Modesty and Anger in Autobiographies of Women Journalists, 1900-1940
Linda Steiner
Rutgers University, Department of Journalism and Mass Media
Elizabeth Jordan began her 1938 autobiography Three Rousing Cheers by
explaining that the title expressed her devotion to good friends, who used
the expression as greeting, farewell, and rallying cry. In hastening to
deny
that her title was"the offspring of any delusion as to my individual
importance" (vii), Jordan provided nearly a paradigmatic example of the
self-effacement some critics have claimed characterizes women's
autobiography.
Later Jordan commented, "I have been pianiste, reporter, newspaper editor,
magazine editor, public speaker, playwright, dramatic critic, and
novelist,
which helps to explain why I have never done any one thing superlatively
well"
(11). An even more self-deprecating remark came from Milly Bennett, who
prefaced her autobiography, written around 1938, with the comment that
friends
had encouraged her to describe her experiences covering the Chinese
Revolution. But, she said, reading the drafts made her sick, provoking
the
question, "Good God! Did I write this---this nonsense?"
Women's autobiographies written before the 1970s tend, according to Carolyn
Heilbrun, "to find beauty even in pain and to transform rage into
spiritual
acceptance" (1988, 12). In Writing a Woman's Life, Heilbrun accuses
female
autobiographers of consistently refusing to acknowledge their anger,
their
desire for control over their own lives, and their interest in public
power.
Well into the twentieth century, says Heilbrun, looking at a range of
autobio
graphy and biography, women could not admit their ambitions or
achievements,
such that even women of considerable accomplishment have attributed their
success to luck or to others' generosity.
Other feminist historians and literary scholars find passivity and
sentimentality tainting the stories of women's lives. Patricia Spacks
(1976)
says eighteenth-century women's autobiographies always managed to
transform
feminine strength into a confession of inadequacy. Moreover, the radical
twentieth-century heroines, such as Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and
Golda
Meir, underplayed their own importance; they accepted responsibility for
failure but avoided claims of ambition (Spacks, 1980). According to Jill
Conway (1992), Progressive era women similarly represented themselves in
their
autobiographies as nurturing or as swept along by forces outside their
control, although their letters and diaries reported more assertive, decisive
behavior. Several literary critics speculate that the woman
autobiographer
essentially re-writes stories that already exist about women, since by
seeking
to publicize herself she violates "an important cultural construction of her
femininity as passive or hidden" (Anderson 1986). Uneasy at having
violated
cultural expectations, women adopt a modest tone to win readers'
sympathies
(Winston 1980).
This research examines autobiographies by five women working for general
interest newspapers in the early twentieth century. The major question was
the extent to which these women defined themselves in terms of gender
and/or
whether they defined themselves as journalists. The corollary issue is
whether they expressed a sense that others--their editors, publishers,
colleagues, sources, readers--regarded them as women, even when they saw
themselves as journalists. Particular attention is paid to occasions when
these women discussed whether they saw themselves as having a "woman's
point
of view" or "women's standpoint," even if they did not use that
particular
vocabulary, that might affect the way they approached story choice or
assignment, ethical dilemmas, and other professional issues. In part the goal
here is to see whether these reporters' lives--as they literally self-wrote
their public writing careers--follow the pattern of writers described by
Heilbrun, Spacks, and Conway. The point is not trying to determine why they
construed their lives the way they did. The one recent journalism
scholar
seriously interested in autobiography assumes psychological motives,
seeing
the writers as essentially driven by personal or historic upheaval to
create
literary fictions that "plug the sudden cracks in their identities" (Good
1993, 3). Rather than speculate about the individuals' psyches or
womankind,
the goal is to understand the professional status of women journalists as
perceived by these women, and the way they reconciled conflicts between
work
and family life, if indeed they addressed such conflicts.
The earliest autobiography studied here was published in 1902 by Elizabeth
Banks (who died in 1938 at age 68). Banks wrote for a couple of American
newspapers, but was best known for free-lanced work serialized in the
British
press. Another autobiographer included is Florence Finch Kelly,
self-described
dean of American newswomen, whose autobiography appeared shortly before her
death, at age 81, in 1939; she worked for newspapers in Kansas,
Illinois,
Massachusetts, California, and New Mexico and then wrote for the New York
Times Book Review for thirty years. Elizabeth Jordan (1865-47) worked for
the
New York World for ten years, before going to Harper's Bazar and published
her autobiography in 1938; Milly Bennett (1897-1959) worked for various
organs of the Chinese Nationalist Party, then returned to the San Francisco
News, and later served as a foreign correspondent in Russia; and in 1933
Joan
Lowell described how she found adventure, pay, and "regeneration" as "Gal
Reporter" for the Boston Daily Record.
The period under study involved tremendous growth in the number of newspapers
and of journalists, including women. Enough women were employed as
journalists in the United States to understand themselves as a
category--but a
category still distinctly in the minority, in a profession widely
acknowledged as male. Furthermore, this period heard frequent discussion
about the changing roles of women; emerging models for "modern" women
brought
greater self-consciousness about gender. Heilbrun dates the first true modern
(i.e., explicit about a woman's anger as such) autobiography to 1973, when
May Sarton published her second autobiographical book.1 Yet, at the
least,
these five women were modern in their identification with work (Good
1993).2
The first personal document by a woman to be called an autobiography was
written in 1814 by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Cavendish
answered the question she imagined others would ask: "Why hath this Lady
write
her own life...[I]t is to no purpose to the Readers, but it is to the
Authoress, because I write for my own sake, not theirs...." (in Stanton 1994).
