Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space

Introduction

{1} Introduction In 1891 Margherita Arlina Hamm began writing “Among the Newspaper Women” for the New York Journalist—the first newspaper column ever devoted to newspaper women as a group. Chronicling the work of women newspaper writers around the country, but especially in New York, Hamm conjured up a world of public sociability. “There were some four or five newspaper women met accidentally Thursday evening at a restaurant on Broadway,” she began her first column; “they all became confidential in a short while, as is the habit of newspaper women. Not confidential about their inner lives, but about their business I mean.” On the face of it this was a casual statement about a casual meeting of women in public, but it also deliberately laid claim to a public community of independent women in one of the most famous public spaces of New York.1 With hercolumn, which she continued towriteweeklyover the next two years, Hamm publicized the activities of some of the hundreds of women who were entering newspaper work nationwide at the turn of the century. But she did more, as well: by writing about what newspaper women were thinking and doing, by reporting their conversations in the printed columns of the Journalist, Hamm also created a new public space for women within the world of print culture. As she did so, her column joined the work of numerous other newspaper women, who at the turn of the century wrote widely of new work opportunities for women, developed new newspaper genres such as advice columns and interviews, explored new living arrangements for women, advocated extensive travel, and covered and promoted women’s political activism.Their work shaped new public spaces for women within the physical pages of the newspaper, while also writing into being a far-flung new public world of women.2 We get some sense of newspaper women’s active creation of this new public realm when we examine the career of the ambitious and prolific 2} introduction Margherita Hamm herself. Starting out at the Boston Herald at age sixteen , by age twenty she was briefly working for the New York World, as well as writing her column for the Journalist. She wrote “specials” for New York newspapers—like numerous other women in a newspaper world that offered few regular, full-time staff positions to women.3 Traveling to China, Japan, and Korea in the mid-1890s, Hamm claimed to be the “first woman war correspondent” in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. On her return she successively became editor of the Journalist, editor of the “woman’s department ” of the NewYork Mail and Express, head of what she called a “suffrage department” for Peterson Magazine, and editor of Clubwoman Magazine. Traveling to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii during and after the Spanish-American War, she wrote newspaper articles as a “war correspondent” in addition to four popular books on America’s “new possessions .” She then turned to history, publishing a book on the “first families ” of New York (still used by genealogists), as well as a volume on the “builders of the republic.” Drawn to the theater, she brought out a volume of sketches of “eminent actors in their homes.” All the while she occasionally published (quite bad) poetry—and in the early 1900s fulfilled a dream by publishing a collection of short stories about the Lower East Side,Ghetto Silhouettes, and several short stories on New York’s “Egyptian colony” in the elite Century Magazine. No doubt she would have published more, but Hamm died suddenly of pneumonia in 1907. She was thirty-six.4 Hamm is not remembered today as part of journalism history, much less the history of women. But in this neglect she is far from alone: we know little about most of the women who took up newspaper work at the turn of the century and created new public spaces for women in print. Instead , the history of newspaper women follows well-worn grooves: it highlights the daring of the pioneering and influential Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane); it discusses the so-called sob sisters who covered the notorious 1907–8 trials of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of architect Stanford White. These were prominent newspaper women, to be sure. But in between we have missed an entire generation of female journalists and a richly networked public community.5 Many of the women who are the subjects of this book have been hiding in plain sight for...