Copyright by Margaret Frances Thomas 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Margaret Frances Thomas certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THROUGH THE LENS OF EXPERIENCE: AMERICAN WOMEN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHERS Committee: ________________________________ Dustin Harp, Supervisor ________________________________ James B. Colson ________________________________ Don Carleton ________________________________ Robert Jensen ________________________________ Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez THROUGH THE LENS OF EXPERIENCE: AMERICAN WOMEN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHERS by Margaret Frances Thomas, B.F.A.; M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2007 For all women newspaper photographers: Past, present, and future. For Julianne Newton, Ph.D. who lit the spark of learning. For David Thomas, who kept the home fire burning. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the women in this study who took time from their busy schedules to open their homes and their lives to me, a stranger. The collegial bonds of women in newspaper photojournalism are strong, as anyone who has ever attended the annual Women in Photojournalism conference can attest. By sharing their life stories and permitting the use of their names, the participants became mentors for younger women seeking connections to our collective past. Thanks also to my dissertation committee, Dustin Harp, chair; James B. Colson; Don Carleton; Robert Jensen and Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, whose input was invaluable. Len Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, who approved a three-year leave-of-absence to study at the University of Texas at Austin, deserves special thanks because without his generosity this dissertation would have remained unwritten. Don Graham, president of The Washington Post Company, also offered encouragement and support. His “high fives” in the newsroom hallway were always appreciated. Someone once compared the speed at which a transcript can be completed with the slow progress of a glacier. My brother Jerry Sandahl, Anna Mae Patterson, and Judy Holloway of the Center for American History helped transcribe the taped interviews, a labor for which I cannot thank them enough. I especially thank my husband David Thomas who spend many hours paginating the text, a task not easily accomplished. Ultimate thanks to three strong women in my life: My grandmother Ebba Nordstrom Walters, my mother Frances Walters Sandahl, and Judy Press, who gave wise council during difficult times. v THROUGH THE LENS OF EXPERIENCE: AMERICAN WOMEN NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHERS Publication No. __________ Margaret Frances Thomas, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisor: Dustin Harp As eyewitnesses to history, American women newspaper photographers occupy ringside seats as they cover local, national or international events. Their names are credited under countless images printed in daily and weekly papers, yet viewers seldom consider how the private lives of individual women intersect with their profession. Regrettably their narratives are absent from most photographic and journalism histories. Female news photographers constitute less than 25% of this male-dominated profession. To comprehend how newsroom culture informed both professional and personal experience, extensive life histories were collected from thirty women who vi consented to participate in this study. As a means of painting a more complete picture of issues encountered during their careers, the group was chosen to reflect geographical location, age, ethnicities, and sexual preference. Participants were asked how they balanced career aspirations, personal relationships, and self-worth in context of the changing roles of women. What choices have they made? What compromises? Did their experiences change over decades or do some issues remain essentially the same? What kind of discrimination, if any, did they experience in their job and how did they respond? Did ethnic cultures or social mores clash with their career choice? Also explored were statements regarding education, parental professions, marital status, family dynamics, life changes, and stressors. On assignment and in the newsroom their presence has helped change social assumptions but because their profession straddles both journalism and photography, researchers have ignored much of their work. Naomi Rosenblum, author of A History of Women Photographers, cites only a few newspaper photographers and describes pictures produced by women photographers in the 1940s and 1950s as “pedestrian” in quality. Current photographic history is not false, but rather one-sided. Stories shared by the women of this study, whose collective experience spans over fifty years, offer