Women and Journalism

Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, Carole Fleming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134496198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Women and Journalism offers a rich and comprehensive analysis of the roles, status and experiences of women journalists in the United States and Britain.

Drawing on a variety of sources and dealing with a host of women journalists ranging from nineteenth century pioneers to Martha Gellhorn, Kate Adie and Veronica Guerin, the authors investigate the challenges women have faced in their struggle to establish reputations as professionals.

This book provides an account of the gendered structuring of journalism in print, radio and television and speculates about women's still-emerging role in online journalism. Their accomplishments as war correspondents are tracked to the present, including a study of the role they played post-September 11th.

1

Early women journalists: 1850–1945

As with most paid occupations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, journalism was male-dominated and hierarchical. Editors and publishers regarded women as consumers rather than as producers of news. Only when advertising became necessary to newspapers’ survival in the last decades of the nineteenth century were women actively sought as journalists to produce articles that would directly appeal to women readers and around which lucrative advertisements targeting women consumers could be placed. That is, women were hired as ‘women journalists’ to attract female audiences. While most male editors assumed that women lacked reporting skills and could never acquire them, those who did employ women assigned them to topics in which men – as readers and journalists – were uninterested.

In colonial America there were several notable examples of women involved in newspapers, but their presence was usually connected to the journalism of their husbands, fathers or brothers. A hundred years later, women clearly had an independent presence in journalism. US census figures demonstrate that out of 12,308 journalists in 1880, only 288 were women. By 1900, out of a total of 30,098 journalists, 2,193 were female (Steiner 1997b: 4). And the numbers and percentages continued to grow during this period. US census figures indicate that in 1920 women were 16.8 per cent of the reporters and editors, and by 1950, they were 32 per cent of journalists. The role of women in American and British society as a whole was changing and newspapers began to reach out to a wider audience as literacy and education levels rose. The women who managed to enter paid journalism were highly educated, white (with the exception of the black women writing for the black press) and from middle-class backgrounds. Some women were forced to earn a living as writers and journalists because they were single and/or because their family's economic circumstances had declined. Others managed to move into journalism with the help of family connections as wives or daughters of male journalists. None the less, as this chapter documents, women occupied a subordinated ‘ghetto status’ at least until the turn of the twentieth century and, in many respects, beyond that period. They were often confined to marginal areas of news – fashion, domestic issues and a form of ‘society news,’ that is, essentially glorified gossip about the lives of the rich and famous. Although many women resented and even attempted to resist this status, often at great personal cost, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century journalism remained characterized by a sharp gender division of labour in newsrooms, structured by male dominance in terms of numbers, status and managerial control. This chapter outlines not only women's achievements but also their experiences of prejudice and sexist stereotyping when they entered the profession.

The rise of women journalists

During the nineteenth century societal attitudes in the United States and Britain discouraged women from journalism. Generally regarded as a ‘craft’, even a rough and tough craft, journalism was deemed unsuitable for educated ladies. For example, Edwin Shuman (1899: 148–9), a US newspaperman who wrote a couple of early textbooks about reporting practices, asserted: ‘The work of news-gathering, as a rule, is too rude and exacting for [women]. . . Local reporting work deals too exclusively with men and the affairs of men to give women a fair chance in it.’ Towards the end of the nineteenth century women began to demand and often need a more active role outside the home. Those white, middle-class and well-educated women who managed to enter journalism were confined to writing about topics and in a style that contrasted sharply with the straight factual reporting of their male colleagues.

Women's journalism dealt with what were considered to be ‘light’ topics, such as fashion, the arts, domestic issues and society gossip. Male journalists dealt with the ‘serious’ and higher-status news of political and economic issues. Even when women did write about politics or social issues, they were encouraged to provide what has come to be referred to as the ‘human-interest’ angle by demonstrating how events affected people in their everyday lives. The role of early women journalists was to provoke an emotional response from readers. That said, this angle and the perceived glamour of journalism are also part of what drew women to journalism. Then, as now, journalism dealt with famous and influential people. So even if women were confined largely to society news, they enjoyed access to the rich and famous that no other profession open to women offered. Moreover, if on the whole they were paid less than men, they still were able to earn a living as journalists, a not insignificant fact to women who were orphaned, single, widowed or divorced, or whose fathers, brothers or husbands were poor managers of money.

In Britain, newspapers went through profound changes during the second half of the nineteenth century. Taxes on newspaper advertising were abolished in 1853; stamp duty was withdrawn in 1855; and taxes on paper were removed in 1861. In the United States in that period there was increasing excitement about democratization and the emergence of ‘the common man’ (the gender reference was intentional). Newspapers also expanded, often designed to bring news to that common man. Cheaper paper, the lowering of postage rates and several improvements in printing technology meant that larger newspapers could be produced faster and more efficiently. The innovation of the telegraph in 1844 was among the technological developments that had a direct and immediate consequence for journalism in both countries.

