab el Potter Dag<;�et t, who wo rked on the

Philadelphia North American and the New York World early in her career , was one of the first newswomen to adopt the label ''suffragist ." As associate editor first of

Hampton 1 s Maaa.zine, then the Delineator, Mr s. Daggett used these magazines as vehicles to present the suffrage platform wh enever the opportunity arose.

The sob sisters Winifred Black , Ada Patterson,

Dorothy Dix and Nixola Greeley -Smith , one and all , lent their talent and support to the cause of expanded op portunities for women . Nell Brinkley , the illustrator , and Marguerite Marsha ll did the same . Still, most of these ladies of the p ress, despite natural prejudice on a behalf of their own sex, maintained a reporter 's ob� jectivity wh en dealing with these subjects in print . Re sponding to Mr s. Oliver H. P. Belmont 's "no vo te, no 11

hu sband" campaign , Nixola Greeley-Smith wrote:

Possessing the established supremacy in the realm of emotion, why e�ler imen t with it at the

risk of failure-:' •••The slogan will win no vot es ,

and possibly lose a great many husbands •••a good thin g for suffragettes to have , since it uaran tees to them at least an au dience of one . �

El len Scripps in the Midwest sp ent lavishly of the

family money supporting woman suffrage, while Pinky Wayne

in California and Sophie Treadwell in California lent their

'names to the mo vement .

By 1910 it might be simpler to list those news-

women who did not involve themselves in suffrage than those

.who did. Between 1910 and 1920 the mo vement came of age--

:women were on the move seeking voting rights, better edu-

cation, equal pay and greater job opportunities . ;' i Somewh ere in the midst of the tumultuous transition ia young Pulitzer Prize winner was growing up . Edna Ferber , i who att ained the coveted award for her novel So Big in

!j ! J l 925 , began her career , quite by accident , on her home- town newspaper in Wisconsin . j When Edna was a high school senior she and her

£ather --as teenage girls and their father s are wont to do-- ; locked horns over the matter of an allowance. Both were

.strong-willed and their verbal battle reverberated ·through the neig:':lborhood, but , as might be exp ected, Edna lost . r ! In the heat o£ fury she stomp ed downtown and into the l office of the Appleton Crescent ; with embarrassment rapid- f ly draining the false courage of anger , she sta®n ered to ij l ' editor Sam Ryan that she was looking for a job. To her ! surprise, and her family's, Ryan had seen some of her work

in the high school p ap er and hired her on the spot . In

her autobiography , Miss Ferber recalls her Crescent days with obvious fondness:

There never had been a woman reporter in Appleton. The town , broadminded though it was , put me down as definitely cuckoo . No t crazy, but strange. Big-town newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Sentinel , employed women on their editorial and reportorial staffs, but usual ly these were what is known as special or feature writers ; or they conducted qu estion-and answer columns or woman 's pages . But at seventeen on the Appleton Crescent I found myself covering a regular news beat like any man reporter. I often was embarrassed, sometimes frightened, fre quently offended and offensive, but I enjoyed it , and knowing what I know today I wouldn't swap that year and a hal£ o£ smal l-town newsp aper reporting for any four years o£ college education . I'm a blank when it comes to Latin , I can't bound New York State, and count on my fingers , but in those I eighteen months I learned to read what lay behind the look that veiled people's £aces , I learned how to sketch in human beings with a few rapid words , I learned to see, to observe , to remember ; learned,

••. in short , the first rules o£ writing 3

Working at a "shaky pine table J.n the darkest, smallest , du stiest corner of that dark, small and du sty room wh ich constitut ed the Crescent editorial department ,"

Edna lea.rned the rules o£ reporting. 11We worked in a r--- ·- j clattering heap," she recalls, "Sam Ryan , editor and proprietor , kinged it at a roll-top which was marked off !I jfI rom the rest of the room by a chicken-wire fence, heaven i I !knows why , unless 1. t was to h1m from hurling paste preven t . I1 pots at us , or infuriated reporters from throwing scissors 4 laI t him . " l Lorena Hickok att ended Lawrence College in

Appleton , Wi scons'in just a- few years af ter Edna Ferb er

left to join the Mi lwaukee Journal ending her reign as the

:town 1 s one and only girl reporter . Di s couraged by the I i ! tact that her youth kept her from a teaching position she I ! wanted, Lorena abandoned college and, inspired by Mi ss Ii . ! Ferber 's first book Dawn O'H ara (the account of her own I l newspapering experiences ), landed a job on the Milwaukee l sentinel . Her flair for news writing was apparent from l! ! the very first • ! I Lorena did not espouse women 's equality, she !l Practic ed it . Fr equently she was the sole woman reporter ! covering such maj or events as presidential campaigns . In

!I she joined the and aft er a brief Ch icago Tribune 11l 917 \!fli ng at the �ew York papers, she returned t0 the i'

..,. t ,.;;,,;,,,}) - //if

After a term on the New York Mirror , Lorena became brief of Associ ated Press' brightest stars . one

Rh eta Dorr , who eventually gained world-fame as a

forei gn correspondent covering the Ru ssian Revolution was

nudged into newspaper work by her feillinist convictions .

As a college girl Rheta was most c6ncerned with

art and drama ; her life' s ambition was to play Nora in

Ib sen 1 s Doll House. However , in 1893 , she married John P.

Dorr , a man twenty years her senior, and settled down to

have a family. But , domesticity just did not appeal to

.her.

I She was filled with the consuming fires of discontent . She scrapped Jane Austin ; read the moderns . She argued endlessly with her husband for she believed that men and women should live

on absolutely equal terms ••.Her husband could not understand her stran ge nterests. He thought that women should not budge �from the nursery an d fireside . So she left him and returned to New York in 1898 with $500, a two -year-old child, a 5 marr1. age aa , r1"f t.

Writing first for the New York Sun , then for the

Ma il and the Herald Tribune, Miss Dorr cover ed every

assignment given her but frequently handed in unsolicited

stories as well ; invariably these extracurricular articles

dealt with "th C' mo v0mcnt ." Ear ly in her career , the

reading public associated �heta Dorr as much wi th the

suffrage mo vement as with her professional expertise------. /I 'I

and again her name was linked with the feminists, iaga in

� :includin g En gland 's Mrs. Ch ristabel Pankhurst and Alice i ; of America 's Women 's Party . It is said that Rheta 'Pau l l d to be led, scr eaming, from the do cks wh en immigrat ion ha i l ! officials declined to include her in the quarantine they

il 6 lhad prescrib ed for the newly-arrived Mr s. Pankhurst . l still, Mr�. Dorr was bewi ldered by the seemingly contra- � dictory sides o£ the English leader 's nature: She des-

: cribed her as a "Victorian lady who had a Po.:neranian to

I which she loved to talk baby-talk, and she ad,)red sitting Ii with her feet on a hassock sewing yards o£ lace on dainty ! . I 7 !muslin underwear ." Catherine Brodv carried her suffrage convictions

into �he newsroom; a member of several ' women 's press 1 ! associations she constantly labored for better pay and op . portunity £or her sister reporters and perpetually pestered j . I her city editor on the New York Wor ld to run additional ! -- I / stories about the movement . Perhaps the mo st successful ! j of her efforts was her own personalized serial , "What i . Happens When a Girl Goes Job Hunting." Miss Brody con- ! / ceived of this idea and, after finally wrangling her paper 's permission to carry it out , toured twenty cities--

:seeking work in each associated with the town's maj or

Detroit she worked for an au tomobile factory , ,industry . In 12(

in Ch icago she found emp loyment in a packing plant ; she

stayed one week in each city , turning out a 5,000 word

story on each which described job requ irements and oppor

tunities , pay level s, co-workers, wo rking an d living con

ditions.

Russian-born Sophie Irene Loeb was also a World

reporter with feminist convictions . However , her social

conscience involved her in much more besides; in 1910 Mi ss

Loeb launched he . own investigat ion of child welfar e in :? New York City. Personally touring the poorer sections of

the metropolis , intervi ewing fatherless families and o�ohanage di rectors , she wrote article after article, following up each with her own brand of lobbying.

Mi ss Loeb's reputat ion as a reformer has no equal in journal istic circl es . In di rect response to her activities the New York State Comnission for the Relief of

Widowed Mothers was set up in 1913 . Housing relief , penny lunches for public school children , sanitary and fireproof laws for all city buildings were stirred into being by her agitat ion . Mi ss Loeb served as president of the State

Board o£ Child Welfare and, because she was an authority on city traffic as well , she frequently acted as mediator in the city 's transportation di sputes . ·------· ------. '! Th ree llant girl rs Anne ga.. report0rs- -Ruth Bv e , I a photographer named Du�1lan, Geraldine Fitch--and young

n I Josephine Higgins , worked side by side with male contem-

poraries on the New they covered crime news ,: York 1\.mcri� ; celebrities , politics and features , earning respect wher -

ever they went .

Du ring this era M� Taft and Jane Grant accom-

plished the impossible, winning jobs on the New York Times

under the aegi s of edi tor Carr Van Anda . Mr . Van Anda's

disapproval of women reporters was legendary--yet these

two young women , both among the founder s of the Lu cy Stone

League, passed his careful scrutiny with flyin g colors.

Miss Taft 's and Miss Grant 's success as general

reporters for the Times paved the way for religious editor

Rachel McDowell and a girl who served for a short time as a reviewer for the Sunday edition , Ruth Hale.

Mi ss Hale, who se writing style was highly polished and intellectual , began her career as a reporter an d dr ama critic for the Philadelphia Ledger . She married columnist

Heywood Broun and with his support campaigned hard for women 's rights. Sh e became a news "item" when she put up a succes sful figl1.t on the passport issue and became the first s woman to go abroad her maiden name. under

------·-- -- - _____ j! ·.. .

-- --· - ---- ·------· ------1 Ruth and Heywood, an d Jane Grant and her spouse,

Harold Ross of the New were frequent social com- I Yo rker , \ I • I I panions . They also rep�esented a branch of the famed l ·: I I Round Table of New Xork' s Algonquin Hotel . Dorothy Parker i I l was the high priestess of this group ; her pithy epigrams I were enshrined for posterity in Franklin P. Adam's World j 9 ! column , called !!The Coming Tower .n Amo ng the witty remarks attributed to Dorothy by

!numerous news columnists were these: Up on l'earning that iI I Calvin Coolidge bad died, she asked , "How could they tell ?n !I Her review of a Katherine Hepburn play noted that the leading actress nran the whole gamut of emotions , from A I! . I to - And, Miss Parker 's most famous poem, unfortunately,. B.n I is still quoted today : nMen seldom make passes, at girls !l 10 I who wear glasses . n I -I It is generally acknowledged that a great many of

! the quips. attributed to Dorothy Parker did not originate Il !lw ith her , but the legend persists. She wrote novels , short

stories, poems and scr eenplays ; for a time she was a book reviewer and drama critic for the World, but she is still best known for her columns in Vanity Fair and the New

Yo.:::."ker .

Despite the inroads which Miss Taft and Miss Grant were makin g within the New York Times hierarchy of editors , 123

- - - - it was obvious , even to them , that the paper a t ne : �� ;�i

an intrinsic prejudice toward the fair sex. Fol lowing the I I practice of most major metropolitan papers, the Times

assigned "women 's" stories to their female writers until

they became front-page news at wh ich point a man was

called in . Miss Taft , who had covered the humdrum suffrag�

events for nearly a decade before they began to hit the front pages , was infuriated by the number of male col-

leagues who were suddenly assigned this beat . At her urging a number of women 's groups and suffrage leaders threatened to boycott the Times on the grounds of dis -

�rimination but nothing ever came of the effort.

The newswomen on the York Herald Tribune had New better success. Wn en Mr s. Elllil leline Pankhurst was detained on Ellis Island, interrupting her schedul ed suffrage meetings , a man was assigned to cover the story . El eanor B.

Simmons , Emma Bugbee, Evangeline Cole , Ethel Peyser and

Christine Vall eau complained to publisher o·gden Reid and editor Mil ton Snyder that the,assignment was unfair ; they pointed out that they had cris scrossed the city, the state and the nation at times following people like Dr . Shaw , ' Mr s. Carrie Chapman Catt and Mrs. Belmont an d were better equipped than any man to handle su.ffrage stories in their own front yard . On the eve of a major 1912 suffrage parade 1n New York, t'he Tr ibune 's editor and publisher succumbed

to this persuasion, giv!ng the girls total freedom to cover

the story wi thout mal e interference. In the next edition ,

the paper triumphantly carried nine columns chronicling

the occasion--two of them on the front page. 11

Earlier in her career, wh;ile a reporter on the

Sun , Miss Simmons had ga.ined overnight notoriety when she

interviewed authoress Rebecca West in a New York hotel room. The British novelist, apparently, was in no mood to be qu estioned, but she did condescend to preach to the

girl reporter in a bored, impatient manner as she dressed and bathed.

Miss Si��ons wrote a devastingly satirical report of the interview which pro:np ted Trib� columrlist Heywood . Broun to award her his mythical annual " $1,000 , 000 prize \ for the best story of the year ," while Alexander Woollcott called her work "artful , convincing and delicately mur- derous ." Ham er 's Magazine, which ran a g�ceat deal of

Miss West 's work, was shocked into qu estioning the young 12 woman 's motives .

During this decade the United States was slowly surfacing from its own _ internal social upheaval . Domes- tically the nat ion was concentrat ing its energies and enthusiasm on reform; unscrupulous bankers and businessmen -- - - were blamed for the country 's il ls and those wi�h � �o:�al conscience--@�st flying the banner of Progressivism--were � . . going to set right . it Ida Tarbell became a leading 11muckraker" of the

day . Braving the wrath of big business and cal ling into

question America's sovereign money -making ethic, Ida wrote

a mu ltisectioned expose in 1904 for McClure's magazine

titled : "History of the Standard Oil Company ." She gave

public light to the power and abuses o:f large , monopo-

listie corporations and aroused an audience which would

subsequently savour the works of her contemporaries :

Lincoln Steffens ' "Shame of the Cities ," Upton Sinclair 's

"The Jungle," and Frank Norris ' "The Octopus , "-) -b-:)oks which

revealed corruption in urban government , the meatpacking

industry and in the railroads .

Meanwhile, another lady publisher , Mary Baker

Eddy , was co,:ning under attack. Thou gh Mrs . Eddy 's writing

output probably rivaled that of a::1y contemporary reporter ,

her notoriety had little to do with her journalistic e£ -

. forts; as a religious leader:--founder of Chr istian Science

and the Christian Science M�mi tor--Mrs. Eddy became a

highly controversial fi��re. In the summer o£ 1906 Willa

'Cather turned out an unsigned four teen-installment .

,, -- 1

··--- ... ----- .. . ..1 I It was a study of Mary A. Morse I3aker. Patterson I Glover Eddy--her an·tecedents , chi ldhood and her schooling, her striking eccentxicities, her various her fitful rel ationships with her marriages , natural son and adopted son , her career as her poetess and invalid, her ultimate emergence as full-blown theologist and architect of a new

rei igion •. .13

Applying such self-righteous fervor to c leaning up

their own ills , Ame icans also tended to view the world's r problems in a h g ly mo ral light . Th e United States i h practiced political isolat ionism bu t at the same time

maintained a detached in terest in the muddle that others

were making o� the international scene . During this periodil I l more newspapers had £oreig� correspondents abroad than at li \ any other time in the country's history ; some of these

long-distance reporters were women .

