Ida M. Tarbell's "Women in Journalism"

Ida M. Tarbell—best known today as a muckraker (a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to describe journalists who exposed abuses in American business and government)—was born in 1857 in Erie County, Pennsylvania; she received both her bachelor's and master's degrees from Allegheny College. A series of essays she wrote for McClure's Magazine on Abraham Lincoln, which she later turned into a book, doubled the readership of McClure's, and her History of the Standard Oil Company, originally published as a nineteen-part series in McClure's between November 1902 and October 1904, ranked fifth in the New York Times listing of the top one hundred journalistic works of the twentieth century. One of the leading journalists of her day, Tarbell was also a contributor to Collier's Weekly and a co-owner of American Magazine, where she held the position of associate editor from 1906 to 1915.

After teaching from 1880 to 1882 in Ohio, Tarbell returned to Pennsylvania where Theodore L. Flood, the editor of the Chautauquan, ask her to write for his paper; she became the managing editor in 1886. Her article "Women in Journalism," in which she attempts to put aside the romanticized notion of the lady reporter and to lay out the real work of journalism, is written from this perspective. Tarbell begins this discussion of journalistic practice by declaring, "A complete list of the representative women of the day would include the names of a large number of journalists." She then lists the names and publishing venues of thirteen women writers "made familiar by connection with leading periodicals" and claims there are "scores more of honored names," some of whom she identifies later in the article (393). Although Tarbell finds these women to be "representative" of the time in which she is writing, most of them—their names and their works—have faded into obscurity.

In addition to identifying a distinguished cadre of women journalists, Tarbell details the various demands of the profession. First, she admonishes readers that "'essay-writing' … will not make a journalist." Instead, she explains with startling frankness, "[j]ournalism is an organization for turning out periodical reading matter … [, and] it requires a complicated, many-sided labor to produce it. Writing is but one of the many parts of the business." Other parts of the business, she continues, include knowing and working within the periodical's policies, deciding on the subject matter, and collecting materials, all before the writing begins. The tasks of editing, proofreading, and "making-up," she argues, are "quite as legitimate journalism as the writing, and quite as necessary" (393). Although the job was not easy—one writer refers to it as "drudgery" (qtd. in "Women in Journalism" 394)—Tarbell's success demonstrates that journalism was a valid and, at times, lucrative profession for women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• Excerpt from "Women in Journalism" Chautauquan Apr. 1887: 393–95
• Ida M. Tarbell

If an estimate of the relative number of women finding employment in different channels was made, the various branches of journalism, departmental, reportorial, and editorial, would be found to contain a respectable percentage of the whole.

The woman who would become a journalist must fit into the organization whereever she is needed. She may be asked to read articles and prepare them for the printer, to condense a paper of five thousand words into one thousand without omitting a point or weakening an argument, read proof, hold copy for the proof-reader, write advertising paragraphs, attend to editorial correspondence, look after the make-up of the "forms," prepare advertising circulars, review books, write obituaries, report events, write head lines, answer questions, look after the exchanges, make clippings, compile articles, write editorials, or do a hundred other things. If she earns a permanent place she must do some one of these things better than any other available person, and before she rises to an editorial position she ought to know how to do them all, and what is more know when others are doing them right.

The advantages, however, more...