Not surprisingly, newspaper publishers promoted and invested in Samuel Morse's invention; first, individual papers used the telegraph to get news reports back to the newsroom, but by the mid-nineteenth century newspapers were organizing wire services. Improved systems of distribution, especially national railway systems, allowed for the emergence of a mass circulation popular press. By the end of the nineteenth century all newspapers in the US and Britain relied on advertising revenue, as opposed to sponsorship or the cover price, to subsidize production costs. To attract advertisers, publishers needed to capture the readership advertisers wanted, and so broadened the topics the newspapers covered.

The daily press of mid-Victorian Britain was characterized by ‘serious’ journalism that dealt with politics, finance and commerce, and this was supplemented by the so-called ‘pauper press’, comprised mainly of weekly titles sold for a few pennies and aimed at a largely working-class readership. From the 1850s onwards, however, newspapers for the middle classes like the British Daily Telegraph began to realize the economic advantage of widening their appeal to the working class. They adopted a lighter journalistic style that sought to entertain as well as inform readers: ‘Politics and opinion started to be supplemented, if not replaced, with material of a “human note”: crime, sexual violence and human oddities’ (Williams 1998: 51).

Many newspapers aimed to attract more women readers by introducing what came to be labelled as ‘women's journalism’, a style of news writing confined to society news, reports on changing fashions and feature articles on domestic issues. These stories for women readers were written by women reporters. In Britain, significant changes in the law between 1884 and 1896 gave women greater rights within marriage; wider educational opportunities delivered by the 1870 Education Act produced a population more literate than ever before; technological progress had increased mobility and communication; and programmes of urban and industrial change were improving living conditions and increasing both men's wages and leisure time. Similar transformations occurred in the United States where, for example, illiteracy dropped by half (to 10.7 per cent of the population) between 1870 and 1900, while public ¹ school attendance rose from 57 per cent to 72 per cent (Emery and Emery 1984: 232). Moreover, during that period, a number of women's colleges were established, and several state universities became coeducational. In 1918, women in Britain finally won the right to vote, followed, after virtually a ‘Century of Struggle’, in America in 1920. (This refers to the federal level; women could already vote in several states.)

Two women who were both illustrative and exceptional were Margaret Fuller from the US and Harriet Martineau from Britain. The two women, who became friends when Martineau travelled to the United States to campaign against slavery, had remarkably parallel social background and education, and both needed to support their families. Fuller grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard College, where it was not unusual for girls to be very well educated from an early age. Her father introduced a strict educational regime and taught her to translate passages from Virgil at the age of six. In her twenties, influenced by a blend of Unitarianism and Goethe's philosophy, Fuller embarked on a search for intellectual ways of developing the self to higher levels of consciousness. After her father died, Fuller, then twenty-five, was forced to support her family financially, which motivated her to take up writing professionally. Having established herself as a scholar and writer of literary essays, Margaret Fuller became literary editor of the New York Tribune in 1844 and two years later she became America's first woman foreign correspondent, as Chapter 10 on women war correspondents elaborates.

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802 the sixth of eight children in an upper-middle-class English family. Her father, a Unitarian, belonged to an elite literary circle, and believed in educating girls. Although largely self-taught, Harriet Martineau was, like Margaret Fuller, exposed to the kind of topics normally taught only to boys and she kept up a concentrated form of independent enquiry all her life. To stave off poverty when her father died in 1826, Martineau, then twenty-four, was forced to support her mother and herself. As she was deaf and therefore unable to work as a governess as her sisters did, Martineau chose writing as a career, producing a foundational treatise on the principles of sociological research called How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). Said to be the first woman journalist in Britain, Harriet Martineau earned her income as a professional writer, and her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4) sought to prove that women could live on their own income. In 1852 she became a lead writer for the Daily News. When she worked for the Daily News, Martineau wrote from Ambleside in the Lake District (where Margaret Fuller once visited her) and sent her material to the paper in London by railway and coach. The copy would be published the next day. The never-married Martineau herself speculated that she might not have succeeded as an author if she had experienced the confines of a typical middle-class Victorian marriage. She saw the evils and disadvantages of married life and remarked ‘I am probably the happiest single woman in the whole of England’ (Pichanick 1980). With obvious parallels to Margaret Fuller's life trajectory in the United States, the combination of a rigorous and formal education within a middle-class background, the need to find a career to support her family, an inability to become a governess and her single status were pivotal to Martineau's career as a feminist, scholar, writer and journalist. Strongly committed to social justice, Martineau worked against slavery and campaigned for the establishment of the Poor Laws.

Flora Shaw became in 1892 the first woman on the permanent staff of The Times (of London), where her work would have certainly been regarded as glamorous and the envy of middle-class British women typically confined to the domestic sphere. A passionate colonialist, Shaw had been informally employed by The Times since 1890, writing an unsigned column. In 1892 she was sent to South Africa. Her reports, written in the form of letters, caused a sensation. The assistant manager of the paper, Moberly Bell, commented that in his two years at the paper, ‘I can honestly say that nothing of the sort. . . has created such comment’ (quoted in Sebba 1994: 38). She went to Australia, New Zealand and Canada before returning to take up a permanent editorial position.