Having proved their capabilities on the domestic

front , mo re and more women were given an opportunity to

show what they could do abroad. Following in the fearless

footsteps o£ Anna Benjamin, a group of girl reporters

followed Mexican bandit chieftain Francisco "Pancho" Villa

to his hide-out in northern Mexico .

"Pinky" Wayne, of the Ka;-1sas City Post , Sophie

: Treadwell, from California's Call-Bulletin , Jane Dixon , of

Telegram and a young photojournalist named the � � working for Leslie's W2ek , quizzed the Sa�1.i� Miller , 1L ------. ba.ndi t leader on his abortive attempts to g o 1 ·• �� --l : of his count-ry.

Sadie 1\'filler, who writin,'.d ri\tt' ly S.K.M. , mLsscd an oppt)r. tun - Ii ity to photograph the wo rld's hot spots . As the United l states entry into World War I became more and more )! :ii mminent , Sadie headed the war zone . She took pic- for i tures German war machines and fortificat ions and was of arrested as an English spy ; fortunately the Germans were

'forced to release her before the United States had become

a formal combatant and Sadie promptly turned the photos lwhich she had secreted away over to the British govern-

'ment .

Another enterprising newswo�an who spent some

:time in jail as a spy was Marguerite Harrison , of the

.Baltimore Sun . Marguerite traveled to France as a war

correspondent in 1916 and soon after began leading the

double-life of reporter and government agent . Ironically ,

Miss Harrison throughout her war years was never 'suspected

of anything gr-eater than press prejudice by the French and

Germans, yet when she traveled to the Soviet Union eight

i months after the armistice she was promptly thrown into i

jail as a spy and was har�Jresseq to explain that she was

merely looking for local color . JI ·. I

pl)ndence field we re Peggy !lull, Sigrid Schu Lt2, Wlct;\ Do rr and Bessie Beatty.

Peggy Hull was 11the only woman to 'get an accredited 14 11 pass from the War Department . Working for a syndicate , I

called the Newspaper Enterprise As sociation , Peggy covered

the American Expedit ion to Siberia. Peggy found it high-

ly amusing that she should be the first woman to gain the

government 's sanction as a war correspondent in light of

the fact that it took her months to line up an editor who

was willing to send her .

Peggy began her career on the Cleveland Plain

Dealer and, until 1916, she was a devotee of the Nellie

Bly school of journalism . Her last manufac-tured news item before the war was purely and simply an advertising stunt-- she had herself '"held up" by a masked bandit to publicize a particular bank.

This kind of ingenuity is not generally considered

the stuff of which war correspondents are made, but Peggy was determined to see the war from the front lines . She toured the country in search of a newspap er which would back her , and failing to find a sponsor , boarded a ship . I bound for France to become a foreign freelancer . Peggy arrived with the first Amer ican troops in Paris and flooded 129

wire service offices copy. ran with her Wh en h(�r money

Siberia.

Other women who covered Russia during the war years: I inc luded Anna Louise Strong, Rayne:, Clare Sheridan , ; EE:£�, Milly Bennett itc el and Louise ryant . Bessie Beatty, ofI � � � ) the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, an d Rh eta Dorr , representing the Yo rk Mail, covered the Russian Revolution New in 191 7 .

Together they visited the Battalion of Death ; for nine days they slept on the rough wood planking, ate the same weak soup , and viewed the terrors of front-line warfare with these women who were commanded by a big peasant woman named Botd1kereva .

Later Miss Dorr traveled to Mos cow interviewing

Gr an d Duchess Serge, sister of the Czarina, and Anna

A..lexandrovna Virubova , an intimate of the famed Rasputin.

Nhen she returned home, Rheta wrote a .f ive-week series for the Mail on her experiences and later expa!1ded upon these

�rticles to create a book entitled Inside the Russian

�evolution .

Bessie Beatt>!_ also wrote a book chronicling this 1

"" - period, called The Red of e she an M s Hear t Rus sia. :;, � � :: ] sp lit after their brief stay wi th the Battalion o£ Dor� up

Death, she crisscrossed the countryside talking to .i Ru ssian \I l the ''lit� tle people" and soak:ing up the atmosphere of the ; country. She was one of the few report ers permitted to interview Catherine Breshkovsk:aya, a memb er of the royal family known as the 11Li ttle Grand1nother of Russia, 11 and she returned to Russia in 1921 to intervi ew Lenin and

Trotzky .

Sigr id Schultz reported o:n the war for the Ch icago

Tribune . Wh en the armistice was si g1ed she was rewarded with a promotion, becoming the head of that paper 's Berlin bureau .

Before the war Rohe , sister -in-law of Roy  Howard, served as bureau manager for United Pr ess . She became an exp er t Italy-watcher , scooping even the native press in events of major importance . She int erviewed most of the country's important personages--talking several times with Mu ssolini himself.

On the home front , Cor� gby became the fir st .8i:_ woman to head a Washington bureau . Miss Rigby worked first for the � York Mail , then for the Herald, before moving to the Ch:rist an cience Monitor during the war years . =!;_ §._ 131

Her work as the Monitor's Washing·ton bureau chie:f gained

her wide political and professional recognition.

~ Beckley traveled to Europe three times on the

money she earned as a typist long be:fore she even thought

o:f taking up a career which could make such pleasure a

legitimate business expense.

Zoe learned to use the new :fangled typing machine

at age :four and her nimble :fingers earned her living :from

the time she was sixteen years old. She typed everything

:from real estate contracts and detective's reports to

manuscripts; she was typing articles part-time :for the

New York Press when women's page columnist Helen Rowland

suggested she try writing.

At :first Zoe was incredulous at the idea, then she

began to examine closely the material which was :flying out

o:f her machine and decided that she could write at least

as well as her various employers. The Press' Sunday

editor, Richard J. Spillane, bought a :few o:f her short pieces as :fillers and :from then on there was no stopping

Miss Beckley. In 1919 she joined the sta.f:f o:f the Evening

World--her assignment, Europe!

Traveling through Central Europe :for ten months,

Zoe covered every VIP, news event and feature that cropped up in her path. With a natience born o:f delight with her l

- - - -· -- surroundings , Zoe managed to ca;tu�� on £il�-and --j_�prin -; personalities that her competitors had given up on . It l 1 wa.s Zoe who supplied the Uni ted States with its first J glimpse of Kaiser Wilhelm since the end o£ the wa.r ; she

studied the routine of his household, ferreted out the

,routes he was most likely to take and, with the help o£ a

!I neighboring family was standing within three feet of his

carriag�� wh en he passed by. Not content with one look,

; she returned twice more--getting good photos o£ him and a

story- -and, incidentally, a courtly bow from the All�

,Highest .

Next Zoe astonished the folks back home by striking

up a friendship with Rumania' s Queen Marie. It was Zoe

who persuaded the Queen to write a series o£ articles £or

the Famous Features Syndicate in 1920.

Miriam Teichner , who played a big part in the New i York State Woman Is Suf£rag·� Party' went to Eu rope first on ! the Ford Peace Ship . She considered this experience a

disaster and in the intervening years did straight news

reporting :for the New York before returning to the . Glob e Continent in 1919 to write human interest features about

the people who inhabited the ruins of post-war Europe.

Back home , newspape·cwomen were just getting used

to the personalized styl e of "sob n and 11suf£rage11 writing 13

/1 which had represent ed a gent le swing from the ex- away ploitation of an earlier ep och, the pendulum careened when back: to plunge the newspaper sorority once aga.. in into the

diz zying depths o£ sensationalism. 1 In the summer o£ 1919 the Daily News was born in York ushering in an epi- ! New demic of "tabloids" which clamored wi th 11incessant noxious

. appeal to whatever is base evil in human nature11 15 and ' for mass readership .

' .. FOOTNOTES l'OR CI I/\PTEl� VJ

1 "The Era of Women " 1\:cena , Vol . 4 , 1\.ugust lB'Jl , 382 . p. 2 Ross, Ladies, 92 . p. 3 Edna Ferber , A Peculiar Treasure (New York : The iLi terary Gu ild of America, Inc., 1939), 103. p. 4 I bJ.d.' , 105. p . 5 Ross , Ladies, 112. p. 6 David Mitchell , Figb.ting Pankhursts : A Study in 'Tenacity (New York : ThThe1"? Macmi llan Co ., 1967), 32 . p. 4 7 Rheta Childe Dorr , Susan B. Anthony : The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co ., 1928), 117 . p. 8 Dale Kramer , Ross ._and the New Yorker (New York : Doub leday and Co ., Inc., 19::>1 ), 38. p. 9 rbid. , pp . 40-43 .

1 0John Keats, You Mig::1t As Well Live : The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon and Shuster , 1970) 10. p. 11catt �· 538 . ' si!_. , p . 12Ross, Ladies , ---. P • 121 . 13Lyon, · cit., 299 . � p. 14Mott , American Journal ism, 622 . p. 15 Kelly, 2£• 4 58 . �. , p . .I

. I Cl iJ\P nm VI r

TA BLOID HEROINES : 1920-1930 . I

Flooding New York City newsstands wi th monstrosi-

ties of page make -up , composite pictures and sensational -

ism, heal th cu ltist Bernar c Macfadeen 's Even ing Gr aphic was easily the "zani est" tabloid of them all .

Female reporters for the Gr aphic were used frankly for their sex appeal --their writing ab ility , or lack thereof , was incons equential .

male colleague recalls Grace Perkins , one o£ the A. first and best-known of the Gr aphic 's feminine press corps , . I

as "rather tall , pleasant , well-mannered, with big, 1 luminous grey eyes •••"

This same colleague, Lester Coh en , described

Grace 's activities on September 15, 1924:

On this the G�anhic 's first day , she was on her way cheerily--or at least so it seemed--to the subways , wh ere she would be 1Miss Courtesy , 1 ano ther of our promotions . you gave her your If seat in the subway , she would give you something redeemable for one dol lar--that is , if you got to 1I see the Contest Editor of the Gr a? h ic •••

To help you identify Mi ss Perkins --oops , Miss Cour tesy·--there was a two-column picture of her in a bathing suit all do'Nn the front page . ( Mr .

135 1 3.

l\1a.c.fa.dden believed in trw Body Be. ys she wuu take .

The lh'' ' J dtrJ !.o .\ llli• J:-d. lu<; L LIH� ---·<;r;,--.J, il,---- l<---·

po·.t.� l iJJ· · I�<·<:I.fJ r·.--.;1 ·� Ll.l f' l.v its m;\ i.lin

Another Grauhic girl reporter , Alma Sioux

Scarberry also listed in some accounts as Alma Semberry , ( ) "a tall girl , part Indian , good looking , with black hair 3 and big eyes , skinny but cu rvaceous ," gained celebrity

status as an actress, app earing in the Music Box Revue .

Nevertheless, she attributed her start in the theater to

the fact that her picture was so often incorporated into

the phony composite pix created by the Granhic- -one of

these shows Alma and Grace Perkins as the nurses in

attendance, while the paper 's editor an d another reporter

play "surg(�on" and "unidentified doctor" to Rudolph

Valentino .

Alma was actually listed as the Grauhic's society

editor "who sits in the seat o£ the high and mighty ,

wields the scepter of decision over society and decides

, who se name shal l cross the thresho ld of that maker and 4 ·breaker of foll:cs socially--namely, 'The Blue Book. ' 11

--· _ ...... 13•

Returning victorious from the war "over there, "

Americans took their old lives with a new confidence in up the character their count ry. With the rest of the of world torn by war and senseless bickering, it had taken

.the United States "to make the world safe for democracy ;"

a buoyant optimism born of new prosp erity pervaded the

·nation and the tabloid "learned to time its beat with the 5 .pulse of the common peop le."

Tabloid historian Simon Bessie describes these

rowdy news sheets as "a journalistic mirror of the era,"

·reflecting 11a pattern which included speakeasies, jazz,

coll egiate whoopee, bathing· beauting, movie-star worship ,

big-time sports and many other gigantic exaggerations ."6

By 1920 newswomen were no longer rare; they num- 7 bered 5,730 or 16 .7 per cent of reporters and editors .

News writing had become a fairly respectable profession

when suddenly the tabloids plunged them once again into

the sham and personal exploitation that had characterized

the stunt It is interesting to note that many of age . them resurrected the practice of writing under a pseud-

onym as they mastered the tabloid vernacular : new The succin ct terminology of the tabs began to gain ground and get into general currency- lovenests, gin mills, torch murders, cry-baby I bandits, bobbed-hair bandits, sugar daddies , on the spa , trigger crooners , gang slayings, ; men , mu sclino in , death pac-ts, heart balm, wonder girl , dream babies , and torso mur tiger woman , ders. The blondes were alway3 svelte; the vivacious. Each new crime brunettes were launched its own phrase.8

Murders , suicides and sex blanketed the front

1pages--only a Lindbergh flight or kidnapping, an English

; channel swim, or Valentino 's death could pry these staples ' :loose.

The Hall-Mills mu rder trial in 1926 is an excel-

lent example; the trial had every ingredient required by

the sensational press of the day and it was played for

every sp eck of reader interest . survey conducted of the A space given this one event revealed that the New � Times milked 528 ,300 words £rom the story while the

funerican gave it 347 ,700 and the Daily News wrapped it up 9 in a mere 223 ,400.

The major components of the crime could be des-

cribed brief ly enough: Reverend Harold Hall and a �ember

of his congregation and choir , M:cs. Eleanor Mil ls, were

found murdered, together , beneath a tree in the rector 's

1 orchard. The minister 's wife, Mrs . Fr ances Noel Hall,

was tried for their mu rders in 1926. Mr s. Hall was ( Il!i finally acquitted for lack of evidence and many years later ! j I it was determined that the deaths resulted from a suicide JI

�.. - ..... 139

pact . ) Piling hundreds of column inches on this event U? their respective pipers were: Mazie Clemens , Jane for 'Dixon , Ju lia Harpman , Julia McCar thy and Bernadine Szold.

Mazie Clemens , a devil-may-care reporter for the

Wor ld, figured mo st prominently in the trial because she

sat briefly as a witness--she had been walking her dog

Freckles near the Hall home on the morning the bodies were

discovered .

Jane Dixon , a United Press corr espondent , capably

covered a variety of assignments . Besides the Hall -Mills

trial , she also chronicled the Lindbergh flight , the

Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hauptmann trial for her news

service. Jane even gained some notoriety outside her own

profession with her exclusive interviews of Pancho Villa

in northern Mexico and her singular status as the first

:woman to report on a prize fight ••.she also made the ( t social colu,nns wh en she dated Jack Dempsey for a brief

time . Additio::J.ally, Jane was often quoted as a ''source ) close to" Mrs . Warren Harding. Miss Dixon had worked for

the Hardings in Ohio , long before they reached ·the White

House; when the First Lady was reluctant to speak to the press en masse, she often sough t out her young �f riend to

e�press her views . 140

scooped the police by tncss in the LindilHJ the sole wi case--Mrs . Jane Gibson, the cu "pig woman" who ac s ed Mr s. Hall of the murd·2rs. Julia Szold, also of j and i3 ernadine the Daily News , covered this trial together as they did I c i ; 0 h e 0 r a I ::::e:: :n:: ::n::::::: a :::m: ::e: :::: ::r: h: ::d com- mitted. Knowing his interest in spiritualism, they I created an elaborate setting Mi ss Szold's apartment-- :in I including a throne and crystal ball--hoping he would con- I

fide in "Madame Astra." Julia, who had befriended the l man , brou gh- t him to the apartment and waited behind a

black curtain with Daily News editor Phil Payne while

1 Bernadine, playing the titl e role, conjured up the spirit l world for the crafty suspect . It made an interesting

evening but the man kept his sins to himself and there-

after the two reporters left confession-getting to the

police.

