“They’ll Never Make Newspaper Men”: Early Gendering in Journalism, 1884–1889

Abstract

Scholars have long noted that journalism is a heavily gendered profession. An examination of the initial five years of the Journalist, the first news trade publication dedicated to defining and standardizing modern journalism in the late 1800s, finds that gendering in the news industry began as early as 1884. This early establishment of gender-based newsroom work suggests that gender and professionalization shaped each other, intertwining so that modern journalism was gendered from the start. The Journalist provides evidence that male news workers standardized masculine character traits and behaviors as benchmarks in the field—ideals that still persist today.

Notes

1 Conducteur, “Monsieur’s Ideas of the Reporter,” Journalist, November 5, 1887.

2 Sam Wilkeson Wistrom, “A Man’s Opinion,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

3 “Woman’s Methods,” Journalist, January 21, 1888.

4 Lisa Adkins and Beverly Skeggs, Feminism After Bourdieu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 6.

5 Toril Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” New Literary History 22, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 1019.

6 Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 270; Lisa Adkins and Beverly Skeggs, Feminism After Bourdieu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 6.

7 Toril Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” in What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 270.

8 Toril Moi, “Appropriating Bourdieu: Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture,” New Literary History 22, no. 4 (Autumn 1991): 1022.

9 Linda Steiner, “Construction of Gender in Newsreporting Textbooks 1890–1990,” Journalism Monographs 135 (1992): 1–50; Linda Steiner, “Stories of Quitting: Why Did Women Journalists Leave the Newsroom?,” American Journalism 15, no. 3 (1998); Marjan de Bruin, “Gender, Organizational and Professional Identities in Journalism,” Journalism 1, no. 2 (2000): 217–38; Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain, “‘Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are’: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 322–3; Linda Steiner, “Failed Theories: Explaining Gender Difference in Journalism,” Review of Communication 12, no. 3 (July 2012): 201–23; Michael Schudson and Danielle Haas, “One of the Guys,” Columbia Journalism Review, accessed June 6, 2020.

10 This study began with 1884 and finished with 1889, as saturation had then been reached. See Wm. David Sloan and Michael Stamm, Historical Methods (Northport, Alabama: Vision Press, 2010), 235–6.

11 Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, eds., Newsworkers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Randall S. Sumpter, Before Journalism Schools (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018).

12 Stephen A. Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism: A Nineteenth-Century Beginning,” Journalism History 24, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 157–63.

13 Nancy Whitelaw, Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World (Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 2000).

14 Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine A. Foss, “‘The Facts—the Color!—The Facts’: The Idea of a Reporting American Print Culture, 1885–1910,” Book History 15 (2012): 133.

15 Elizabeth V. Burt, “A Bid for Legitimacy: The Woman’s Press Club Movement, 1881–1900,” Journalism History 23, no. 2 (1996): 9.

16 de Bruin, “Gender, Organizational and Professional,” 221.

17 “Familiarity and Vulgarity,” Journalist, August 28, 1886. In the end, it was decided that after the individual’s introduction, any further use of their first name was “vulgar and indicates either a very young or a very stupid writer.”

18 Ted Curtis Smythe, “The Reporter, 1880–1900: Working Conditions and Their Influence on the News,” Journalism History 7, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 1–10; Hardt and Brennen, Newsworkers, 55–7; Burt, “A Bid for Legitimacy,” 10; James Bowman, “A Pretense of Professionalism,” The New Criterion 15, no. 4 (December 1996): 55.

19 Hardt and Brennen, Newsworkers, 59.

20 Kimberley Mangun, “Should She, or Shouldn’t She, Pursue a Career in Journalism? True Womanhood and the Debate about Women in the Newsroom, 1887–1930,” Journalism History 37, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 67.

21 U.S. Census Bureau, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Table 4, 70, accessed June 29, 2020, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-occupation/00312147ch2.pdf.

