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INTRODUCTION Cornelia “Nell” Battle Lewis inhabits a unique and notable niche in the annals of the southern press. She also claims a significant rung in the liberation and advancement of women in the American South and beyond. Her invasion of the fourth estate as North Carolina’s first female columnist and one of a very few in the nation created a fissure in that bastion of masculinity that had theretofore accepted women as society editors only. Lewis’s admission to the state’s almost exclusively male bar gnawed further into southern chauvinism. Her widely publicized activism in both of these fields set examples and broadened the occupational choices and opportunities of women who would follow in ever-widening streams. In her advocacy for workers, women, children, prisoners, and the mentally ill, she protested inequities, exposed horrors, and worked for change. Nell Lewis was born in 1893 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into the upper stratum of a Dixieland culture rigidly segmented by class, race, and gender. Her forebears had acquitted themselves nobly in both the Tar Heel State and neighboring Virginia—the men professionally and in the public sphere and the women as quintessential embodiments of the Southern Lady. Reared mainly in the sternly Victorian charge of an overbearing stepmother alongside three older half brothers, Nell predictably would chafe under the conventions imposed on her sex. Lacking playmates as a result of her family’s relocation during her infancy to a plantation just outside the state capital, she spent much of her time with books and superstitious farm and household help and developed an active imagination. She attended public schools in Raleigh before entering socially prestigious St. Mary’s, where she shone in letters with her poetry, essays, presidency of a debating society, and editorship of the yearbook and monthly magazine. After then completing a mysteriously unmentioned year of study at Goucher College , in Maryland, she took a baccalaureate degree and delivered the Class Day address at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She applied and was accepted for World War I service with the YMCA in France, apparently motivated in part by a budding romance with fellow Tar Heel Lenoir Chambers, who was stationed there with the Allied Expeditionary battling nell 2 Forces. When she debarked in France, the war had ended, as would the romantic attachment that had blossomed while she worked there during the demobilization . The breakup would leave an enduring scar. In mid-1920 the Raleigh News and Observer hired Lewis as a reporter / feature writer preparatory to her appointment as society editor. Shortly after assuming that responsibility the following year, she introduced in her space a column, “Incidentally,” that would weigh in on nearly every current subject of importance in the region and the country. No passive reporter, Lewis imbued her writing with strong opinions and advocacy that became “must” reading for a range of citizenry, from the lowly to the state’s high and mighty. Within approximately a decade “Incidentally” and Lewis herself drew accolades from leading journalistic lights as far afield as the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken and Gerald Johnson; Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times Dispatch; and the nation’s most celebrated political columnist, Heywood Broun of the New York World. Edwin Mims devoted nearly a chapter to Lewis in his publication of The Advancing South in 1926. W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South–the culminant treatment of southern, history, culture, and psychology—praised Lewis. Defeated presidential candidate Al Smith informed her that he had framed one of her columns and planned to hang it in his library. Lewis demonstrated conclusively the sincerity of her liberal prose with her championship of workers in 1929. In the wake of the disastrous communistinspired labor uprising at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, she worked exhaustively on site, incurred vilification in person and in the press, and exposed herself to physical danger in the interest of justice for accused mill hands and their leaders. She confirmed the workers’ grievances and pleaded that the conditions they were protesting be rectified. Two years later, in another high-profile case, she ferreted out atrocities at a showpiece reformatory for girls, at heavy cost to herself in friendships and support from feminists . For over a decade she earned widespread acclaim and vituperation as a leading patron of the downtrodden and voiceless. In a column posted in 1932 during her hospitalization for a baffling illness, Lewis signaled an abrupt...

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