Julia, who started her career on the M13mohis

Commercial App eal , covered everything from Klu Klux Klan

activities to prize :fights an d the World Series . She made

headlines herself in 1920: While flying to Atlantic City 1

to write a feature on Luis Firpo , in training for hi s titlej! ------· ------·----· . ______j 142

1 .--1 ! M bout with Jack Dempsey, she an d a friend, urrow Krum,

plunged a thousand feet into the ocean . Miraculously I! ! !I neither was hurt and a boat picked them up before Julia l i l even . got wet . I ! the women included Of in this survey almost II eighty per cent eith er came from newspaper families or marr1ed newspapermen . One of the most interesting of lI . ji these couples was Julia Harpman and Westbrook Pegler . ·I i The famous columnist and sports wr iter was working

£or United Press wh en he met Julia in 1920. Pegler ! I I j arrived tardily at the scene of a �urder in West Seven - I! 1 tieth Street--the police and coroner had left , so had his 1l competitors , but a young reporte:r from the Daily News was still snooping the premises looking £or more detail .

! Pegler explained his predicament and the girl, fresh from I! I I Ten. nessee, supplied him with his story. Julia soon j! ! learned the consequences of aiding the competition , but she Ijw as never sorry �out this par ticular instance. Soon I I afterward; Miss Harpman suffered seve�ce injuries 1n a taxi crack-up and during a long stay in the hospital she and 1I I westbrook, a frequent visitor there, became good friends . I! i Pegler 1 s iographer , Pilat , recalls the j Oliver l b . : drama which surrounded a climatic moment in their rela- ! l tionshil.o : !_ 143

Making up his mind dur ing the World se-ries, Westbrook sent a letter to Julie, still in the hospital with a fractured spine , preparin9 her in arch terms for a treasure would fore wh ich s h do closer rel ationship . Eventually his a w a / present reached the hospital , gift -wra;>ped in a square box larger than would ave been required h t i k wh.ich Her for the r n et Julie had in mind. fingers trembled so out of wea'-<.ness and nervous ness that she asked a nurse to open the p a kage c . Th ere it wa s : a pledge of indescribable and eternal love from a sportswriter--a genuine , au tographed 3abe Ruth baseball . 10

Julia and Westbrook were married on August 29 , ·:! I' 1922 and each maintained an a u ed attitude toward the I m s I other 's work. Julie laughed at the awe with which Pegl er ! j I a proached certain sports figur es and he scoffed at her I! p 1 newest assignment, "The Inside Dope or1 Movie Stars," a i I ! column on Hollywood 's naughty luminar ies wh ich ran in the lI Sunday News :

'I Her pieces described how Wi lliam S. Hart , the 'ti�1t-lipped, thin-hipped1 stalwar t of the Westerns , had been a lled cream puff by c a Winifred Westover during their ho:1eymoon ; how a friend of Rudolph Val en tino and Charlie Ch aplin , the Latin and Limehouse lovers, concealed a :family skeleton in her closet ; an d how Lew Cody , the he-vamp , was really a butterfly man . This kind of tabloid pa;::> was probably no more vulgar and c a l than the t r ip produc ed by many sports yn ic e writers . At least Julie di d it well ; she was soon ll offered the job on a permanent basis .

Julie refus ed the job e t back to straight and w n

orti g and ''Peg" covered another big even t of :: ep n . She

:he 20 's together- -Trudy Ed•?r le' s record breaking 14-hours

� - 1

and 31-minute swim of the English Channel . Later Julie

gave up her own career, traveling with her husband around

the world. Frequently, when Peg was sick, Julie would

i write his column for him--as she di d when they covered the

! Geneva summit conference in 1952 .

Julia McCarthy, who worked first £or the New York

,Journal under the name Margery Re�, joined the York � Mirror in 1928. A list of her stories might well con-

stitute a catalogue of tabloid topics £or she covered

crime, cults and celebrities throughout the gaudy era of

jazz journalism .

Th e tabloids flourished in New York, providing ·

more work £or women writers than ever before. The Mirror

boasted Lady Terringt on , Ruth Phillips and Helen Hadakin

and a spatter o£ face-less by-lines including--Fay King,

Gladys Glad, Sally Martin , Elizabeth Leonard and Beatrice

Fairfax . The Daily News , besides Julie Harpman and

Bernadine Szold, had on its staff some o£ the finest re-

porters in the city; among these were Imogene Stanley ,

Irene Kuhn , Irene Th irer and Grace Robinson . Bu t the

-News too had its share of anonymous signatures including

Marion Stewart, Nancy Randolph , Doris Blake, Elinor Ames , . I

Antoinette Donnelly and Gladys Bevans . Edna Huntington ' 145 Ill ,li 1:,

Ferguson and Norma Abrams both wrote features for the

Sunday News.

Dorothy Dayton is one of the few tabloid report-

ers--as astonishing as it may seem--whose dauntless deter-

mination to "get the story at all costs," cos·t her more

dearly than she had expected. On March 13, 1926, the New

~World ran this headline on page one: "Dorothy Dayton

Clubbed by Police. 11

Dorothy, who was a New York Sun reporter, and

c. Bo Allen, of the World, were covering a strike in

Passaic, New York. They taxied into a harried swarm of

police, who had just dispersed a mob of 3,000 with fire

hoses. The two reporters were requested, ungently, to

leave the scene. Dorothy was hit on the arm, but not

really hurt, and Allen had his camera smashed.

Still, it was not the first time that Dorothy's

efforts on behalf of her profession had evoked public

concern. She began her career on the Daily Oklahoman.

Following carefully in the footsteps of Nellie Bly and

Winifred Black, she spent two weeks in the State peniten-

tiary at McAlester, Oklahoma. When she got out she wrote

a series of fourteen articles describing in detail the

inhumanity of that institution. Unexpectedly, she aroused more sympathy for herself than indignation over the prison .

Miss Dayton became famou s in the district . She was invited to speak at an Evangelical meet ing� A minister turned to her as a martyr and said, 'This poor little girl . Her soul is seared through by the terrible experiences she has gone through. ' She did not feel that her sould had been seared in the least . She had merely done a good job of reporting. But she could not qu ell the solicitude of the re£ormers. They named the 12 Dorothy Dayton chapel £or her •••

The girls who "reported" £or the tabloids were, for the mo st part, as familiar to their readers as the charact ers in some of today ' s long·-running television series . Like the soap opera stars, their names and acco;:nplishments provided much o£ the meat for topical dis - cussions and humor. Yet, one of these succeeded in capturing the fancy o£ that sentimental -and sensat ion- hungry audience as no one else had done before or after .

Her name was Imogene Stanley , but to many , she was simp ly

"the beautiful girl in green who danced with the Prince of 13 Wales ."

John Chapman desc-ribes the incident from memory :

Any reporter who remembers Miss Stanley then sighs over her now, recalling her as the mo st beautiful female who ever carried a police card. She was the perfect flapper in a Tlapper age , slim of figure, possessed an exquisitely chiseled of face and big, deceptively mourn£u l eyes . The most beautiful male in the world, the Prince 6f

'·· -- 147

Wales--now the Duke of Windsor --was making his first visit to this continent . He was not to come to the United States, which he later made his playground, but he was du e for a sojourn in Montreal . This stopover included ball, and . . a every Montreal mo ther , as she dressed her daughter for the party, hoped that the royal visitor would be smitten by the daughter and carry her off to his castle like the prince in a fairy tale. News paper people from the United States were admitted by sufferance to this gJ=eatest event in Canadian social history.

The News assigned Imogene Stanley to do the . 14-- JOb • ••

Nevertheless , from this point on the story becomes a bit clouded. There is no doubt that the young prince was captivated by the beautiful girl wearing a brilliant green evening gown , or that he sent an equerry to ask her to dance, or that �e monopolized her dances for the rest of the evening and talked with her in complete candor of his life as heir to the British throne; the confusion comes over whether Miss Stanley did or did not write the subsequ ent story--"How I Danced with the Prince of Wales ."

As John Chapman recalls the story, Miss Stanley sent a telegram to her editor as deadl ine approached which I said simply: "Sorry I haven 't been ab le to file. Have been dancing with the Prince of Wales. 11 15 This much can be confirmed . However , according to Chapman , another reporter the News office was then impressed to write in J

the stilted, almost impersonal story , which app eared under

. Imogene's by-line the next day . "Upon returning from her ) assignment ," says Chapman , "Miss Stanley seemed gravely hurt . Her dance wi th the prince was a per sonal and won -

· de·r£ul affair , and she £el t that the fake story about it . . ·was an 1nvas1on o £ pr1v. acy . ,,16

That the entire af fair was an emotional experience for Miss Stanley is certain . However , Ishbel Ross , who

·interviewed the News reporter years later , claims that

Imogene herself wrote the strangely impersonal account for her own paper , while every other publication in New York and Canada chatted dreamily of " �he beautiful girl in green who danced with the Prince of Wales ."

According to Mi ss Ross, Imogene was so over come with guilt over tr::i.cking the charming prince into talking to - her (he did not know until the next morning, when she confessed to him, that she was a reporter )_, that she could not bring herself to ex-pose his confidences : _

She filed a story describing the evening in a detached way , not using the personal pronoun . Only the initiated newspaper read"�r would gather £rom it that Imogene herself had danced with the Pr ince o£ Wal es . A picture ran beside it iden tifying her as the mystery woman in green . l7

Another Prince-of-Wales-watcher was Alva Taylor, of the Daily News . Alva's beat was men's fashions and,

'• _,... 149

·since the Pr ince spent most of his time introducin g new clothes and new dance steps, she kept New Yorker 's con-

stantly informed of the royal heir 's shirts, ties , shoes ,

suits and hats.

Nellie Bly made her last sensat ional sp lash in

New York, after a ten-year ab sence, by becoming the first woman to witness an execution at Sing Sing on January 30,

1920. Nellie wrote the story of Gordon Hamby's last moments for the New York Journal thus aiding in the birth of a new jou\L'nalistic era--one which paralleled very

closely her own . Though Nellie did not live to see it

,through to its conclusion (she died on January 28, 1922),

virtually no metropolitan newspaper escaped the influence of the tabloid epoch. "Even the eminently respectable

New York Times reflected it ••.Fo r the first Tunney-Dempsey prize-fight in 1926, the Times used the same size front-

. . 18· page headline with which J.. t had announced the ArmJ..stice."

In Los Angeles , Agne� Underwood, working first with Gertrude Price at the Record and later as city L.A. editor of the Herald-Express pioneered West Coast sensationalism along with the flamboyant A<;lela Rogers St . Johns .

Driscoll joined the Francisco Chronicle in Marjorie San 1919, after a six-year stint as city edi tor on the

Pasadena Miss Dr iscoll's excellent coverage of Star .

'•' _.,._ J

Pres ident Harding's death in California brought her and

her staff numerous newspaper awards ; one of the girls who

worked for her on this story was Geraldine Sartain . Miss

Sartain spread the tabloid fever to Hawaii wh en she joined

the staff of the Star -Bulletin in Hono lulu in 1924,

specializing in exposes of the islands ' crime syndicates .

Mary Mahoney also specialized in gangland crime ;

her beat was Boston an d her paper, the Globe, frequently

found its star reporter in court testifying on behalf of,

or against, the criminals she had coaxed out of hiding for

· the police. Ruth Mu gglebee was performing the same sort

of service for the Boston American while Mary Elizabeth

Prim belied her name with hard-hitting features for the

Transcript.

In Chicago , a city renowned for it s criminal ele-

ment, Peggy Doyle turned out gangster and gore stories for

the Herald-Examiner ' while Evelyn Shuler made press history · ' in Philadelphia, going to jail briefly for posing as a

1 lawyer . Mi ss Shuler 's favorite feature material came from

:the city 's racket eers; she joined the Philadelphia Ledger

in 1918 and for the next ten years donned disguises and

climbed fire escapes , willingly jeopardizing her own safety

time and again in order "to get the goods on the hoods ." 151

-· -··-·· -- - -· ------· --- -1 Agnes Underwood in Los An g·2les was not the only

woman to break the newsroom editorial barrier during this I

period; in Oregon , Helen Havener was made city editor of

the Portland Press and Laura Vitray earned the same post

with the New GraDhic . Katherine carborough became � � the first woman copy 1editor on the New York Sun and Hel en

Rogers Reid attain ed the unattainable by beco�11ing a vice-

.president of the New York Herald Tr· By this decade, the newspa�er business itself had · grown to be such a complicat ed en tity t those women who tb.i;\ labored in the rarified atmosphere of the upper echelons

made news by the simple fact of their positions . To be

· sure, Helen Rogers had married into. the right family to

reach the top but her capable handling of the paper 's ad-

vertising brought her recognition respect . and There are few women who occupy positions of high executive au thority on larg•o:: rne·tropolitan newspapers. In othe·c words , there are few women publishers. This is not wholly a �atter of sex, however . After all, there are but a limited number o:= such positions in the wh ole industry, and it is but natural that most of these should be filled by men . Which makes all the more interesting the personality of a wo:'.llan who through her own ability, her flair for journalistic leadership and management , is ab le to steer the course of one of the country 's largest, oldest, most influential, and mo st highly respected new papers •19 pre·face preceded a -;:_Jersonali ty p-rofile of Th is ;5

Mr s. Reid wr itten by Mona . Gardner for the Satu rday EveniJ

·Post .

1911 In Helen Rogers married Ogden Reid, son of

· the famou s Whitelaw Reid . For the first years of her

imarriage Helen devo ted herself, outside of her home , ex -

:elusively to suffrage work. She served the New York Stat

I i Woman 's Suffrage party as treasurer an d in the process I

! :raised $500,000 . In 1918,- at her husband 's suggestion ,

Mr s. Reid decided to contribut e her money -making talents

I 1922 j the Tribune. By she was official ly "director of

advertising; " a vice-pres iden cy went with the title but I � unofficially the Reids operated the Heral d-Tribune on a � . partnership basis . Helen's flair for bu s iness and her 1

advertising sense were evident from the moment she wa lked. I . I:t hrou gh the door ; within five years she managed to triple

!tI he Tr ibune 's ad revenue .