22 U.S. Census Bureau, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Table 15, 171, accessed June 29, 2020, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1940/population-occupation/00312147ch2.pdf. Newsgirls were also recorded in 1910, with the census recording 135 native-born white newsgirls, 87 of mixed parentage, 37 foreign white newsgirls, and 14 African American newsgirls.

23 “The Woman’s Number,” Journalist, January 19, 1889.

24 Marion Marzolf, Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Communication Arts Books, 1977); Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (United States: Times Books, 1994); Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Randall S. Sumpter, “‘Girl Reporter’: Elizabeth L. Banks and the ‘Stunt’ Genre,” American Journalism 32, no. 1 (2015): 60–77.

25 Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, “Grit Your Teeth, Then Learn to Swear: Women in Journalistic Careers, 1850–1926,” American Journalism 18, no. 1 (2001): 55.

26 Fahs, Out on Assignment, 8.

27 Adela Rogers St. John, The Honeycomb (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 114; Steiner, “Stories of Quitting,” 89.

28 “About Ourselves,” Journalist, March 27, 1886.

29 Karen Lee Ashcraft, Sara Louise Muhr, Jens Rennstam, Katie Sullivan, “Professionalization as a Branding Activity: Occupational Identity and the Dialectic of Inclusivity-Exclusivity,” Gender, Work, and Organization 19, no. 5 (September 2012): 473.

30 Karen Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, & Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2016), 35.

31 “A Clever Journalist, Sketch of Mrs. Anna Mai E. Ellis, of the Boston Herald Editorial Staff,” Journalist, September 25, 1886.

32 “NELL NELSON,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

33 “Scraps from Chicago,” Journalist, June 5, 1886.

34 Flora McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman. One Side of the Question,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

35 “A Clever Journalist, Sketch of Mrs. Anna Mai E. Ellis, of the Boston Herald Editorial Staff,” Journalist, September 25, 1886.

36 “By-The-Bye,” Journalist, September 24, 1887.

37 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74; David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Debra Reddin van Tuyll, eds., The Civil War and the Press (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 257.

38 Rosemary Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine (University of California Press, 2005), 249; Paulette Kilmer, “Why Women Dared to Make Journalism Their Calling,” in After the War (New York: Routledge, 2017), 313.

39 “By-the-Bye,” Journalist, February 7, 1885.

40 Ruether, Goddesses, 250; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Right Movement in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 23.

41 MAC, “A Few Women,” Journalist, May 23, 1885.

42 “Ella Wheeler,” Journalist, December 19, 1885.

43 “Women in Journalism,” Journalist, May 28, 1887.

44 Ibid.

45 “Noms De Plume,” Journalist, July 19, 1884.

46 Mangun, “Should She, or Shouldn’t She, Pursue a Career in Journalism?,” 66–79; Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015); Kate Ridinger Smorul, “Of Marionettes, Boxers, and Suffragettes: Djuna Barnes’s Performative Journalism,” Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 1 (2015): 55–71; Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

47 “Noms de Plume,” Journalist, July 14, 1884.

48 Harry J. Shellman, “Some Queries,” Journalist, October 29, 1887.

49 Arthur C. Grissom, “Kansas City,” Journalist, January 12, 1889.; W.E. Mellinger, “The Prize Essay,” Journalist, January 12, 1889; “Compliment and Criticism,” Journalist, November 12, 1887; Matthew Unit, “The Reputation of Reporters,” Journalist, January 1886.

50 “Reportorial Repartee,” Journalist, November 5, 1887.

51 Journalist, September 24, 1887. After that date, the masthead was changed to read “Devoted to Newspapers, Authors, Artists, and Publishers.” Emphasis added by author.

52 “Across the Atlantic,” Journalist, October 1, 1887.

53 “A Clever Journalist, Sketch of Mrs. Anna Mai E. Ellis, of the Boston Herald Editorial Staff,” Journalist, September 25, 1886.

54 Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, & Crime, 81.

55 “Working on Space,” Journalist, March 31, 1888.

56 “Newspaper Writers,” Journalist, February 7, 1885.