insights to young women who will be working as news photographers in the future and refute benighted scholarly assumptions that women newspaper photographers have no history worth remembering. vii Contents v Acknowledgements vi Abstract viii Contents ix The Kodak Girl 1 Introduction 14 Who Cares 30 A Scattered History 45 Setting the Stage 56 Stray Women, Photography, and True Womanhood, 1865-1900 73 News Photography 80 Pioneering Women in Newspaper Photography, 1900-1950 97 Transitions, 1950-1965 111 Making It in a Man’s World, 1965-2000 134 Mothers and Others 154 Women and Power, A Portrait 160 Conclusion 172 Appendix A 175 Appendix B 182 Bibliography 192 Vita viii The Kodak Girl She is delicate and sweet, She is pretty and petite, Her hair is either fluffy or in curl; And a man of any taste Would go far to clasp her waist While her dainty ankles made your senses whirl. When I see her calm and bland With a Kodak in her hand Preparing to take a snapshot, sun or rain, My eyes have snapped her face In its witchery and grace And have printed it in colors on my brain. How I hope that in her glee She has had a shot at me With the Kodak which she caries in her hand. For I know my photograph in her eyes will loving laugh When she puts it on the mantle in a stand. William E. S. Fales Photo Beacon (February 1902) ix I Introduction The eventual path a woman takes is, in large measure, a function of the familial and education environment in which she is struggling. Mary Belenky, 1986 My Story In many ways this dissertation is a response to a wager my late father proposed. The scene: Minneapolis, 1959. After driving me to college to begin my freshman year at the Minneapolis School of Art, my parents were about to depart for the long journey home to northern Minnesota. Before sliding into the driver’s seat of his car, he turned and said, “I bet you $10 you don’t last one semester.” My father expected me to fail. I stared at him – too Lutheran to feel anger and too naïve to comprehend the larger implication of such a negative statement. But in his defense, what success could he reasonably expect from a daughter who showed no talent as a secretary, teacher, or nurse? Who was introverted and immersed herself in drawing? By the time I finished my Master of Fine Arts degree in 1965 my father had yet to pay off the bet, and died by his own hand a year later. I remember images of the funeral to this day. The sky was overcast, a cold wind blew and the pastor’s white vestments billowed in the breeze. The townsmen dressed in black suits with Masonic aprons tied at the waist consoled my mother. My father, lying in his coffin, seemed to me the remnants of an earthen vessel. I mused, “If I struck it with a hammer, it would split into shards.” Feeling detached from family grief, I longed for a camera. 1 A Small Beginning At age three I snapped my first picture. While visiting my great-uncle at his cottage in Maine, I watched waves crash on the rocky coastline and begged my mother to let me take a photo with her black plastic box Brownie camera. I still possess that small shaky deckle-edged image. But after that initial impulse to record what I saw on film, I didn’t pick up a camera again for another 17 years. I preferred to draw the pictures I saw in my head rather than snap them. Then as part of my major in the newly created Graphics Design curriculum at art school, I was required to study photography. Because I had watched a television drama about her fight with Parkinson’s disease, I knew about Margaret Bourke-White but cameras held no fascination for me. I wanted to be an illustrator, and nearly left school because of this requirement. But my mother’s reason prevailed (“Why don’t you try it? You might like it.”), and with the help and encouragement of Joe Zimbrolt, our photography professor, I discovered the perfect medium through which I could communicate. After receiving my graphic design degree in 1963, I was still unsure which career path to follow, so I enrolled in the master of fine arts program in photography at Ohio University. Clarence White, Jr., the son of a well-known Pictorialist photographer, chaired the department, and Betty Truxell, a former magazine photographer, who taught the picture story classes became my mentor. I loved taking pictures of people, and knew I had finally found my bliss (Joseph Campbell, 1988 pp. 120, 149). No one warned me that finding a job in photojournalism in the mid ‘60s might be difficult for a woman. What did I know? After all, both Margaret Bourke-White and Betty Truxell had cracked the gender barrier. I didn’t know that Huey Miller, a gruff cigar-chewing picture editor at The Washington Post who would never consider hiring a female photographer was about to retire. 2 The Road to Washington After graduating from Ohio University in 1965, I shopped my portfolio around Minneapolis and Chicago with no results.