I Astonishing as it may seem the sa�e decade wh ich j spawned exaggerat ed inanity irt the tabloids also saw womer

writers come into their own in the serious side of the 1

. . • • b. h iIP O 1 1t• 1cal• f 1e . ld Co ra R1 g y, t e Mon 1tor• I s Wash1n• gton

: burea•1 chief , introduced Mary F. Hoc:-naday to the Press ! Gal l ery at the same time that Mary Osborne Carpent er took

. charge of the La Pre� bu r eau . lSJ

, ______,, ------� a specialized Ruth Fi_-me;,:, Scr ipp s -H'J'Sdrr l star , in oil, power , labor and federal budgeting news eminating

from the nat ion 's capitol . Sh e Cal ifornia in 1924 left and won her Washington reportorial stripes by being better , 1 informed than the legislators on bills affecting her home

state.

Winifreq Ma llon, the first woman to serve in the

New York Times Washington bureau , was admit ted to the

Press Gal lery in 1918. e covered Republican Sh both the and Demo cratic national conventions in 1928 and fol lowed

the candidates cross country to their reception. record Bess Fu rman , from Nebraska , covered nat ional

politics for Associat ed Press . Her special assignment--

in addition to the House of Representat ives--was Mr s.

Herbert Hoover . Wh en the a&ninistrat ions chan ged, Bess

stayed on the job , dogging Mrs . Roosevelt's every footstep .

Together she and Ruby Black, who vvas assigned to the New

Dealer 's wife by the United Press , traveled thousands of

miles in the First Lady 's company .

Other ladies of the press were traveling during

these years. Rheta Dorr , ever on the mo ve, was covering

the Bu lgarian uprisings , while Peg

traveled to the Orient for the Tr ibune . They split up in

Ma , an ·-- nila, Miss to return to the Sta! es d I_:fen:� to Hu ll ,

,, -- 154

acco-:n.pany her husband to Honolu lu . Bert Kuhn was an editor for the wh ile Mr s. Kuhn served as a Star-Bullet in correspondent for the Internat ional News Service--once scooping rival wire services with the first report of a tidal wave .

Offered a chance to edit the �ina Press, the Kuhns with their new baby gir , Rene, moved first to Kobe, then l to Shanghai . Du1:-ing the riots of 1925 Mr s. Kuhn helped to organize the Women 's Volunteer Mo tor Canteen Corps and became the first woman broadcaster in the Orient.

Like Helen Rogers Reid, DJ rot� Thompson devoted the early part of her career to suffrage work . After she graduat ed from Syracuse Univer sity in 1914, she worked as an organizer in upper New York . Though the work was satis.fying and admirably sui ted to her temp era;nent--"Her chief funct ion, she was told, was to attract attention to the movement by startin g public arguments ; and she made a notable success of it in scores o£ upper New· York State 20 t owns . 11 . was not a living, so she went on to try --lt advertising and social work before deciding that writing was her career ambit ion .

$ �n 1919 wi th virtually no prospects and 150 in her pocket she sailed for London, determined to reverse the

_ road to success for forei gn _co r e den! : traditional a E �eo!:_l_ _ "

------��-·,.�',.;.;;...... �� -: - �- ....;-;o;.·" ' ,,·¥ -·�

- -·-- ·· ·---··· -----·-·· ·- ·· ----··· -- - · ---·····-·------·-·-·-----l of earning her reporting stripes state-side then

going overseas, she was going to do just the opposite· l jl "It must be said, to the vast credit of Mi ss Thompson,"

points out her biograpl1er , Ch arles Fisher , "that no one

ever en tered the exciting life with £ewer introductions or

mo re resolution Her inge..'luity ·was boundl ess : than

first :1otio:1 of na:,in{;; mo:1e:V" duri:1g :-= er :l er tour occurred 1vhen she met a group o£ Zionists on the ship going over . They wer e on their way to a confer ence in London. Miss Thompson spent the better part o£ the crossing with them , and, upon arriving, called the London office of the International News Service an d informed the manager that nobody he could na�ne knew as mu ch about Zio:1ism as she did. i£ she covered Wh at the convention £or him? she suggested.

The manager agreed and so Mi ss Thompson entered her first assignment in a significant fraTfle o£ mind : convinced that she was an author ity on the subj ect fro� the inside out . She covered the session competently and aft erward made an arrangement with I.N.S. to freel ance at space rates . 22

In 1920 she covered the Irish hunger strike in

·County Cork; in 1922 she interviewed Dr . Eduard Benes--in

her opinion one of her finest pieces of journalism. In

1925 Cyrus Cu r tis owner of the Public Ledger , pur- H. K. , chased the New Yocrk Post , then cabled Dorothy asking her

to move from Vienna to Ber lin as direc·tor of the Central

Eu ropean Bu reau for the combined papers. Directorship o£

such an important foreign bu.reau was an important first for

.- __!>'__ _ -� - - . - ....��""�� ...... --�--��-�-� , ....;.4.., ;.:...;,.��-�·� -.....,...�� iolQ.�o...... O"""o""' '" "" - :""�---�"""''-·""'""""...,..""""'"-""'"'Y"'«"'-.'.Sf"'""'-·g'"""""'-."'":fii-.-.-;,·""..::'

L'J

.. American women journali st:; , lntt fo e IJrJJ:'()thy it w;l'• rJn ly

the beginning . 157

.. ------·------, FDOTNOTES i•\W 1.. '1 1/\PTFl<. VII

I · • • • • · 1 · • _ �, l_ � () , 1 • ��: > , 1 1 11 .� ,l'l , 1 1 , L ;t; r 1.. 111 'n I' 1\ 1 d -' i . 1 • 1 v 1 1 " t· {Philc:\ch.' l.ph i_a: l'h LLLl>�l H,,, ,k l'll l• l i ·.llt·t··. , lq,,.l ) , l': 1:•.

3 Cohen, op e ci!. ·, p. 13.

Mi ch a•2l Bessie, Jazz Journalism : T Story 4sLnon he Newspape rs (New York: E. P. Co ., of the _ Tahloid Du tton & • Inc . , 1938 ) , p 190. 5 Ibid. , 240. P • 6 B essle , ci!_., p. 24. 9..2.· 7 compile. d from Censu s reports , 1850-1960. u. s. 8 Ross, Ladies, p. 268 .

9Silas Bent , Bal lyhoo (New York: Horace Liveright ,

1927 ) ' p • 192 •

10 . . 0 11ver PJ. lat , Pegl e��-Angry Ma� o f the Press

(Boston : Beacon Pr ess , 1 9 63 ), p. 91 . 11 Ibid. ' p. 105. 12 Ross, Ladi�, p. 226 . 13 John Cha an , Tell It To Sw12eney (New York: p m Doubleday and Co ., Inc., 1961 ), 220. p. 14 Ib:id. 1 5 Chapman , l o . c i t . --c -- 16 Ibid. , p . 221 . 17 R')ss , Ladies , pp . 286-287 . 18 . B e s s e p. 230 . l , �· cit.,

,, -- 158

------l

19 15, 1937 . . Satu-rday E2.ening Po , �t, May 20 c ;n:- ew h 1es Fisher , Th e C'>l__t_�nni'_:_t:5_ (N Yo r:k : Publishers, 1044) , �:) 4. Ilowel l, So�;!d.n p. I 21 . p. 35. I b l.d • ' 22 F1s. h . p. 36 . er , £E.. £!..,

j l I l

I li i l

!I ! ___j 1 CHAPTER VI [I I 1930-1 960 PR')F'ESSIO Ni\ L COMPETITORS :

Du ring the next thirty years women accounted for a full quarter of the nation 's newsgatherers and, as the I I decade of the Sixties a?proached, they accelerated past • j ;the one- third mark in 1960, of the 102,859 persons em- ( ployed as reporters an d editors in the United States , 37 .2 1 per· cent or 38, 305 were wo men ). Thus , it becomes more ��I and mo re difficult to analyze their individual contribu -

tions . Wh ile in 1880 the mere presence of a woman in a

newsroom earned her a spot in journalistic history, by

her sisters worked routinely elbow-to -elbow with their

male col leagues in foreign capitols, small tcrwn court

beats, World Series games , and even in foxholes .

Th e newswoman herself had changed--in 1930 she ! I had had the right to vote for a bare decade but she did

not take kindly to being shunted of£ into a corner to turn

out the women 's page . For the mo st part she was better

educated and a few yea�s older than her novice counterpart

of fifty years earlier, and she had more competition .

As the nation teetered about, trying to regain its I

! _ I ecol)oTUi9 , po l:i,ti cal and §Oc:i,.al ba.lal}ce_i n j:he_1 9.10_ _� , ___ _ -�_Q j 159 I �.:::> v

too did the news media. Papers across the country began

to look more seriously at the events recorded on their

wood-pulp pages- -tabloids were on. the way out and a !!lore

thoughtful journalistic era was making its bow :

rise of interpretative reporting was the The most important development of the· 1930' s and 19401s ...Pro per backgrounding of news events, and covering of major areas of human act ivity by specialists , were no t unknown before that time , just as uncritical and sensationalized treatment of news continued in the press after that time . But the impact of the polit ical -social-economic revolution of the New Deal years, the rise of modern scientific technology , the shrinking of the world into one vast arena for power politics forced a new approach to the handl ing of news . :'Why ' became important , along with the traditional 'who did what, ' because the reader , more than ever , wanted and needed to know the meaning of the news . Coverage of politics, economics and business , forei gn affairs, sience, labor, agriculture, and social work was improved py rep6rter -specialists. 2

In light of this changing att itude toward news in

,general , the newswoman �as no longer regarded as an im-

.:p ortant 11ingr edient11 in� news coverage . Her presence at a

;news event was inconsequential ; her value--like any other

:reporter 's-- rested with her ability to g�casp and mar shall

salient facts, to report to her readers with the critical

, eye of a trained obs�r ver , and , on occasion , to add the

' jinsight which comes with "special i zation., By the 1930's

·and 1940's it seems clear that sex prejudice in the

·newsroom--while not erased--was fading into the backg;::-ound:

______L 1. 61

Competence had become the key criter ia.

In the 1930's Do roth_y: Th ompson 's career reached

:a level which began to brin g to her the title "principle

lady mental wel terweigh t of our current civilization .'' 3

By 1940 , Dorothy 's thrice-weekly column , 110n the Record, "

,was purchased by 125 nat ional pa?ers and read by some ' 4 thing like 8,405, 399 subscribers .

Dorothy figuratively covered the globe; her

columns were almost always cosmic in nature--anything that

moved on the international scene was her beat . Her pas-

sionate concern over the ways o£ the wo rld brought her

scathing criticism and hyperbolic admirat ion from states-

men and colleagues alike , yet few, if any , attributed her

abilities or shortcomings to her sex .

Char les Fisher suggests the scope of Miss

Thompson 's mental prowess: \_ Miss Thompson deals with the tumu lt of the age from her house in East 48th Street, New York, where she has maintained offices since she broke with the New � Herald Tr ibune over her support of Roosevelt against Wendell Wilkie . From her workroom on the second floor she has probably contrived to cover as much ground, in a geog:r.aph ical and philosophical sense, as anyone else in her profession .

Th ere is one recent essay which is remembered

g:r.atefully by connoisseurs as an unquestionable new record for the course. In so�e 800 or 900 words Miss Thomp3on dealt authoritat ively with

'• ...... 1 62

-- ·- . -·--·- ··---···--· -- ---} An glo-American influence in Eu rope ; the proper .. - manner for po Rt-war reconstruction ; the U. S. at titude toward Vichy ; the Czechoslovakian tn�a.ty the Mu nich Conference of with l(ussia ; l9JB ; Gpn eral Smuts ; King Pc:t e-r of Jugoslavia ; I I Democracy ; i Federal ism; prcs<�n t u. s. Fo reign Po Licy; French , ItaLian German reaction to and Al Lied �ations plans ; the geography of Czechoslov_a t<:ia ; and the private political de sires the Serb , Croat , and Slovene Factions of in Jugo.slavia . s

Dorothy was given to making prejudgments about

i both nat ions and people; she had the utmost confidence in i I l I i her own assessmen t of the world situation and of the human J I1 j character . Her battin g average as a seeress is impressive 'II_! I but she is probably best rememb ered by many readers for one I! ! , lcollossal miscalculat ion , made when she interviewed Hitler ! ! in 1932: lI When I finally walked into Adolf Hitler 's salon in the Kaiserhoff Hotel I was convinced that I I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In II something less than fifty seconds I was quite II sure I was not . It took me just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this I man who has set the world agog. i He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, I insecure--the very prototype of the Little Man. .. I and yet he is not without a certain charm . 6 'I I'I ,1!1 ,1!1 During this same era po 1 it i ca 1 writing 1 aunched \I another woman , Clare Booth Luc e. Clare came from a rich I !!fami ly and married a rich man , George Brokaw . However , as i' !thel decade of the 20's came to a close and with it her j ! twenty-ninth birthday , she thrust the pseudo ·-sophisticat --· --· ------·----· __ed___ __ ··--- ·-· -- · '- ...... _jl 163

world of Long Island behind her . She divorced Brokaw Mr . and wrangled a job on Vogu� magazine--actually she took

advantage o-f publisher Conde Nast 1 s ab sence; she illc\rched

into the o-ffice, sat at explained down an emp ty desk and to the startled office manager that salary her require-

,.. _.,4 •n·.- ,.- ·-

.• ;:;.ent s ../- ,:,... --� .:./ ..J

Europe. Her wo rk was sufficiently good the that ruse .worked and Nast, surprised but impr essed by her tenacity,

hired her at a week and soon promoted her to his $35 Vanity Fair staff .

Clare 's specialty was satir e and her caricatures

of nat ional and international political figures nicely

suited the so?hist icated audience of Vanity Fair . How-

ever , Clare took her work seriously and soon tired of the

role of obs erver ; she determined to become a participant

in the polit ical arena . :tn 1932 she shared Mr s. Woodrow

Wilson's box at the Democratic Convention ; she backed

·wendell Wilkie in 1940 and, by 1944, she gave the keynote

sp eech at the Republican Nat ional ' Convention . Frequently

at odds with such political sages as Dorothy Thompson ,

Clare was nevertheless elected to Congress and appointed

to numerous ambassadorial missions . Her political essays

have since graced mo st of the nation 's major publica-

tions - -including, of course, those of her second husband

-.· -- '·" -- -.· _ .,.._ 164

magnate, Henry Lu ce. ------� Ti me -Lif� I far different writing style was develop ed by A Doris pol itical columnist for the York Daily Fl eeson , New News. Already a veteran reporter in August 1933 when she

and her husband, John O'Donnel , introduced a joint

Washington column called "Capital Stuff ," Doris soon went

'on to join the United Features syndicate. In 1954 she

became the first woman to win the Raymond Clapper award

for meritorious reportin g.