57 “Bad Writing,” Journalist, October 18, 1884.

58 “Female Toilers and Sharks,” Journalist, January 22, 1887.

59 Little Oliver, “A Protest,” Journalist, July 3, 1886. Later in history, men of the “New Journalism” school were praised for writing lyrically.

60 Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (London: Routledge, 2004), 24.

61 “A Hard-Working Guild,” Journalist, April 9, 1887.

62 “What Newspaper Work Is,” Journalist, December 24, 1887.

63 McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

64 “By-the-Bye,” Journalist, February 11, 1888.

65 “A Forgotten Novelist,” Journalist, September 3, 1887.

66 Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards.

67 “By-the-Bye,” Journalist, April 7, 1888.

68 “Newspaper Growth,” Journalist, January 21, 1888.

69 Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

70 Monika Djerf-Pierre, “The Gender of Journalism: The Structure and Logic of the Field in the Twentieth Century,” Nordicom Review, Jubilee Issue (2007): 82.

71 Djerf-Pierre, “Gender of Journalism,” 98.

72 Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 5; Linda Steiner, “Gender at Work: Early Accounts by Women Journalists,” Journalism History 23, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 6.

73 Mangun, “Should She, or Shouldn’t She, Pursue a Career in Journalism,” 70.

74 “A Clever Journalist, Sketch of Mrs. Anna Mai E. Ellis, of the Boston Herald Editorial Staff,” Journalist, September 25, 1886.

75 “Women Editors,” Journalist, September 24, 1887.

76 Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism, 24; Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, 91.

77 Quoted in Fahs, Out on Assignment, 65.

78 “The Town Tramp,” Journalist, June 28, 1884.

79 Fahs, Out on Assignment, 64.

80 Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, 196.

81 The Printer Girl, Topeka, “The Printer Girl: A Few Words About Ourself,” Journalist, January 19, 1889.

82 McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

83 Gottlieb, “Grit Your Teeth,” 66.

84 Juana Gallego-Ayala et al., “Gender Stereotyping in the Production of News,” in Gender and Newsroom Cultures (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2004), 57.

85 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History: 30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 38.

86 “A Clever Journalist, Sketch of Mrs. Anna Mai E. Ellis, of the Boston Herald Editorial Staff,” Journalist, September 25, 1886.

87 Djerf-Pierre, “The Gender of Journalism,” 98.

88 Florine Thayer McCray, “Mrs. Louisa Knapp, Editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

89 MAC, “A Few Women,” Journalist, May 23, 1885.

90 Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 281.

91 Ibid., 283.

92 Linda Steiner, “Construction of Gender in Newsreporting Textbooks 1890–1990,” Journalism Monographs 135 (1992):7; Patricia Bradley, Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005): 202–20. According to Steiner, the school was created after Rayne tired of “waiting for Charles Dana” to open a school for women journalists. The school emphasized being “bright and newsy, accurate in details of importance and in quotations.”

93 “The Amateur School,” Journalist, November 24, 1888.

94 Newark Advertiser, “College Training for Newspaper Work,” Journalist, June 26, 1886.

95 Lucy Wilmot Smith, “Some Female Writers of the Negro Race,” The Journalist, January 26, 1889.

96 Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism, 5, 19.

97 N.F. [Gertrude Bustill Mossell], “Some Painful Truths,” New York Freeman, November 20, 1886.

98 Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime; Mangun, “Should She, or Shouldn’t She, Pursue a Career in Journalism”; Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House; Smorul, “Of Marionettes, Boxers, and Suffragettes.”

99 Samantha Nicole Peko, “Ada Patterson ‘The Nellie Bly of the West,’” Journalism History 43, no. 3 (2017): 162–71.

100 Kroeger, Nellie Bly; Bradley, Women and the Press; Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, & Crime.

101 Djerf-Pierre, “The Gender of Journalism,” 98.

102 Journalist, April 23, 1887; “Mrs. Burnett’s Literary Methods,” Journalist, November 10, 1888.

103 “Miss Elizabeth Bisland of the Cosmopolitan Magazine,” Journalist, November 30, 1889.