Journalism began to be seen as a viable occupation for women in the US in the 1890s. This greatly distressed many male journalists, such as Edwin Shuman (1903: 157), who commented, ‘Why any woman who can get $800 a year for teaching should wish to take up the harder work of newspaper reporting is difficult to understand.’ Men claimed that the work was too arduous for women and that women exposed to the rough-and-tumble environment of the newsroom would lose their high ideals, their sweet and tender ways, indeed, their femininity. Many male journalists endorsed the findings of Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies Home Journal, that ‘a girl cannot live in the free-and-easy atmosphere of the local room or do the work required of a reporter without undergoing a decline in the innate qualities of womanliness or suffering in health’ (quoted in Steiner 1992: 10). How many women were actually deterred by this rhetoric cannot be known, but certainly many women pursued opportunities in journalism, and then went on to advocate them for others. In her 1893 book entitled What Can a Woman Do: or Her Position in the Business and Literary World,² journalist Martha Louise Rayne included a chapter on journalism, which Rayne described as ‘agreeable, wideawake work, with no more drudgery than there is in other occupations, and with many compensations’. Likewise, in her 1904 Text Book for The Young Woman Journalist the British journalist Frances Low claimed, ‘The occupation of journalism is daily becoming more attractive to the average fairly well-educated woman’ because of the ‘constant variety of work and scene, contact with all sorts and conditions of men and women, and opportunities to know something of the deeper side of life’ (Low 1904: 2, 6).

Low's advice also points to the nature of journalism work at this time: it had no specific entry qualifications. Although this also had disadvantages, in an era when educational opportunities for women remained uneven, the relative openness of journalism meant that women who were reasonably well educated, middle class, confident and persistent could gain entry. ³ Along with teaching or writing, becoming a journalist at that time was ‘one of the very few routes open to intelligent women with some education to rise beyond humble origins or out of a failed marriage’ in both countries (Sebba 1994: 3). Again, women's persistence was often motivated by the vulnerability of economic decline, as well as the desire to escape the confines of Victorian married life. However, only white women were able to take advantage of this relatively open access; very few mainstream papers hired men or women of colour.

The impact of the New Journalism on women

The rise of the New Journalism in the big cities of the United States during the 1880s was undoubtedly a key element in generating openings for women journalists between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War on both sides of the Atlantic. New Journalism blended two former traditions, the elite political press and literary and essay journals on the one hand, and the popular ‘penny’ or ‘boulevard’ newspapers and story papers on the other. It was characterized by large headlines, prominent illustrations and ‘lively writing’, like today's newspapers. It broadened the traditional topics of financial and political news covered by newspapers. The aim was to obtain large circulations and raise profits, so advertising took up wide columns (Marzolf 1983). The British adapted the American model with the aim of combining sensationalism with social reform. As Marion Marzolf (1983) argues, American New Journalism was so influential that it transformed the style and look of modern daily newspapers across Europe.

One controversial aspect of this New Journalism was its sensationalism, its determination to build a readership by nurturing an appetite for scandal and drama on its front pages. Information was presented in a way intended to arouse public emotion, whether hostile or empathetic. In its most extreme and popular forms, the New Journalism was scorned as ‘Yellow Journalism’. The new emotional and sensational style was used to appeal to a new market of unsophisticated readers, but political affairs and public welfare were also strongly promoted, with political support given to the urban working classes. It was therefore heavily criticized for losing objectivity and impartiality. Significantly, this was the very moment when women journalists began to be appreciated for their ability to attract readers through their style of writing and approach to stories.

Representing the paradigmatic case in the United States, Joseph Pulitzer first experimented with the murder/sin/sex formula at the St. Louis Dispatch. The formula was more fully celebrated when Pulitzer bought out the New York World in 1883. Pulitzer recognized the growing economic power of women and their importance to advertisers, and the World is credited as being one of the first newspapers to include a women's page (Smith 1979: 159). In Britain, Alfred Harmsworth, knighted as Lord Northcliffe, launched the Daily Mail in 1896 with the statement: ‘get me a murder a day’. By the turn of the century his formula of crime, adventure and human-interest stories made it the first British mass circulation paper, with a circulation of 989,000. Like Pulitzer, Northcliffe recognized the economic benefits of ‘women's journalism’. Although the populist Daily Mail shied away from the overt sensationalism of British Sunday newspapers, ‘priding itself on being a respectable family paper’ (Williams 1998: 56), its daily page 7 ‘magazine’ section offered women readers stories covering the latest fashions and features on domestic matters. In 1903 Northcliffe launched the Daily Mirror as ‘a paper for gentlewomen, written by gentlewomen’ under the editorship of Mary Howarth (Lee 1976b: 82). However, the paper did not sell and in 1905 it was revamped as an illustrated newspaper (Williams 1998: 57).

The New Journalism of the late nineteenth century produced three key changes. First, it gave women opportunities to enter the profession as they took on the task of interviewing and writing stories about women. Second, women were sought as subject-matter, both because they seemed to embody the drama of social change and because women's growing independence was ‘a...