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“Like Home”: Gerrymandering the Physical Public Sphere in Female Journalist Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2024
Abstract
The cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 42.
2 For a representative sample of the scant scholarship about female journalist fiction as a subgenre, see Donna Born, “The Image of the Woman Journalist in American Popular Fiction 1890 to the Present,” paper presented to the Committee on the Status of Women of the Association of Education in Journalism Annual Convention, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, Aug., 1981; Lutes, Jean Marie, Front Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shelley, Lorna, “Female Journalists and Journalism in fin-de-siècle Magazine Stories,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 5 (Summer 2009)Google Scholar; and Roggenkamp, Karen, “Journalistic Literature, Female Reporters and Newspaper Fiction in 1880–1930,” The Routledge Companion to American Literature Journalism, ed. Dow, William E. and Maguire, Roberta S. (London: Routledge, 2020), 81–90 Google Scholar.
3 The Gilded Age, season 1, episode 3, “Face the Music,” directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield, written by Julian Fellowes, aired Feb. 7, 2022, on HBO.
4 While the two are inherently linked within a single “public sphere,” I focus throughout on the “physical public sphere” as a space that newspaperwomen generally had to enter to engage with the “discursive public sphere.” Doing so centers physical movement and highlights the female journalist figure’s body as a site of its own discourse, as seen in fictional and historical moments of tension.
5 Hampton, Mark, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 37 Google Scholar; Roggenkamp, Karen, “Dignified Sensationalism: ‘Cosmopolitan,’ Elizabeth Bisland, and Trips around the World,” American Periodicals 17, no. 1 (2007): 26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 The study of American female journalists (rather than editorials, etc. about women in the field) arguably began with Ishbel Ross’s expansive tome, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York: Arno Press, 1974), originally published in 1936; Marion Marzolf’s Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Hastings House, 1977) also offers a sweeping view of the historical and 1970s newspaperwomen. Contemporary historical scholarship focusing on female journalists or women writers are Schriber, Mary Suzanne, Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997)Google Scholar; Rooks, Noliwe M., Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture That Made Them (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Jean Lutes, Front-Page Girls; Fahs, Alice, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roggenkamp, Karen, Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Dubbs, Chris, An Unladylike Profession: American Women War Correspondents in World War I (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ross, Ladies of the Press, 425. This work, of course, was limiting in scope, forcing many aspiring newspaperwomen to work exclusively in the women’s pages or covering topics of the private sphere. Such a conversation about the limits of and frustrations about stereotypical work is beyond the scope of this article but nevertheless serves as one reason some women worked even harder to find a position in the public sphere. However, as the protagonist shows in Jordan’s “Miss Van Dyke’s Best Story,” not all women were interested in moving beyond the genteel unless they were forced to do so.
8 For example, American census data lists just thirty-five female “editors and reporters” in 1870, almost 900 twenty years later, and over four times as many by 1910. Hill, Joseph A., Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870 to 1920 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1929), 42 Google Scholar.
9 The “New Woman” was a manufactured social figure that greatly influenced (positively and negatively) the image of the independent woman; for mainstream society, the figure was a means of understanding the new movements of young white women. For a reframing of the figure as one inclusive of other races and ethnicities, see Patterson, Martha H., Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).Google Scholar
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15 It is worth reiterating that, while in this framing I center gender and the gendered separate spheres, a similar and legally sanctioned racial gerrymander of separate spheres remains in place within United States politics; and efforts to redistrict similar social gerrymandering, as will be seen, results in shorter term successes.
16 Tuan, Space and Place, 36 (emphasis added).
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21 Schriber, Writing Home, 30.
22 Patterson, Beyond, 14.
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25 Ross, Ladies of the Press, 1. This “white satin ball gown” goes unremarked upon by Ross, but it sets Joy apart from her male coworkers who presumably are dressed “appropriately” for the space they are in.
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35 In her autobiography, Jordan discusses her close friendships with other women and her use of lived experiences to inform her fiction. Elizabeth Jordan, Three Rousing Cheers (New York: D. Appleton Century, 1938).
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42 hooks, Yearning, 42.
43 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 73.
44 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 72–74.
45 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 75.
46 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 209.
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51 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 221–22.
52 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 223 (emphasis added).
53 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 225.
54 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 228 (emphasis original).
55 Saval, Cubed, 108.
56 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 230.
57 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 231.
58 Jordan, Tales of the City Room, 231.
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60 Foster, Frances Smith, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17 (Winter 2005): 714–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I speak here exclusively of fiction published during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Later fiction, including The Gilded Age, has somewhat filled this gap, but the surviving discourse surrounding marginalized female journalists from the period is exclusively nonfiction.
61 Here, I use “subaltern” and “counterpublic” separately but still in the spirit of Fraser, who uses “subaltern counterpublics” to describe the “alternative publics” created by marginalized communities. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 66–67.
62 Lutes, Front-Page, 39.
63 Wells, Ida B., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Duster, Alfreda M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 18–19 Google Scholar.
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65 The transcript and recording of Idar’s interview regularly diverge, with the former eliminating or incorrectly transcribing the latter. Where this occurs in the quotation, I defer to the recording. Aquilino I. and Guadalupe Idar, interview by Jerry Poyo and Tom Shelton, Oct. 26, 1984, transcript and recording, The University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Oral History Collections, https://digital.utsa.edu/digital/collection/p15125coll4/id/1304/rec/1 (accessed June 27, 2023).
66 Gualtieri, Sarah M. A., “From Lebanon to Louisiana: ‘Afifa Karam and Arab Women’s Writing in the Diaspora,” in Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal, ed. Suleiman, Michael, Joseph, Suad, and Cainkar, Louise (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021): 169–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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68 Far, Sui Sin, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, ed. Ling, Amy and White-Parks, Annette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 224 Google Scholar.
69 Far, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” 227.
70 Schriber, Writing Home, 30. See also Patterson, Beyond, 107.
71 Huhta, Aleski, “Debating Visibility: Race and Visibility in the Finnish-American Press in 1908,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 4 (2014): 168–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 Lutes, Front-Page, 46. See also Gloria Wade-Gayles, “Black Women Journalists in the South, 1880–1905: An Approach to the Study of Black Women’s History,” Callaloo 11/13 (Feb.–Oct. 1981): 138–52; Monica Clare Mulcahy, “Professional Anxiety: African American Female Journalists Writing Their Way to Legitimacy, 1880–1914” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2017), and Gualtieri, “From Lebanon.”
73 Ross, Ladies of the Press, 3.
74 Ross, Ladies of the Press, 9.
75 Kern, Feminist City, 13.
76 Massey, Doreen, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 11 Google Scholar.
77 Tuan, Space, 36.