Professional Anxiety: African American Female Journalists Writing Their Way to Legitimacy, 1880-1914 by Monica Clare Mulcahy A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Monica Clare Mulcahy, 2017 ii Abstract Situated at the juncture of black periodical studies, periodical studies more broadly, the history of American journalism, and black women’s historiography, Professional Anxiety contributes to a growing trend in scholarship that explores black female journalists’ writing. This study considers the meaning of professional legitimacy for African American women, and their complex work to claim it, in the press at the turn of the century. Focusing on leading black female journalists, including Gertrude Mossell, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Lucy Wilmot Smith, and Addie Hunton, I argue that their negotiation of professional standards is made evident through their writing on journalism and on the black domestic worker, a controversial figure within the black press and broader turn-of-the-century American society due to her centrality to such pressing issues as migration, education, labour, and civil rights. Whereas extant scholarship on middle-class black women’s writing on the black domestic worker often positions it as classist or emerging from social reform work and the black women’s club movement, I contend that for black female journalists addressing this figure constituted both an important strategy toward solidifying their tenuous claim to professional legitimacy even as they used it to challenge dominant notions of professionalism within journalism. My project explores black female journalists’ efforts to negotiate their marginalization by aligning themselves with legitimizing collectives while simultaneously working to redefine their roles within them. Chapter One examines the ways that, through their writing on the profession, they simultaneously upheld models of respectable journalism within the black press that promoted racial collectivity, yet undermined them by championing a careerist, feminist collectivity with other black female journalists, even over loyalty to “the race.” In the subsequent chapters, I build on this analysis by interrogating black female journalists’ navigation of gendered iii and racialized meanings of professionalism, not only within the black press but also within American journalism, through their writing on the black domestic worker. In both Chapters Two and Three, I argue that this strategic negotiation of journalistic professionalism often came at the cost of creating a dichotomous relationship with black domestic workers that undermined their labour movement. I argue in Chapter Two that black female journalists endeavoured to rhetorically manage their proximity to this figure in order to construct themselves as informational journalists, a significant move given that this prestigious form of journalism was widely racialized as white and gendered as male. In Chapter Three, I read their engagement with the black domestic worker within the context of the “servant problem” debates as an attempt to lay claim to markers of professionalism, which were denied to them through systemic oppression, and yet were increasingly privileged in an era of professionalizing American journalism. iv Acknowledgements Financial support from the University of Alberta and Social Science and Humanities Research Council has been essential to my completion of this project. I want to thank my committee members, Susan Smith, for her keen editorial eye, and Susan Hamilton, for the fascinating Victorian periodicals course that inspired my research topic. Thanks in particular to Teresa Zackodnik for being a consistently engaged supervisor who pushed me to write a more complex dissertation. To the members of my writing group, Melissa Stephens, Lisa Ann Robertson, Louise Harrington, and Brianna Wells: your patience and support helped keep me on track during many difficult moments, and you inspired me with your own passion for research and writing. To my parents and siblings: I’m endlessly grateful to you for fostering in me a love of reading, writing, and ideas, which started me on the path toward this degree. To my partner, Todd Merkley: It is one of the joys of my life to have made you proud. Thank you for always believing I could do this, and for helping me get here. v Table of Contents Introduction 1-26 Chapter One: Collectivism and Careerism in Writing by and about the Black Female Journalist 27-73 Chapter Two: The City, the Black Female Body, and Disembodied, Dislocated Journalism 74-123 Chapter Three: Professionalizing through the “Servant Problem” 124-168 Conclusion 169-176 Works Cited 177-204 1 Professional Anxiety: African American Female Journalists Writing Their Way to Legitimacy, 1880-1914 Introduction On 8 March 1906, T. Thomas Fortune’s The New York Age (1887-1953), a leading black weekly, pronounced the “domestic service problem […] the paramount issue with us at this time” and declared: “Our newspapers all along the line would do the race an inestimable service by taking up this question” (“Domestic Service” n.p.). As the Age’s coverage indicates, domestic work1 and the black domestic worker in particular were subjects of intense scrutiny within and beyond the pages of the black press,2 in part because of the role this figure played within the 1 In this project, I refer to women who carried out domestic work for pay as “domestic workers” or “domestic labourers,” rather than the commonly used turn-of-the-century term “servant,” to highlight the physically demanding nature of this occupation and to acknowledge the black domestic workers who condemned “servant” as connotative of slavery (Sutherland 125). “Domestic workers” or “domestic labourers” indicates women because they comprised the majority of all domestic workers and because this project specifically addresses black women’s evolving role in the occupation (Katzman 283). “Domestic work” or “domestic labour” encompassed a wide range of specialized positions that differed in wages, prestige, and/or day-to-day tasks, including housekeeper, cook, lady’s maid, nursemaid, parlor maid, chambermaid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundress, and maid-of-all-work (Clark-Lewis, Living In 141-142; Sutherland 89-94). I will occasionally address these subsections of domestic labour in more detail, but for the most part I make use of these umbrella terms. I also often refer interchangeably to “employers” and “white Americans” because the majority of the people who hired black domestic labourers were white, though the wealthiest African Americans occasionally employed them (Hunter 110; Mack 62). Finally, this project primarily addresses black and white domestic workers because this racial divide dominated the “servant problem” debate upon which this project focuses as central to black female journalists’ negotiation of the profession. 2 Throughout this project, I refer to the black press to denote periodicals that were primarily published, edited, written, distributed and read by African Americans, and to the white press to similarly signify periodicals that were primarily produced, circulated and consumed by white Americans. Though they were two distinct and often oppositional cultural institutions, the black and white press did not operate in isolation from each other, and the line between the two was neither fixed nor stable. For example, Ellen Gruber Garvey argues in Writing with Scissors that it was vital for African Americans to read white periodicals in order to ascertain what was written about them, both because of its news value and because of the potential to utilize this writing to monitor and criticise the white press’s racist assertions (133). Furthermore, Eric Gardner and Joycelyn Moody query whether “recognizing the work 2 “servant problem,” a colloquial phrase that referred to three interconnected concerns: that there were not enough domestic workers, that those available to hire were not “good servants,” and that the unstandardized nature of domestic work rendered it a dysfunctional occupation (Katzman 37- 38; Smith, “Regulating” 865-866). The national contest surrounding the “servant problem” was dominated by middle- and upper-class whites, including politicians, educators, and employers, and “took place not just on the women’s pages of local newspapers but also in a host of magazines, newspapers, professional journals, and published muckracking investigations” (May 18). African American professionals also joined the debate about the black domestic worker, including social reformers, educators, social scientists, and journalists and editors (Ryan 91; Higginbotham 216). I would argue that, for these black professionals, the black domestic worker did not simply signify a key factor in the “servant problem,” but also a crucial figure in the most contentious issues facing black communities across the country, such as labour, education, civil rights, and geographic and economic mobility. As I will explore, for the black women who increasingly pursued journalism during this era, their writing on the black domestic worker was informed not only by the larger debate surrounding this figure but also by their marginalized position within the profession. In this project, I take up black female journalists’ attempts to claim professional standing through their columns, editorials and articles on journalism