104 “The Country Press,” Journalist, December 22, 1888.

105 “The Great Sunday Paper,” Life, December 17, 1896; “What Is Legitimate News?,” Journalist, February 19, 1887.

106 “What Newspaper Work Is,” Journalist, December 24, 1887; William H. Yerkes, “The Independent Press,” Journalist, October 15, 1887.

107 “By-the-Bye,” Journalist, February 11, 1888.

108 “The Line of Improvement,” Journalist, August 27, 1887.

109 “By-the-Bye,” Journalist, February 11, 1888; McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

110 McDonald, “The Newspaper Woman,” Journalist, January 26, 1889.

111 Ashcraft, “Professionalization as a Branding Activity,” 471–473.

112 Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Ashcraft, “Professionalization as a Branding Activity”; Celia Davies, “The Sociology of Professions and the Profession of Gender,” Sociology 30, no. 4 (July 2016): 661–78.

113 Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism, 7.

114 “A Suggestion,” Journalist, February 9, 1889.

115 Ibid.

116 Linda Lumsden, “‘You’re a Tough Guy, Mary—And a First-Rate Newspaperman’: Gender and Women Journalists in the 1920s and 1930s,” J&MC Quarterly 72, no. 4 (Winter 1995); Tiffany Lewis, “Mediating Political Mobility as Stunt-Girl Entertainment: Newspaper Coverage of New York’s Suffrage Hike to Albany,” American Journalism 36, no. 1 (2019): 99–123.

117 Bonnie Brennen, “Cultural Discourse of Journalists: The Material Conditions of Newsroom Labor,” in Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File, ed. Hanno Hart and Bonnie Brennen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 85.

118 Brennen, “Cultural Discourse of Journalists,” 85–86.

119 Steiner, “Stories of Quitting,” 109.

120 Bradley, Women and the Press, 258.

121 Hardin and Shain, “‘Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are’,” 322–38.

122 Schudson and Haas, “One of the Guys.”

123 Margareta Melin-Higgins, “Coping with Journalism: Gendered Newsroom Culture,” in Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work, ed. Marjan de Bruin and Karen Ross (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2004), 215.

124 Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, 195.

125 Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism, 7; Karen Ross, “Sex at Work: Gender Politics and Newsroom Culture,” ed. Marjan de Bruin and Karen Ross (United States of America: Hampton Press, 2004), 145–60.

126 Melin-Higgins, “Coping with Journalism,” 215.

127 Callego, “Gender Stereotyping,” 59.

128 “The Status of Women in U.S. Media 2019,” Women’s Media Center, February 21, 2019, https://www.womensmediacenter.com/reports/the-status-of-women-in-u-s-media-2019; “The Status of Women of Color in the U.S. Media 2018,” Women’s Media Center, March 6, 2018, https://womensmediacenter.com/assets/site/reports/the-status-of-women-of-color-in-the-u-s-media-2018-full-report/Women-of-Color-Report-FINAL-WEB.pdf; Liesbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (London: Sage, 1994); Liesbet van Zoonen, “One of the Girls? The Changing Gender of Journalism,” in News, Gender and Power, ed. C. Carter, G. Branston and S. Allan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 33–46; Hardin and Shain, “‘Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are’,” 322–323.

129 Karen Lee Ashcraft, “Appreciating the ‘Work’ of Discourse: Occupational Identity and Difference as Organizing Mechanisms in the Case of Commercial Airline Pilots,” Discourse & Communication 1, no. 1 (February 2007): 13.

130 “Our Women Journalists,” Journalist, December 31, 1887.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Autumn Lorimer Linford

Autumn Lorimer Linford is a Roy H. Park Fellow in the Hussman School of Media & Journalism at University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. She studies media history, with an emphasis on turn of the twentieth century women journalists.