Lest the road seem too smooth for the ladies of

the press in the political ar ena , it should be pointed out

that many still encountered editors who doubted a woman 's / Ila bility to deal with subjects more taxing than bread I I baking and fashion . In 1934 Marguerite Young left Scripps I Howard World Telegram in a huff : i I The few satisfying stories I could write i were at the expense of writing uncounted reams of woman-story piffle which shamed me as a journalist as well as rendered me a tool in the Scripps -Howard process of deadening its vaunted labor readers to important events affecting them by drowning them daily in sentimental pap . 7

Carrying on the tradition of fine political

coverage from Washington fo:r the Christ ian Science Monitor, lI l ! begun in 1918 by Cora Rigby, ! was .Joseuhine Ripley . ! In the educat ion field, R•Ath Dunbar , of the

�.. _ ...... -.· _ .... 165

- Sun-Times , and Wilma Mo-::-r on , o:f the t is �:r ::: as excel lent examples of the new --� toward reporter sp ecialization . !I I Another traditio��lly mal e dominion, economics, i

first tipped its hat to a woman in the late 1930's. The

woman , �v ia Por!_�, has become a legend financial in . circles :

In 1959, wh en she wrote about the first 5 per cent government note issue in current history , there was a land-office rush to buy . ('I want some of those securities Sylvi� Porter wrote about.') And some months later , when she suggested that her reader s write to their brokers, or to the New York s-tock Exchange, for assorted pamphlets on investin g, many thousands did just that . 8

Sylvia 's economic acumen developed early. She was

just seventeen when the "great crash" came , yet she knew • ;well its implicat ions :

On October 1929, my young widowed mother 6, had just about every penny of her nest egg in the stock market . Her cash investment was com paratively modest but her stake in the market was qu ite impr essive . For Mother was in Wall Street on a 10 per cent mar gin , meaning that be hind every $10, 000 of stock she 1owned,' she had only $ 1,000 of her own money . With that sort of borrowing power , she was ab le to load up

with ••• (stocks )

By October 29, 1929 , Mother 's nest egg was a bitter memory and we were flat broke. As stock prices plunged under the avalanche of selling, she cou t raise the cash demand•2d to simp ly lch1 1 the margin up to 10 per cent. Along with k�ep 166

millions of other speculator s, she was sold

out •..9

Miss Porter 's writing style suggests some of the

ireason for her success . Her accounts of complicated - � financial tangles were consistently interesting and , more I! important , understandable. Scorning such phrases as l ! "economic parity," "price-earnings ratio,11 and "discre- l tionary income ," which she cal led "bafflega.b ," she writes ; only J..n terms which ·the average reader could be expected

to understand.

Slyvia's career began on July 8, 1932 when , at

nineteen , she got a job with a Fifth Avenue investment-

counseling firm. From then on her rise in the financial

world was inevitable:

From time to time , as a par ticular facet o£ the fiel d posed an interesting problem, she wrote it up and submitted it £or publication to the select journals distributed around Wall Street , and to the financial sec·tions o£ the New York newsp apers. She prudently signed them "S. F. Porter ." Her shrewd comments and analyses began to appear ·r egularly and were read with respec·t and interest in the financial strongholds of the bus iness wo rld. lO

Soon Sylvia began to find more satisfaction in

facet of finances than in any other . She began with a

regular colu,nn in the American ?ank�E_ but was soon invited

to join the New Yor� Post. In 1940, So Fo Porter

-.· _ ..... -.· .- 167

Financial Edi tor o£ the Post but in the pa 1942 per 's editor decided to take advantage of the fact that his 27- l

colu:nn also ca i ed pic turc --"a h<:\l C-column pho toc;:rc;\ph r c her

1 11 of the attractive young brun ette . 1

Th e first cesponse was �> Lar.tling; -f rom a long-time corres onden t who been a�lressing p had queries and ommen ts to Mr . Po r ter ' c I Dl:'C\L' I under the impres s ion that the co lumnist was an old man with a white beard, came a new salutation : 12 "Darling! 11

Sylvia did not balk at the flurry o£ public recognition which followed, nor was she cowed by the de- nunciation of a do zen 11Silver Senators,11 who blustered in self-righteous indignation over a series of articles she wrote in 1940 under the title "Uncle Sa:n' s Silver Scandal .11 i! ! To date, Miss Porter (also known as Mrs . G. Sumner Collins ) ! has wr itten five books on finance, all aimed at the lay- !I man , and edits a weekly newsletter called RIO[?orting on Governments . I !i I No t all of the new breed of woman reporters con- l cerned thems elves with such weighty subj ects. Du. ring this . period, too , Hedda Hopper and Louella P?-:r. son.s were honing in on Hollywood, and a 22-year -old girl named Jeane Hofmann . became 11the nat ion 's only woman writer-cartoonist of big- 13 time sports.11

'-· _.,._ 168

r-·- i Jeane , a native o£ Los An geles, l).ega.n .following j . ! baseball while convalescing :from a childhood illness . The long hours in bed didn't seem half so bad while she j listened to radio broadcasts describing the game "play by l! jplaI y." In 1937 :

. i ••.she tossed up further education at ' Stanford University to take a part-time job on the Hollywood three months Citize�-News . For she covered the local sp ring training camps and the Pacific Coast League and gained dis tinc t ion as the only woman ever to wangle her way into the press box at Wrigley in Los Field Angeles . She fol lowed football, basketball

and hockey •. _ 1 4

Wh en Jeane finally talked her way into a job with

the Philadelphia EveninS2 Bulletin in her first 1 940, assignment was a fashion show ! According to Jeane, she

"messed it all up" but convinced her editor that she knew

more about baseball than hemlines .· He gave her a chance y in the sports departmen t and "soon she was drawing a dai ly

£our-column cartoon. Last year she began wr iting a two-

column illustrated sports feature, digging up material in

the Shib e Park press box, the du gout and even the dressing

room with equal apl omb . " 1 5

A great number of the wo�uen who accounted for the

growing rariks of journalists across the country were hold-

ing down ' important spots on rural publications . In 1 93 5,

'·" ...... --- ! wh ile Mr s. Helen Re id received the Amer ican Women 's

:Association award for di stinguished work in journal ism,

:I Mr s . Mary El i zabeth Ma hnkey_ came to !'l"ew York to col lect � I I ! magazine prize as the best country newsp aper corresponder ·i i ' I lin America- . I

I Writing a gossip column for the Taney County I Repub lican in Forsythe , Missouri , Mr s. Mahnkey had wr itt< for forty-four years with one underlying philosophy :

I£ any stranger came in or anybo dy moved or ' a baby was born or somebody got married or died, then that was news .- And wh en kinsfolk come from l� I a long way off .I'd ment ion all their names and brighten up the column s or make someone laugh or -l I please some child or some old per son . I£ any ex citing crime or anything not exactly ri ght hap pened in Oasis , I just let -it go and di dn't write it up , because tho se sort o£ things happen in 16 a:.1y place.

Wh ile mo st country editors and reporters shared

Mr s. Mahnkey 's belie£ in local coverage , few shared her

news sense. Hazel Brannon , of Missis sippi, was one who c I 1 not shy away from contro·versy .

I Hazel bough t the Lexington Adver tiser in 1943 ; a

gr aduate o£ the University of Alabiliua with two years re I porting experien ce, she had her own ideas about wh at a I! I I 1country newsp a�er should be .

1n the beginning the townsfolk could not see mu ch

difference between Mi ss Hazel 's writing and that of her 170

·predecessors. Most o:f the paper's pages were :filled with homey chatter and classified ads like this one: "For

sale: Wild winter peas, double cleaned."

Before too long, however, the paper's editorials

titled "Through Hazel's Eyes," began to deal with two very

touchy subjects--gambling and bootlegging, both of which were illegal in Holmes County:

Today we have one joint after another lining the highways going in and out of every town in the county. Slot machines are seen in practically all of them, drunkenness, cursing, fighting goes on. The places are full of lawlessness and corruption, and not fit, even safe, for sober people.

There are plenty of people in Holmes County who enjoy a drink, but, like the writer, feel that such places should not remain a challenge to everything decent. 17

Apparently she was right, for 200 citizens signed her petition urging circuit Judge s. F. Davis to call a

• grand jury investigation of "organized crime" in Holmes

• County. That Hazel's campaign was not unopposed can be

surmised from one of her columns:

I should like to warn those persons re sponsible for rumors that you better watch your step. You who are trying to impugn my motives don't amount to anything, anyway. I'm no lily white reformer, but the people of Holmes County don't want organized crime here. 18

Following the grand jury hearings Holmes County

Sheri££ Murtagh was promptly castigated and sent to round 171

up every bootlegger and slot machine in sight . The sheriff

di d not take kindly to the upbraiding, and some said he

was sore at losing some "protect ion money" as well , but he

lost no time in getting back at Mi ss Hazel .

Miss Brannon was arrested by a deputy in the foyer

of the cou rthouse. The charge--questionin g a witness who

was still within the court 's jurisdiction . Hazel pleaded

innocence on the grounds of ignorance but the judge fined

her $50 and fifteen days, susp ending sentence for two

year.s . When Hazel decided to appeal the case at the state

level , MississiEEi News editor Fr ederick Sullens com-

mented, "Our guess is that our Supreme Court , when Miss

Brannon's ap peal comes up for hearing, is going to slap

the ears of that circuit judge right down under his toe- 1 nails ." 9 He was right !

Another country lass, Caro Brown , faced opposition unafraid. Caro worked as a reporter for the Alice (Texas ) \ Daily Echo when state and federal agents began moving in on the small county , determined to rid it once and for all of the tyrannous one-man political rule imposed by "George

B. Parr, a tough south Texan who was known as the Duke of 20 ·Duval County . 11

Parr ru led the county an d a good portion of the

-.· -- -.- -- 172

state, with his political machine and private army ; he and

his family had dominated the area for forty years and

"more than one reporter £ailed to get information about

Duval County," according to Tom E. Fite, managin g editor

of the Echo , "and one died trying."

When state and federal agencies finally went into Duval County to open the records , reporters still were not free of the threat of harm if they wrote and printed the story . But Mrs. Brown wrote her stories , and they were published, under per haps as difficult conditions as such a story ever 1 was . 2

Uncovering the details of Parr 's legendary wrong-

doing took hours o£ painstaking investigation; Caro at -

tended meetings and court hearings and pored over public ' records . On January 19, 1954 she thrust herself between

a ranger and one of Parr 's sons as they strugged £or

possession o£ the ranger 's pistol :

As watched could tell that the talk be I I tween the sher i££ Parr and Ranger Bridge was becoming heated and( shu) shed the man who was I tal king to me . 'Something 's fixing to happen , 1 warned. I

And it did ••.Parr 's left ear received an open tear when it was twisted by the Ranger cap tain, who also hit Parr with his £ish before sticking his gun in his ribs .

At this point I stepped into the middle, begging, 1 Cap , please don t, please don t • ••22 1 1 1 For this courageous piece o£ work Caro Brown re-

ceived the Pulit zer Prize for local reporting in 1955 and

_ ..... ,, 173

a letter of appreciation from John

General of Texas :

You ••.ha ve the g:rat i tude of the people of County and the of Texas and the ad· Du va l State mirat ion your profession . But your greatest of compensat ion , am sure, is the satisfaction of I having helped bring forty years of corruption and ter rorism to an end. Duval Count is no longer t. 2 ¥ the ' Land of Mu rder and Mayhem •. i

In the 1930's Edgar Hoover and his G-men , hot onl! J. the trail of "Bab y Face" Nelson , "Machine Gun" Kelly, and !

Dillinger , were gaining heroic stature in headlines John across the nation. Thus , an importan·t beat on any metropolitan paper remained the criminal elements of society.

Many tabloid alumni fou:1d thems elves among ·the top

"crime sp ecialists" in the journalistic world. Nellie

Kenyon of the Chattanooga (Tennessee ) News won a $ 1,000 prize Po r her story of the detective work which led to the capture of a bank bandit . Adding ·thri'll and flavor to the account was the fac·t that Miss Kenyon herself di d the detective work; following a $ 6,617 robbery in 1931, Nellie, following up a random remark made by a nurse, uncovered a ·trial of clues which eventually led to the capture of the bandit . Though her local fame rests on this one incident , Miss Kenyon proved her investigative skill time and again .

... -- /7 'I ---- ·- --- 1 When the New York World died in 1931 after a fort_y· ·Iei ght year -run , one of its best front -p<>ge reporters wa s Elenore KellogQ• El eno re was a g':meral reporter but her !I coverage of big-city crime brought her a front-page by-lir ;in one edition aft er another . When the World folded she

bid a reluctant farewell to the frat ernal group under the

"Go l den Dome" and joined Associated Pr e ss . Her car eer wa�

ended abruptly wh en she died, following an operation in

1935 •

. Kathleen _!v1c Lailghlin's year s on the Ch icago Tribun'

were filled with the do in gs of gangsterdom. When "Big

. Tim" Murphy was rel eased from prison , Kathleen was sent t<

accompany him back froill Leavenwo rth . Frequently it fell

to her to tell the mobster 's "molls" that they were widow

af ter a maj or shootout , Miss McLau ghlin would be first on

the spot at the victims ' homes , ready to report on any

"retal iation plans " which might be in the offing. Th is

beat was frou��t with danger ; Kathleen expected every

assignment to be her last , so it was with great relief

that she accepted a New Yor k Times offer : "Previously

frowning on features ," reported Newsweek magazine in 194 1

"the Ti� started a daily food column an d two months ago

named Kathleen McLaughlin , one of its crack reporters , as I 7.

f f l t'St WOolliltl 1 S edi to r Lo cnu nlin; \te lli.�W:-; and I!t�: -;;�_lll<'S .. /! features of femin ine interest ."24 Doro � A1� Har rison , o£ the Ph iladelph ia. Led9'�r. I an d later in I th e Ph i I ;HJel ph i;, R�'•cor(l' a 1 c;o ·N ��n t h'-' '' vi] y iI I !for news £ro11 the \ L'1. d<.:: rwc;r l

killed, Pius Lanzetti , "one of the mos t notorious gan g-

sters once sent word by the grapevine route: 'I£ ever yo1

meet Mi ss Harriso�• , treat her like one o£ the boys.'"25

Before her columnist days , Dorothy Kilg

When the ferry boat Ob servat io� was blown to smithereens in the East River with a boiler ex plosion on the mo::-ning of Septemb er 9, 1932, Dorothy was count ing up the long row of dead lying in a shed on the wharf wh en sh e bQnp ed into another reporter who p roved to be her father . He had 176

started at one end of the row, she at the other, and they met in the middle. The men had been tossed into the air, blown on rooftops or into the water. Seventy-two were killed; sixty-three were injured.26

Dorothy rated a few column inches herself in 1933 when a bored jury--listening to testimony in the Jessie

Costello trial--sent flowers to her hotel room every day to

show their appreciation for her decorative presence in the courtroom.

Dorothy was just one of a small army of reporters who covered Bruno Hauptmann's trial in 1935. Hauptmann, accused of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, was the subject of thousands of newspaper stories all over the country.

Probably no other event brought more newswomen together on one story--among them was Ester Hamil_!on, who covered the event for the Youngstown {Ohio) Telegram. Ester, another reporter-detective credited with solving several local crimes, was voted best newspaperwoman of the year by the Ohio Newspaperwomen's Association in 1935 for her coverage of the trial.

Another press representative who detailed the

Hauptmann story was Dixie Tighe. Dixie, working for

International News Service {I.N.S.), and Evelyn Shuler, of the Philadelphia Ledger, were ·the only women who wrote the 177

lead stories on the trial for their respective employers.

However , Dixie 's real sp ecialty was of ano ther sort ; her real flair was in the foreign correspondence field.

WAR CORRESPONDENTS

Wn ile Dixie cover ed the Cuban Revolution for

I. N. S., Betty Kirk chronicled the Mexican front for a number o£ publicat ions including the Chr istian u. s. �� Monitor, Life maga?-ine, and the Washing·ton Post .

