The Second Sex in the Fourth Estate

In the United States, "fourth estate" commonly refers to the press—particularly to the periodical press and its journalistic function—as a de facto fourth branch of government, and the historical and popular uses of the phrase associate it with the power of public opinion as a necessary component of more formal governance. The thematic cluster of essays presented in this issue of Legacy considers how women have functioned as members of the fourth estate. Our chronological range here is broad, comprising essays that begin with a study of one of the earliest women to write for the American periodical press, Judith Sargent Murray, and concluding with a review essay that surveys the work of women who wrote as professional journalists into the mid-twentieth century.

Such a thematic focus is appropriate for a journal such as Legacy, for the very word suggests an interest in the daily, the contingent, and the historical (journal stems from the Latin journalis, meaning daily). Like magazines, journals' near cousins, Legacy has a heterogeneous content; in its pages, readers can find an olio of writings loosely related to American women writers and gleaned—to borrow Murray's metaphor—from the ideas shared by colleagues with similar interests. Such gleanings, brought together in the columns of a newspaper or on the pages of a journal, frequently produce fortuitous—albeit unintended and unpredicted—mutual illuminations, insights that are less the property of a single author's contribution than the result of their convergence in a shared conceptual space.

Journalism and Our Object(s) of Study

Journalism as we have loosely defined it here (as multiply authored collections of texts that appear at regular intervals) differs from our traditional objects of study in several key ways. A book, as Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway note, has traditionally been considered to be a unique object and has been marketed as a discrete product (11–12). Books—of necessity, perhaps—have a more limited and class-stratified circulation. As Radway and Kaestle point out, "The distribution of book readers … is not random; book reading in the United States tends to correlate with education and wealth. In fact, there were far more readers of newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than there were readers of books" (19–20). Concomitantly, it seems logical to assume that there were far more women who wrote for newspapers and magazines in these periods than there were women who wrote and published books. Most of these women journalists have not yet been fully or even briefly studied.

How would thoughtful studies of such writers modify our present understandings of women as cultural producers? We might take Jane Cazneau and Margaret Fuller as a comparative case in point, as Megan Griffin suggests in her Profile of Cazneau. Why has the recovery of Fuller succeeded so notably, while knowledge about Cazneau remains relatively incomplete? The two knew and associated with each other and with other women journalists. Both were advocates of women's rights who nevertheless did not affiliate with feminist organizations; both published more frequently in nonfictional and journalistic genres than in individual books; both were intimately involved with international diplomatic and political issues; both were war correspondents. Cazneau, however, unlike Fuller, was not aligned with and supported by the literary establishment of Transcendental Boston and Cambridge, nor did she cultivate ties with European intelligentsia. Rather, she often wrote from contested borderland locations—the Southwest, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The feminist literary recovery of Fuller was a logical outfall of an American Renaissance-centered field imaginary, and Cazneau, by contrast, was embroiled in expansionist projects that have only recently begun to force a revision of that field.

Moreover, Cazneau's political alignments were not those with which traditional women's histories have been comfortable. Why study a woman who was an outspoken proponent of expansionism, land speculation, and other proto-imperialist ventures? As the field of nineteenth-century cultural studies has turned its attention to precisely those issues, Cazneau's importance should now be self-evident. Yet, perhaps, we have qualms about focusing effort [End...