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

Chapter seven: Travel

{232} chapter seven Travel Traveling to Mexico with her mother in early 1886, some three years before her famous trip around the world, Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) dreamed not only of adventure but also of a possible “beat” as the first woman newspaper correspondent to write from Mexico City. To her chagrin , on arrival she quickly discovered that she was not the first—or even the second, or third, or fourth—woman correspondent in Mexico City: instead, she was part of a virtual colony of American women writers. As she observed with some asperity in her first “letter” from Mexico to the Pittsburg Dispatch, “At the present day there are no less than six widows, of the crankiest type, writing up Mexico, each expecting to become a second [Alexander von] Humboldt and have their statues erected on the public square.”1 Bly’s biographer, Brooke Kroeger, has perceptively noted that this “sarcasm may have had more to do with her unhappiness at finding she had been beaten to the assignment of female foreign correspondent than with the quality of her competitors’ work.”2 While we cannot be certain exactly to whom Bly was referring (she did not name names), we do know some of the American newspaper women whowere in Mexico in 1886.Chicago journalist Margaret F. Sullivan, for instance , traveled to Mexico that year with occasional newspaper woman and poet Mary Elizabeth Blake. Their trip resulted in the coauthored Mexico: Picturesque, Political, Progressive (1888), based in part on columns first published in the daily Boston Journal. Fannie Brigham Ward was also there, having moved to Mexico in 1883; she eventually wrote hundreds of letters from Mexico and other Latin American countries forover forty newspapers around the United States—all through self-syndication. The field of newspaper correspondence from Mexico was well occupied, if not crowded— perhaps one of the reasons why Bly cut short what she had originally envisioned as an extended stay. After only a few months, Bly and her mother returned home to Pittsburgh. She published a slight volume, Six Months travel { 233 in Mexico, but it made disappointingly little impact at the time. She soon moved to New York, eager to seize the greater newspaper opportunities there.3 Like Bly, dozens of newspaper women published newspaper “correspondence ” as they traveled beyond the borders of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Deliberately mapping the world with their writings , these women not only observed the customs of other countries in ethnographic-style pieces, but also, in a number of intriguing cases, wrote extensively about politics—including both U.S. foreign policy and the internal politics of other nations. Far from “relatively few American journalists , male or female” having “reported from overseas in the nineteenth century,” as one literary critic has claimed, numerous American newspaper women eagerly embraced such work.4 Newspaper women’s work at the turn of the century was in fact part of expansionism in several senses of that term. The inherent impulse behind newspaper work, after all, was expansionist—as reflected in such phrases as “out on assignment” and “cover it,” both of which expressed the drive to map larger worlds, to “own” them through observation and acquired knowledge, and to write them into fresh new print forms. At the local level, as this book has argued, newspaper women’s work was expansionist in occupying new territory for women in the public sphere—whether in urban public spaces or in the public spaces of print culture. But women’s newspaper work was also expansionist in a more traditional sense: it was part of the larger American project to expand territory and influence in the late nineteenth century. Newspaper women participated in that expansionism by traveling the world, “mapping” it with their writings, and, especially, arguing for America’s right to new territories and “possessions.” It is important to recognize that it was not just through domestic writing and the deployment of domestic ideology that newspaper women helped to shape and support American expansionism. In recent years a rewarding critical literature has addressed American women’s domestic roles in expansionism , stressing that immersion in domesticity did not make women “innocent” of imperialism. On the contrary, domesticity acted as an “intimate ” set of practices and beliefs that often helped to further an imperialist agenda. American white women, for instance, advanced ideas of white supremacy and the “superiority” of Anglo-Saxon culture by assuming that American practices of domesticity were superior to those of othercultures...