Miss Kirk visited Mexico for the first time in 1938 and remained to give it the thought:ful "interpretive coverage11 she thought it deserved. Her success may be judged by the comment of Josephine Daniels , U. Ambassador to s. Mexico (1933-1941 ):

Betty Kirk asked no privi leges or favors because she was a woman . She was a working journalist, proud of her profession and keen to furnish her papers not o�ly the important oc currences but vvhat prompted the actions of pub lic men an d the influences which mo ved the people. Her news stories had a flavor all their own . Her statements were based U?on her own investigations and interviews with those in a posi tion to know . Soon her insight , sound judg ment , fairness of reporting, and sense of re sponsibility for what she wrote won for her the confidence and esteem of Mexicans and Amer icans alike . She wrote not only what she saw and heard but she thought afte�r going ·c o the what bottom of things. Not always did her papers print what she wrote, but they generally found later that she sizing up the situa. t ion exactly as was

�. -- it was , an d not as she or her paper o r indi viduals wished it to be . It fo l lowed natural ly that , as time went on , she won the regard of the public men to whom she went for the news and side-lights on public policies . They trusted her and gave her statements off the record as we ll as on the record wh ich informed 27 her wr iting.

Agnes Smedley was busy deluging American papers

with her view of the Or ient , particular ly of the upheaval

,in China , when Ann e O'Hare McCormick first traveled with

·her hu sband to Eu rope in 1921 . Emboldened by a few of he

'pieces wh ich appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ann

·wrote managing editor Carr Van Anda, asking if she could

send him some dispat ch es fr om abroad.

Mr . Van Anda replied: 'Try it! ' With that quasi permission she sent in many that captured 28 th� mind of Carr Van Anda and she was hired.

So captivat ed was Times publisher Ar thur Sulzberg

that he offer ed her a position on the Time� editorial

board, the first woman to be so honored:

"You ar e to be the 'fr eedom editor , ' he said.

"It will be your job to stand up an d shou t wh enever free-

) 29 dom is interfered wi th in any part of the world! "

In her editorial column ent it led "Abroad, " Mrs.

McCormick strove always to carry out her charter . In · 193'

she won the Pu litzer Prize for corr espondence for her

account of Pop e Pius XI's struggle to end Italian

... . - ! aggression in Ethiopia , In 193 5 she had inter vi ewed for the first time the

im)I an who was respons ible for that aggressio-:1 , Mussolini . l i I Her report : I

Of all the public characters I have inter viewed, Mu ssolini is the only one wJro seems inter ested not only in what he says hims elf but in wh at you have to) say; he appears to wei h. 3 8 your suggestions , solicits your opinions .

Anne found El Du ce friendly an d mo re than willing

to discuss his plans . Tho se plans appalled her : "Nothing

ibI etter or mo re stable can be established by mo re war," she !I I!w rote soon aft er , "but in the long view it is equally cer-

tain that · there must be war --not all the · sanct ions of the

j world can stop it--unt il there is a league not only to I 13 1 en f orce b u t t o crea t e peace •••1

Just as she predicted, the war came. One o:f its I

first vi ctims wi thin the ranks o£ western correspondents

was Leah Burdette , of PM . Leah was an Italian, married to

an American newsman , She wa s thrown ou t of Bucharest in Ii for anti�fascist sympathies an d in met her death 11I 941 1942 I i;a t the hands of bandits in Iran .

Inez writing £or I . N . . was one of the first Robb , s ,

fu�erican women to cover Wo rl d War II for readers . u. s.

In�z , who start ed as a cub reporter on the Evening (Bo ise, rr--·------was a dare-devi l from the very be- ! Idaho ) Capi tal N0ws , �l ginning. Tired of covering ladi es ' tea parties , Inez snapp ed up joking offer made barn-storming pilot : ! a by a I ! "Would the little girl like to go up?" he asked as he I : lounged in the News city room . iI .•.altho u gh I was hurt that he could not see I that I was a young lady , I gr abb ed my coat and hat I an d was .out the door before he could chan ge his mind.

·We dr ove ou t to the fair grounds in a beat -up jalopy , and I was fu ll of anxi ety , al l right . I I was wearing a bright scarlet coat , and I was scared stiff that Mama and Papa and my aunts and uncles , all at the fair that day , would spot me before I could get into the air and out of their protect ive clutches .

To make a long story short , we made it . I was strapped into ·an open-cockpit plane an d we roar ed into the wild blue yonder . Jh e pilot was paid to thrill the crowd with stunts such as loops and fall-l eaf di ves , I think they were called, and heaven knows what .

You know what? I thought it was wonderful! That 's youth for you . I wasn 't scar ed or sick or even nervous . . And when it was al l over , . I than ked the young man , scooted back to the News an d wrote an account of my adventure . The story had a dr eamy lead, even if I do . say so over thirty years 1ater--I wrote that the only way a lady could stand on her head with dignity an d decorum was in a stunting plane .

We ll , sir, the editor slapp ed a by-line on the story and the rest is history . ..3 2

Inez an d Ru th Cowan , of Associated Pr ess , had

plenty of opportunity to be 11scared •..an d sick ••.and I fl

nervous" wh en they accompanied th e first Women 's Au xiliary i! ! Army Co rp s group to go overseas , reporting from the North !African front in 1943 . l By June 1944 almost two do zen women had done a ! j tour of du ty in the war zone, perhap s the best known was . I!P eggy Hu l l, the fir st gal to wangle a pass from the War l i Department . Th is war , Peggy had no troub le getting editors Ij i to send her to the action zone ; she covered the Pacific :theater in 1944 for. the American Nevvspa::_Jer Alliance and I - ' the Cl eveland Plain Deal er .

Time -Life photographer Mar garet Bourke-W'.n i te became lI the 'first wo�an correspondent to accompany a bombing ! mission wh en she covered the Tun isian campaign in January I 1943 .

11Maggi e" had de sperately wanted to accompany a

bombing miss ion since the moment she hit the war zone. She

had photographed everything on the ground--from front line

action to secret inst al lations and she was anxious to be

I • b I1 aJ.r orne. Ironically the Air For ce top brass was un- I ! budgeable in its refusal until Ma ggie and five of her I( !cam eras went down with a troop convoy ship . Ma ggie mirac- l ulously survived the experience, though her cameras di d ' i.n ot, an d the fir st person to greet her up on release from 182

the hospital General James Doolittle: was 'Maggie, do you still want to go on a bombing mission?'

'Oh, you k: now T dr >, I r (ylc;p"r l. IT h;uJ qi vpn up ask in g, bec;, u ··,c I didn't tt/ ->rr L Lr, ru•>l' ·� ;, nuisc:.�.nce of my �.;el.f al t the tinJ

women 's opportunities in news work . Historian Frank

Luther Mo tt remarks :

During ·the wartime manpower shortage, women , came to occupy many positions from which they had formerly been excluded. Controvery over the value of women on the copy desk, in ad..'llinistra tive news jobs, or on foreign ,assignments was com mon ; but the girls actually got such jobs, and in many cases they held them after the war was over . By January 1945, there were 135 wo:rnen in the House and Senate press galleries. Many women made repu tations as war correspondents. Du dl ey Ann Harmon, who saw service in the UP 's London and Paris bureaus during ·the war , became head of its Geneva bure.au in 1948 . Helen Kirkoatrick was chief of the Paris bureau of the Chicago Daily News 1944-46 . 34

MarQ_uerite "Mag2ie" Higgins earned her master 's

degree in Journalism from Columbia Univer sity in 1942 and

the day after graduat ion was informed by the New York

'Herald Tribune that her work as "campus correspondent" had

earned her a spot on their staff .

Mag9ie was overjoyed except :for one thing·--she had another job in mind, she wanted to be a war correspondent . 18: :

What ? The edi tors laughed at the idea o£ a twenty-two

year old girl covering the war . They continued to refuse

the assignment until so ably proved herself her sh e had locally that they could refu_::;,e no longer . Maggie reached

Ber lin just as the war ended and was one of the first reporters to reach the concentration camp at Dachau .

If Maggie missed her chance during World War II, her opportunity came later at the other end of the wo rld

in a tiny country called Korea . Despite Army regulations

and General Douglas MacAr thur 's personal prejudice against women at the front , Maggie covered almo3t every campaign

in the Korean conflict .

Soon after the hostilities had begun , Maggie flew

in to Soeul with the first American troops , then partici- pated in their hasty departure from the area as the South

.Korean army retreated around them. She returned to Suwon

.in an unarmed ammunition plane :

Our pilot was Lieutenant Donald Marsh . He was a veteran of the fighting for Guam and knew what we might run into . As we approached -the deep , rocky in lets o£ b:r ill iant blue water that are Pusan Bay, Marsh warned us , 'In a few minutes we reach hot weather . Put on your chut es and grab a helmet .' And then , after glancing over his shoulder in the direction of the big ISS millimeter shells we were carrying, he added flat ly, Tho:..1.gh I don't know wha·t in Christ good a 1 chute will do if we do get hit.'

'·" -- ·- -- 184

I felt the rush of fear that was to become so in the next weeks . It seemed turn familiar to into of that was pressing <\ tra.; )ped b,J.ll brccJ.th aga.inst heart . I could the faces of my sec by the crew that was definitely not �orrying alone . I radio operator his place beneath the The took glass-dome turret of the C-54. In a :few moments somebody saw an unidentified plane, but it didn't see us . An d that was all.

But the ominou s atmosphere continued even after we had bumped and scraped to a stop on the Suwon airfield. We had had to brake hard to avoid the wrecked, bullet -splattered planes at the end of the runway .

As I climbed out of the plane, :fervently promising myself never to ride on another ammuni tion ship , I was greeted by a dour army colonel . He was the nervous , officious type that the Army seems to have a talent for producing.

'You ' 11 have to go back, young lady , ' the colonel said. 'You can't stay here. There may be trouble. '

Somewhat wearily, I brought out my stock answer to this solicitude . 'I wouldn 't be here if there were no trouble. Trouble is news, and the gather

ing of news is my job. 1

The colonel 's too familiar attitude was dis couraging. I had hoped that my performance under :fire in the exit :from Seoul would have ended further arguments that 'the front is no place £or a woman .' But it was to be many weeks before I was accepted on an equal basis with men . 35

Bu t accepted she was . Her story, written Septemb er

18, 1950, chronicling the U. S. Marine landing at Inchon earned her the 1951 Puliti zer Prize :for interna·tional reporting. 185

PUBLISJ-IERS

While the number of women in the special ty fields increased , so too did the rank:s of the women in 'the higher reaches of the newsp aper business.

In 1930 Mr s. Eleanore "Cissy'' Medill Patterson pestered William R. Hear st giving her a chance to into "edit" his Washingt on He·.rald . She had first tried to buy it from him, but , failing that , kept at him until he agr eed to give her temp orary control of the publication .

'J-Cissy" was forty-six wh en she entered the

Washington newspaper scene as editor and temporary publish er of_ the Herald . She had virtually no newspaper experi ence but she was well known , chiefly for the legendary quality which shrouded her glamorous past .

A New England heiress, Cissy had married a Russian nobl eman , Count Joseph Gizycka in 1904. It soon became apparent that the Count had married Cissy for her money and the story of mistreatment at his hands , as well as the couple s fight over custody of their daughter--made the 1 social columns regularly. Beatings , kidnapping,.- flight and escape--all these ,adventurous ingredients added a romantic aura t o Cissy 's already flamboyant per sonality.

She dr essed extravagantly--spending her wealth on clothes ,

'· .- ,, -- '·· -- I I exo tic homes and hunting expeditions - -and fearlessly I

tackled the most aw esome of Washin gton 's personages .

On her firs t visit to the Herald office:

Cissy was wearing a big straw hat and she looked fierce . Th e Herald city room had been warned she might come , but the staffers were not prepared for the sigh t of her in the flesh , glower ing at them. A few stood up and grabbed for their coats, but most of them just stared. 'I suppose you think this is just a stunt !' she declared in a low withering vo ice. The type wr iters all stopped and nobody breathed� Then she said, 'Wel l even if you do , let's al l try to 36 ' put it over . ' :

The sum of Cissy 's newspaper knowledge came from

her casual conversations with brother Joe . Joseph Medill ,

:whose New York Daily News had achieved the largest news

37 paper circulation in the country (1.3 million daily ),

, tried to dissuade h.is sister from acquiring the Heral d.

' l :Cissy remained steadfast in her det ermination . "If she

·was going to fly at all , it was going to be by the seat of

'her pants . She di d know a few tricks - -some she had Ji)icked

·up from her family an d some she had figur ed ou t for her-

1 �self--and these she meant to exploit for all they were

' 38 worth," says her grandniece Alice A. Hoge .

Though Cissy 's sacrilegious sur vey of Washington

\notables --including her long-time friend Al ice Roosevelt--

I ) attracted a great deal of at tention , her news sense was '!

__ _ L_ !1 7

!unfo rtunately not of the same caliber as her courage : ! Some ob servers who have worked close to Mr s. Patterson say that she has a weakness for

accepting as truth the things that are told to her by important or semi - important persons , wh ether the revelat ions are made in the ghostly silences of Dower Hou se (Cis sy 's Wash ington home ) or el sewh ere. Sh e wil l, they say , in-:;tantly sur mi se that she has stumbled upon a tremendous story , and will order all troops into action wi th a sp ar e no -exp ense gesture, when a little quiet prel iminary

inquiry , involvin g no more than two 9:: three tele phone calls , could di sclose that she had been mi s led by the e)...rp a:1.siveness of her informant , or that she had, somehow , go t the wron g idea .

However , this def ect , if it exists , is surely

no t one on wh ich Mrs . Patterson has a �o�opoly . Publishers , many of whom in their hear ts fancy

thems elves as g:r eat reporters--just as , in Mr s. Patterson 's diagnosis , mo st politicians are di s appoint ed actors- -are carried away wh en they think 9 they have stumbled U? On a big sto ry . 3

Another dramatic perso�ality fel l heir to a pub -

) lishing domain when Frederick G. Bonfils died on February

1933, leavin g the famed Den ver Po st in the hands of lzI . , ! his daughter , Helen Bonfils. I Helen had led an extraordinar ily sheltered life !I wh ile her father was alive. �� en he died , she du tiful ly I j watched the paper closely but left its management in the

hands of Arm.e O'N eill , her father 's secretary , an d editor I i! ! William C. Sh epherd. Helen had other- mo ::e pressing matters jto attend to; for years her father had �rustrated her

: ambition to become an actress . Now , she threw herself into. J!t

�- ! this project , ta�ing lessons and acting in little theater I!g roups . She played bit parts in Denver 's Civic Theater in

Ijl 934 and 1935, and in 1936 married actor-director George

iSI omnes , an event wh ich promp ted her solitary int erfer ence

with the Po st 's editorial policy � In keeping with her i! I I father 1 s long-standing wish to ke ep the family name ab ove

I Helen asked editor Shepherd to l such common notoriety , limit. th e Po st 's coverage of her wedding to a single

paragraph on the society page .

Ab out this same time , a rival paper , the Rocky

News , 1 Mountain was employing a girl report er named Mary ! coyle (later Mary Coyle Chase) , who , in 1944', was awarded a Pulitzer for her play "Harvey ," the story o£ Elwood P.

, Dowd, a dr inking man with a tall wh it e rabbit as a constant

companion .

• In 1937 El eanor McClatch;x succeeded her father as I1 ! publisher of the Bee newsp ap er chain in Cal ifornia, an d, !iI n 1939, Do rothy Schiff entered the publishing scene by I - i 'buying the New York Post . Th e granddaughter of Jacob

Schiff , noted banker and philanthropist , Dorothy has

weathered newspap er mergers ' strikes and plung:Lng ad rev-

enue , intent up on keeping -che Post New Yo-rk' s one remaining

aft er noon daily . Wn en she began in 1939, she worked

the closely wi th editor Ted 0. Th ackery to make the Po st ;Jr

- �- i 1 kind o f a paper sh e thought it shou ld be . Her credo is I ttindependent , liberal thought and ideas in the Press . n40 i 190

FOOTNOTES FOR C! I/\PTEI< 'J J I I

1 Com£)i led :from U. S. Census reports, 1850-1960. 2 Emery, p • 633 . . op . sb.!.· ' 3 Fisher , cit., 16. £2.· p. 4 According to the Adve-ctising Hes earch Foundation Inc. , 1944 Report on ewspapers. �l , :::1Fishe r , p. 26 . 6 Co smopolitan Ma')azine, March 1932, 43 . p. 7 Ross, Ladies , pp . 352 -353 . 8 Mildred and Milton Lewis, Fa:nous Mo dern Newspaper Writers (New York: Do dd, Mead Co ., 1963), 94. & p. 9 Lewis , cit • , • 97 • £.E.. p 10 Ibid. , 101 . p. 11 Lewis, cit., 10 £.E.• p. 5. 12 Ibid. 1 3 "Lady Sportswriter , Newsweek , Mar ch 9, 1942, p � 55 . 14 Newsweek , cit . �· 1 5 Ibid. 16 Ross, Ladies , p. 463 . 17 Walter Howey (ed) Edito�s (Washington Square, Philadelphia: DavidFi McKayg)in Cog ., 1946), 82 . p. 18 Ib , p 8 • i 2:.. • 3 19 Ibid. , p • 8 5 • ,. f,;..,J��w.·�-·-- .....,...... -...... -��·- �...... ;..;,;...... :...... ��.�....__.�.- -

191

20John Hohenberg (ed. ) Th � Pulitze.[ Prize Story · (New York : Columb ia Univer sity Press , 1959 ), p. 33 . 21 Ibid. 22 Hohenb er g, £E.• cit., p. 34 . 23 Ibid. , 36. P • 24 11The Times Makes Changes ,'' Newsweek , Decemb er 1, 1941 , p. 66. 5 2 Ross, Ladies , p. 518. 26 Ibid. , p. 243 . 'J 7 � Be-tty Kirk, Coverin9 ME�x:ican Front : The the Battle o£ Eu rope versus America. (Norman , Oklahoma : University of Oklahoma Pr ess , 1942), p. xii . 2 8 · Ma.rion T • Sheehan , ....;T_h...;e;;___T_ifo.:.....;r_l_d;;;__a- .-:.t �H -o:,-m_..:,-..e :--:S_e_l�e-"c-t_i_o_n_s fr

Alfred A • Knopf , 1 9 56 ) , p • x • 29 Ibid. , p. xi. 30 Ibid. , p. 63. 31 Hohenberg, p. 296. 32 I nez R o Don 't Just Stand There (New York: b'o, David McKay Company , Inc., 1962), p. 4. 33 Ma.rgaret Bourke-Whi te, Portrait o.f My self (New York: Simon and Schuster , 1963), 217 . p. 34 Mo tt , �j story of American Journalism, p. 786. 35 . Marguer1.te Higgins , Wa£._i.:_n Ko:: ea : The Re2ort of a Woman Combat Correspondent (New York: Doubleday Co ., & Inc., 1951 ) 38-39. PP • 36 Alice Albright Hoge, Cissy Patter so� {New York: Random House, 196 6), 91 . p.

,, _ ...... 192

Ib id. , p. 89.

Stanley Walker , "Cissy a Newspa;? er Lady," is Saturday Evr.:ming Po st, May 6 , 1939 , p. 16.

Ro ss , Sons o-f Adam , p. 243 .

. 'i

'·" _..,_ CHAPTER IX

BEYOND EQUALITY: 1960-1972

As the decade of the Sixties dawned in America, a full 37.2 per cent of the country 1 s journalists were women.

Working around the clock, on every type o:f assignment, and in all parts of the world, 38,305 American women were interviewing tomorrow's headliners, attending "important events," writing feverishly or calling :frantically to beat a deadline, editing copy and laying out pages. Yet, despite this impressive abundance of activity, it is almost as difficult to identify those who have achieved

11professional and/or public recogni tion~ 1 in this era as it was in 1696.

The newswoman of the Sixties--the reporter on the beat, the society editor, copy editor or columnist-~is perhaps more visible today through sheer weight of numbers.

She has come a long way, achieving equality of sorts

( ••• though many doubt that they are paid on a par with their male colleagues), yet she is gnawed by the same frustration which plagued her nineteenth-century predecessors: Equality with men has never :really been the goal,

193 !If

j equa;ity o£ opportunity- -that illusive key to personal !1 potential--is the real .tar get .

In darker moments, unchal len g

i cessive days o.f d1�udgery , the newswom<3.n wonders to herself

i£ her sex is held against her . Frequently she has good

cause to su sp ect misplaced gallru>try wh en she sees a juicy

tip routed to a man by an editor who £ears that "a woman

couldn't handle it ." Yet th e 250 women whose names a?p ear

in the foregoing sections o£ this survey share more than a

common profession , each of them--in her own way--creat ed

her own opportunities . And so it is with those mentioned

,here, whose car eer s encompass every facet of th e news

world, £rom publishing and magazine editing to pioneering I '!

:new styles of reporting from Main Street to Vi etnam .

PUBLISHERS

Equality o f opportunity seems almost ab surd wh en .

mentione� in th e same breath with su ch names as Katherine

Graham , En id Haupt , or Dorothy Schi££ . ' Mrs. Gr aham stands at the helm o£ the Washington

Post Company ; this augus t position mai<:es her publisher o£

the Washing"i:on Post and �e��w eek magazine , an d own er o£

numerous tel evi sion and radio stations , not to ment ion a

wire service.

,_ .. ,, -- - -.· -- i Though she assumed this respons ibility only af ter

:tI he death her hu sband, former Po st publish er Ph ilip � of i ! Graham , Mr s. Graham handles the position with poise and i i good judgnent . She sits in on editorial conferences at the I I Po st and · Newsweek but "rarely or never" interferes with her

1 I! editors ' policies .

En id Hau2t, nuturing a new generation of reading I 1l . audi enc e, has put her magazine Seventeen in the black

,while many its competitors have folded. Mary King of

!PI atterson , until her retirement in 1969 , was considered the i ruling hand at the New York Daily News afte:r her husband ! , I Joseph 's dea. th . Her daught er , Alicia aD d her hu sb and Harry f·I ! Gu ggenheim, have taken up wh er e Mr s . Pat ter son left off I : making Newsday a smashing success .

Do rothy Schiff has kep t th e New York Post alive

and fairly healthy , wh ile Minneapolis ' Star -Tr ibune has

flourished under the leader ship of Joyce A. Swan .

Oveta Cul� Hobby it prob ably one of th e few women

publishers who real ly understands the wo rkings of her news -

paper from top to bottom . The own er of the Houston Po st ,

Mr s . Hobby is a veteran of several smaller newspapers.

MAGAZINES

In the 1960 's a great battle was waged in the

'·· - - -.- _ .,.._ 196

world. Long-time compet itors, McCall's and the Ladies Home

Journal , battled it out for circulation , their assorted

representatives resorting to every conceivable trick to

wrest new subscriber ship . Though some say the victory is

still undecided, others have conceded the prize to McCall's

under the able leadership of its first lady editor Shana

AlexandeJ: .

Nonetheless, even as these oc·t agenarian giants

fought to secure the readership of the "ave-cage American

woman and her family," other female journalist s were

drawing new pictures of what the American woman looks like .

If nothin g else, the Sixt ies brought to the slick

publication field a new awareness of "specialized audi 

ences ." The "American woman" has been minutely analyzed

and subdivi ded so that today mo st of the major mags are

comp eting for some very select groups of female species-

ones they can describe and deliver to their advertis ers .

Helen Gurly Brown 's Cosmopolitan was one of the first to

identify a potential ly profitable stratum and to make good

its delivery to the advertiser.

�� en Miss Brown took control of Cosmo in 1965, she

set her sights on the single working girl, ag(:�d eighteen

to thirty-four, and reshuffled the old 11fiction , fashion

. and sex" formula of mass women 1 s magazines to emphasize

'· _ ...... -$� ----·----�.. ...!,-�------·----�------·---- ·-

197

the lattet· . f\ recent ad for the magazine capsulizes the

� rea.dec 's ideal sel£ -image :

girl can do almost anything she really wants A to , don 't you agJ::·ee? She can ta::1 instead o.f burn, look sexy but also look like a lady , ha ve a job that because she's smart , and atill stay PAYS fascinatin g to men. I've done all these things , and thank goodness there's one magazine that seems to under stand me--the girl who wants eveJ::-ything out o£ life. I guess you could say I'm that Cosmopolitan Girl. 2

In reality Miss Brown and her crew make capital of

the fact that mo st of their readers "are not knockouts •••

3 .are unsure of themselves .••ar e searching £or a man." The

·fantastic success o£ Miss Brown 's book, Sex and the SingLe

' Giri , proved the app eal of a 11sophisticated , older sister 11

app roach to the mo dern girl 's problems : Thus , Cosmo has been carefully designed to imitate this style and with

good results. Just three years af ter Miss Brown assumed

the editorial chair, Cosmo 's circulation increased sixteen per cent (to 900,000 ) an d its ad revenue more than doubled

( $3,600,000) .

In Novemb er 1971, soon after the release of her latest book entitled The Cosmo Girl 's Guide to Etiquette,

Miss Brown received an award £rom the University of

: southern California' s Schooi of Journal ism and its Alumni

Association "for her contributions to journalism as women ob viously wanted t •••fo r hex success as an editor ••and i.

--· _..,_ for her ab ility to 3ave a magazine which had wh at looked

4 like terminal illness."

What 's the secret of Cosmo 's su ccess? "It's not

sexiness ," says Mi ss Brown . " Th ou gh we are sexy . It 's

not emot ionalism, though we are emo tional . It 's that

ev erything we do is taken ap ar t forty-two times and put

back togeth er again . Th er e are 7 4 5 man hour s invested in

5 each article we print ."

More impor tant ; perhaps , is that each article also

reflects the editor 's point of view ; Cosmo is frequently

describ ed as an on -going interpretation o£ Helen Gur ly

Brown 's philosophy o£ life. Mis s Brown herself is candid

in her appraisal of her own tal ent : "I have a tiny gift

of making things no t boring. I know wh at to leave out and

6 wh at to put in ."

To keep readers o f the new Et iquette book "un- I!b ored, . " Miss Brown and co-editor Gael Gr eene (former reporter £or the New Yo rk Post ) put in such chapters as

"How to Pay for a Man" and "The Etiquette o£ No t Getting i ! Pregnant ." Miss Brown also made journalistic history o£ a

· sort wh en she ran the fir st mal e nude centerfold in a mass

women 's magazine in Ap ril 1972 .

Th e 197 0's, like the 1870's, has sp awned a pro -

li£eration o£ women 's magazines ridin g the crest o£ stil l

·-· -- �- -- anot�er women ' s mo vement . Once again these publicat ions ! I are providing fertile ground fo� � new crop of newswomen jtI o develop their talents and, incidentally, a forum with I ! which to capture the national spotlight . The New Woman , Prog1�essive Woman and Everywo:man

I : are a few of the mo st su ccessful of these magazines at the l . I national level , but the emergence of MS . is pr obably the

mo st closely assoc iated with the Liberat ion Move- I Wo men 's

ment of the j 197 0's . ! MS . pub lisher El i zabeth For sling Harris described

its birth : "Th e mo vement de served a channel . We put a

I toe into the pond and found it to be deep an d very broad. " 7 ·

Just how. deep was dramat ically demonstrat ed wh en the first

issue was published late in Januar y Th e total press 1972 : I .j I run of 300, 000 copies was sold out the same day it hit th e

newsstands an d quick-witted sp eculators, who bought in .MS.. . I bunches at $ 1.50 each the first day , were sel ling them I across the nation thereafter at U?wards of $ 15.00 per copy . I This sight -unseen-success however , is due in large !I pa . rt to the reputation of it s editor Gloria Steinem. Wh en I I Gloria vis ited Los Angeles just prior to the MS . debut, I !the Lo 3 An geles Times summarized her triumphs : 1971

•.•spoke at the Harvard Law Revi ew dinn er , wrote Time's essay on th e Women 's Liberation 200

Movement, made the covers of Newsday and McCalls, hosted the David Frost television show, got a standing ovation at the National Press Club in Washington and earned rousing accolades from farm ers' wives in Kansas on her grassroots trip this way. 8

Gloria, a Smith College graduate who spent two years {1956-58) in India studying at the University of

Delhi and the University of Calcutta, started her career smack dab in the middle of the American "Establishment."

Gloria took a job as an officer of the Independent Research

Service (a Central Intelligence Agency).

The Service paid her plane fare to the Soviet-sponsored Helsinki Youth Festival where she directed three foreign-language newspapers, organized a press service for foreign journal ists, and combated the Soviet influence. She augmented her press activity, veterans of the festivak say, by somehow always showing up in her most persuasive form whenever it was rumored that any Communist delegate was about to defect. 9

In 1969 Gloria again went "undercover," but this time there were no government secrets involved and very little cover: Gloria infiltrated New York's Playboy Club for Show Magazine, "using the name Marie Ochs, Gloria had answered a classified ad, survived two Bunny interviews, attended Bunny lectures and read her Bunny Bible, had been fitted for false Bunny eyelashes and then spent three weeks having her tail tweaked. 1110 20 1

GLoria fol lowed up "The Bunny Tale" with "The

i Beach Book" and wrote £or various publications including

Es uire, New York Times , g Life , Harn er's, Vo oue, GlAmoar ,

, as a staff wr iter £or NBC's television show "That Was The

Week That Was ." At the same time she was turning out

scripts, she was also writing a weekly column for New York , Magazine entitled "The City Politic."

Gloria's New York roommate, painter Barbara Nessim,

recalls:

It was always work, work, work. Gloria wrote and rewrote. Writing didn 't come easy to her . We were as different as night and day . I was always man-addicted. I always talked about g<�t ting married. Gloria never did. Oh she dated a lot, men were always falling in love with her . But I think Gloria loved humanity more than human beings . She was always more interested in world love than human love . 11

The list of men "who were always falling in love with her" include some of the most influential figures in· the country . Among those who openly admit their infatua- tion are: Ted Sorensen, Mike Nichol s, Tom Guinzburg,

Herb Sargent and John Kenneth Galbraith who attributes her rise to "brains , comic perception and extremely good 12 looks ."

Es u re writer Leonard Levitt opines : g j "Her ambitious classmates at Smith married men who looked like they 202

would make it; those girls were bred with a special in-

stinct for success. Gloria married not men but movements

and is just as ambitious for them." 13

When Miss Steinem's grandmother died in 1940, the

Toledo Blade called her "a remarkable Toledo woman who 14 helped to shape the feminist movement in this country."

Pauline Steinem, a contemporary of Victoria Woodhull, and

president of the Ohio Women's Suffrage Association from

1908 to 1911, would undoubtedly approve her grand-

daughter's preeminence in the movement of the '70s.

~Angeles Times women's editor Jean Sharley

Taylor summed up Gloria's appeal in this way:

Lean, blue-jeaned, gold-ringed, cool, in the manner of young women. Feminine, good-humored, at ease with men and 37, in league with middle year women. Tolerant, human, and understanding of the problems of older women. Somebody who can be relied on to step up to the line and make 899 consecutive jump shots on behalf of women. Some body who can dump-shot such reputedly chauvinistic types as Henry Kissinger. But a woman who doesn't wear gym shoes or a number on her back. Instead, an intellectual who can speak of things of the heart and mind that most women can't articulate.15

Miss Steinem is just as eloquent when speaking as

I h . Is e ~son paper. A male reporter queried "What do you see

!within 50 years? Is it possible that women will dominate lif the present liberation momentum continues?n ! I "I think not," said Gloria. "Change should be L ______---- ______j 203

r-····----·------··------··------·-- --- iorganic. By prescriptioning it, we limit our minds. I ,Women don't want to imitate the male role which is neither

1 compassionate nor flexible.'' But she defiantly defends I

·the movement from the label of a passing fad: "The women 1 s 16 movement isn't a Hula Hoop; it isn't going to be over."

ACTIVIST REPORTING

Miss Steinem's personalized approach to journal-

ism, while reminiscent of Victoria Woodhull and in the

best tradition of Nellie Bly, is construed by many as an

· example of another modern-day reporting trend in which

~ women are playing a large part.

Dr. J. K. Hvistendahl, associate professor of i journalism at Iowa State University, spotlighted this new

trend in 1970-·-dubbing it the "fourth revolution of

American journalism." In Dr. Hvistendahl's view, America's

press has undergone these major changes: 1) the freeing

of the American press from the threat of control by gov-

ernment, 2) the growth of the objective press, 3) inter-

. pretive reporting "in which the reporter reported the

facts objectively, but attempted to explain them or inter-

, pret them in a way that would make them meaningful to the

reader and listener," and 4) acttivist reporting. Th e jl>Urna list ic act ivist , s;\ys Dr . llvistenu.-l.hl : '-.. :

• .. e b liev�s he has a righ t (indeed an o� liga tion ) to becom� personal ly and emotio�al ly in

va lved in the events of the d3.y . II<:'! believes he should proclaim his bel iefs if he wishes , an d that it is not only permissible bu t .desirable for him to cover the news .f rom the vi evvpoint of his own intellectual conuni tment . He looks at traditional reporting as being steril e , and he considers re porters who refuse to conunit th ems elves to a point of view as being cynical or hypocritical . The activist believes that attempting to describe events of a complicat ed wo rld obj ectively seldom results in the truth for anybody--the source, the reporter , or the reader or listener . l7

In 1968 Chicago journalists covering the Demo -

cratic Nat ional Convention in that city, feeling "'c hat "the

local papers had suppres sed stories abou.t the city's

police force in an effort to protect Mayor Richard J.

Dal ey ,"18 ·introduced th eir own Chicago Journal ism Review .

(eire. 6,000) to criticize such tactics . Since then re-

·port �rs in Detroit , Minneapolis , New Yo rk, San Francisco

and elsewh er e have threatened to launch similar reviews

of their city 's press .

In 1969 the clash between .object ivity an d activism

was vividly illustrated by a £ath er -and-dau ghter debate:

Sydney Gruson , assistant to the publisher at the New York

Times stated : "Mayb e I'm old-fashioned, but I feel very

strongly about the purity of news columns . Pure o�j ec-

tivity might no t exist , but you have to strive for it ,-- -- 19 anyway ." Hi s d.J.ughter, twenty-one year old Raleigh ,

Ij N. News and Ob server reporter Kerry Gruson disagr eed : I c.

I "Obj ect ivity is a my·th . Th ere come s a point when you have l !I 20 i . to take a stand. After that you try to be fa�r ." • I i

New York Po st reporter Bryna Taubman and a col -

!I league were fired wh en they asked that their by-lines be I j taken off two stories they di d not believe in . Miss ; Taubman had been assigned to write on Mr s. Gil Hodges ,

wife of the New York Mets manager ; she did the story but

ar gued that "women shouldn ' t be in the news solely because

. 2 1 of their marriage to famous men ."

Miss Taubman al so made a case for act ivist reportin g as she pointed out the difficulties of obj ectivity

under some circumstances :

I can't be ob jective today . Wh en I go to a emonstration I'm as likely to get hit over the �head as the demonstrator .

Anyone who has been to college in the last 10 year s and co vers a civi l right s demonstration i s personally involved . The older g.�neration of re porters were just fool ing themsel ves and the public . I'm aware of my prejudices , so 11 b·2nd I' 22 over backwards to make sure my story is fair .

Sitting in the middle of this controversy is the televis ion journal ist . Can a reporter standing "at the scene" before a ca!Tlera remain objec·tive? A growing number of tel evis ion newsvvomen face this di l emma .

-. -- 206

BROADCASTING

In 1960, with three times as many radio and tele

vision stations as newspapers in the United States, tele

vision reporting became an increasingly important field

in American journalism.

Women have played a small part in this broad

casting phenomenon since the beginning. When crackling

crystal sets first introduced headphones into the American

home, Nellie Revell--a former C~icago Times and Chronicle

reporter and circus publicist--filled the air waves with

news of the entertainment world. Later, as the radio be

came more sophisticated, Mary Margaret McBride--who once

hunted crowned heads in Europe for the~~ Mail-

attracted a sizeable listening audience with her "Martha

Deane Reports to Women" in the early 1930's.

Nevertheless, as with the print media, women re

porters have had to re-demonstrate their newsgathering

abilities over and over and still the door to broadcast

journalism is only partially ajar to the "fair sex."

In 1965 it was considered news when it was an

nounced that Li~ Trotta and Marya McLaughlin had joined the

NBC and CBS local outlets in New York City, even though 207

Pauline Frederick was assigned the United Nations beat by

NBC as early as 1953.

In 1969 and 1970 a dramatic upsurge in the number

of women correspondents in network and local stations could

be noted; though in actual figures they accounted for less

than two dozen broadcast reporters across the nation these

women began to enjoy even greater public and professional

recognition than their sisters in print: Betsy Barnette

in St. Louis, Gail Christian in Los Angeles, Linda Coble

in Honolulu, Pia Lindstrom in New York, Gloria Rojas in

Newark and Aline Saarinen in France.

Still, for the most part it has been an uphill

struggle for all of them to achieve greater standing than

the syrupy 11 Weather Girl11 or "women's news specialist."

"Some males have an ingrained belief," says

Michele Clark, of WBBM in Chicago, "that there are certain

things a woman cannot do or understand."23 Connie Chung,

of Washington's WTTG, agrees and adds: "I hate fashion

stories. Give me a tear-gas, rock-throwing riot any

time. 1124

Proving to station news directors that they have

not made a mistake in hiring a woman has often meant

double work for the woman, at least at first. Pia

Lindstrom (Ingrid Bergman's daughter) recalls her first

.~-··••··-----....__. __...... tlt•ol.•*--...... •••"••••-+lo...,..._ .... -#a.,..,.~.._,-.,. .. f.,.., .... ,.,....,,._.,_,..J_~.._-•_,..._,, .... ,...... -,..-..... ~ .... ~ •--..,... •~•_.__.._ •..,._...... ' 208

New York broadcast job:

It was really sink or swim and I really worked hard. I stayed late often and I watched everybody else. I spent all of my time with the film editors in the back, not only watching my pieces but everybody else's to see how it was done.25

Richard Salant, president of CBS News, concedes that the woman's role is a difficult one:

It's our fault--management's--that the net works do not employ more women and that they are frequently assigned to only certain types of stories once they are hired. But women have to fight back. They have to make their presence felt. They must not let our editors or producers segregate them from the general flow of news. They must p.];am.or.~ for general assignments. 26

Lucille Rich, of New York City's WCBS-TV, took Mr.

Salant's advice; Despite her boss' reluctance to assign her, Lucille insisted on covering the story of a motor- cycle gang which was terrorizing a New York suburb. News director Ed Joyce recalls: "I was afraid Lucille might get manhandled by those apes but she was adamant. She came back--intact--with a topnotch story. Now she gets 27 whatever comes up, no questions asked·. u

A few outstanding young women have moved beyond the realm of correspondence work in news broadcasting, among them: Donna Yarborough, a film-camera operator for

Dallas' KERA-TV; Christine Huneke, a documentary producer 209

for Time-Life, and gaysa Bonow, producer of WBZ-TV's

(Boston) public affairs program "For Women Todaya"

However, some newswomen see their future role in broadcast journalism diluted by tokenisme Christine Lund, a San Francisco reporter, complains: "Everybody's got a 1128 woman. It's like having a dogo

"This allegation is strengthened by the widespread practice of hiring women reporters who also happen to be members of racial minorities," says Newsweek magazine.

At the three network :flagship stations in New York, for example, seven women broadcast news. Five are black, one is Puerto Rican and one (Pia Lindstrom) is white. Three of Cleveland's five reporters are black and so is one of Detroit's two women broadcasters. Not surprisingly, news direc·tors insist that they have no quotas either for minorities or :females, but many of the women themselves disagree. One of Boston's two black women reporters claims that her sex and race 'absolutely' won her a job.29

Nanc~ Dickerson, perhaps the best known :female broadcaster in America and one of the highest paid (when she left NBC to join CBS in 1970, Variety estimated her annual income at $80,000), adds her voice to the charge:

"Every station in America feels it must have one black and one white woman. With a black woman they take care of

30 their tokenism in one fell swoop." l "Hou se ch icks" aside , even tho se �v omen who have ! made it to the top, like Mar lene Saunders, ABC 's top- !rI anked newswoman who achieved a maj or br eakthrough when she

!/ "anchored" the ABC Weeken d News in the Sp ring of 1971, ar e i I . ! still dub iou s abou t a woman 's chanc es of making it to the . I ! Hunt ley-Brink:ley-Chronkite level . "They will always come iui p with some theory ab out why it cannot work," says

:MI ar lene, "I'm not holding my breath ."31

One such theory was vo iced recently by Reuven I Frank , presiden t of l\1J3 C News : "I have the strong feeling lI that audiences ar 0 less prepared to accept news from a woman 's voice than £rom a man's." 32

Meanwhile, a cho ru s o£ femal e vo ices have been I . reportin g on United Stat es ' interests ab road. 'I �0 RE IGN CORRESPONDENCE

"I am probably the wo r ld' s only workin g girl with

:a Russian policeman guarding my front do or and Tass

Ijt e . letypes' near my bedroom, " reminisced Al ine Mosby , UP I

!cI orrespondent to Mo scow since Feb ru ary 19, 1959.

Some days it isn't quite so poi�1ant to be I an Amer ican wo�nan wo rkin g in Mo s cow . Sone da s it 's frustrating . The day cus toms co� fis�cated our film arid my vi sa f'or Leningcad TV was issued so late that I mis sed the ••• train Bu t I rememb er ma!ly happy mo ments . Wat ching 221

grandmothers bringing white Easter cakes, deco·· rated with fat red paper roses, to be blessed by priests in the timeless churches. Or being spellbound by the dreamlike poetry of the fragile ballerina Galina Ulanova dancing Giselle. There have been thrilling times, as when Yuri Gagarin soared into space as mankind's first cosmonaut. And frightening days, such as the afternoon a rock whizzed pa3t my head in an anti-American demon stration.3

Covering China from behind the Great Wall in

February 1972 as part of the elite "Peking 87" were

Barbara Walters, hostess of NBC's "Today" Show, ~Wells, for Storer, and Hel_~ Thomas, representing UPI.

Miss Thomas, a veteran White House correspondent, called President Richard M. Nixon's China trip the most exciting story she has ever covered:

Everything was news, and it was a joy to have my editors ask via trans-Pacific satellite: 'What's Pat wearing?' 'What's the menu?'; and 'What does your hotel room look like?' This was the first time they ever cared.34

It was apparently a case of imposed 11 activist

I don't believe any of the reporters on board have ever been as subjective in all of their years of newspapering. And it was permissible, with editors asking for more and more. Everywhere you turned there was a story, starting with a des cription of your hotel room ••• While reporters were not getting hard news, their personal daily diaries were making headlines in our local papers- how they felt, what they saw, what they ate were all grist for the mill.35 222

11 It might not have been the week that changed the

I ;world," Miss Thomas concluded, 11 but I believe it was a I . . . . ,,36 great leap forward 1n the r1ght d1rect1on.

Supplying news to Americans abroad has been the

·job o£ Lillian O'Connell, editor o£ UPI's Ocean Press

since 1951. Mrs. O'Connell provides the ships o£ the

United States Lines, Holland-American Lines, Moore-

'McCormack Lines and American Export Lines with UPI filed

spot news £or newspapers published aboard ship during the

.voyage. She also supplies sea-going editors with features

relating to the countries on the vessel's itinerary and

other items o£ interest to passengers.

Mrs. O'Connell, a gJ~aduate of the University o£

Missouri's School o£ Journalism, relates that a favorite

story about a well-known newspaper editor crossing the

'Atlantic.

Seeing passengers still searching their copies o£ the ship's newspaper late in the afternoon for something they may have missed in the morning, the editor remarked that he wished his newspap,er at home was read with such thoroughness and intensity. 37 11 I 1 ve always suspected this story was dreamed up

by Ocean Press' advertising-sales sta££, '' admitted Mrs.

O'Connell. "However aprocryphal it may be, it does have

a basis in truth." 38 223

Maggie Higgins, who covered the liberation o£

Buchenwald and the capture o£ Hitler's Berchtesgaden re-

treat at the end of World War II, became the Herald-

Tribune's Berlin bureau chie£ at age twenty-six. She then

defied General Douglas MacArthur by covering Korea £rom

the front lines and was one of the first correspondents to

report on the "non-war'' in South Vietnam in 1962. Globe-

trotting £or Newsday, Maggie wrote columns supporting the

regime of Ngo Dinh Diem during the early years o£ u.s.

involvement in the Asian country.

Another woman who was there £rom the first was

Beverly Deepe, a £reelancer who decided ·to make her base o£

operations Saigon until another world hot spot developed.

Beverly quickly developed high-level contacts among the

Vietnamese which eventually won her an exclusive scoop:

When Premier Nguyen Khanh tried to reestablish his politi-

cal standing in 1962 by taking a militant anti-American

stand, he gave the story to Miss Deepe.

Beverly, who was twenty-six when she began cover-

ing the war, notes:

The biggest challenge as a woman corres pondent is that most o£ the American troops ex pect me to be a living symbol of the wives and sweethearts they left at home. They expect me to be typically ffinerican, despite cold water instead of cold cream, fatigues instead o£ £rocks.