Yet, her story and stories of subsequent women are instructive to readers.
These autobiographies are not referenced for facts about these women or
their
personal/professional interactions as women and reporters. Although the
paper
will occasionally mention biographical "facts" about the women, the focus is
how they wrote about themselves. Nor is the claim here that they
presented
the "truth" about their lives. Indeed, it is in the context of
discussing
women's attempt to stitch together a self-portrait emphasizing a romantic
kind
of femininity and womanhood that Heilbrun quotes Virginia Woolf's comment
that "very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies." Recent
literature in autobiography makes impossible any acceptance of autobiography
as recitation of transparent fact. On the other hand, unlike critics
such as
Howard Good (1993), I do not assume that these autobiographers
significantly,
consistently, or intentionally distorted their accounts.3 In any case,
women
reporters are a particularly interesting group of women writers to study,
since, at least during the time period under study, they were more
obviously
intruding into a male territory, relative to poets and novelists, or, for
that
matter, other women professionals who happened to write autobiography. As an
attempt to give the self a narrative, autobiography is always bound up with
identity, one that is self-constructed (Anderson 1986). Given the
collaborative, or at least highly edited nature of their work, their
published
news stories cannot reveal or express their views on these questions. Thus,
autobiography becomes the best available resource for examining how these
women might have understood themselves as women practicing journalism.
The five autobiographies used here, located through standard bibliographies,
were chosen because they seemed representative of both the range and
focus of
autobiographies published by women journalists before World War II. Of
course, not all women journalists wrote autobiographies. More importantly,
those who did were not necessarily either the "best" reporters, by any
criteria, or the best known. Indeed, it may speak to autobiography's
relatively marginal status as a literary genre that not only have women long
published autobiography, but also little-known figures have written their
lives. Whatever regularities appear in these autobiographies, therefore,
are
not necessarily representative of women journalists of the era.
Furthermore,
confirming the ambiguous status of self-writing as a genre, the territory
covered in these books varies. Perhaps illustrating of the others'
modesty--it being apparently enough of a public declaration to reveal
oneself
at all--only Florence Finch Kelly's was a full-scale autobiography that
began
with her ancestors and progressed chronologically through the period of
writing. Kelly's 571 page autobiography, complete with index and tables of
content for each chapter, included not only detailed accounts of her life
but
also extensive sermonizing on sundry topics, from the value of college
education to the problems of "today's youth," as well as chapters on the
history and status of journalism and women in journalism. Nonetheless,
whatever their literary goals, all five focussed on work, with only enough
mention of early education and adolescent ambition to justify their career
choice.
The Culture of Autobiography
Friedrich Schlegel commented in 1798 that pure autobiographies are written by
neurotics fascinated by their own egos; authors of "a robust artistic or
adventuresome self-love"; born historians; pedants who refuse to leave the
world without commentary; and "women who also coquette with posterity" (in
Folkenflik 1993,3). The observation is notable in two respects. First,
although theoretical interest in autobiography as a genre has essentially
developed over the last two decades, autobiography itself has a long
tradition. Already in 1786 the so-called "milkmaid poet" described
strained
relations with her patron in an "autobiographical narrative" (Folkenflik,
1).
Moreover, women have been writing autobiography for an equally long time.
The first woman to compose her life story in English, Margery Kempe wrote
an
account of spiritual development between 1432-1436, although it was not
actually published until 1940 (Glenn 1992). Nonetheless, much of the initial
theorizing and academic literature about autobiography ignored that by
women.
The canon was male--Rousseau, Augustine, Adams. Indeed, a peculiarly ironic
parallel emerges with women's journalism and women's writings, which have
been
disparaged, it seems, merely because they were, or were perceived to have
been, written by women. So, too, autobiographical writing has been a
positive
term when applied to the male canon, but has negative connotations applied to
women's writing, referencing the notion that women cannot transcend, but only
record their private concerns (Stanton 1984). Quite possibly, the general
marginalization of autobiography, until recently, has resulted from its
access
to women, especially when diaries, memoirs, and letters are considered within
the genre. The flip side of the argument is that autobiography's reputation
as a "lesser form" (i.e., compared to epic poetry or drama, which made
grand
claims to high artistic achievement, requiring divine creativity) assured
its
survival as a genre for women and other marginalized people (Marcus
1988).
Regardless of the number of women writing autobiography, feminist critics
claim that the critical theory was long based on a male canon,
particularly
Augustine's dramatic story of conversion and victory of spirit over
flesh, and
Rousseau's secular story of self-discovery. This, they say, results in
misreadings of women's texts--to misunderstandings of how women's
autobiographical writings highlight different themes and different models
of
the individuated self (Friedman 1988). Mary Mason's (1980) reading of
four
early autobiographies leads her to posit a "distinct mode of interior
disclosure." Mason believes female autobiographers' preference for
self-disclosure through identification with some "other" continues to the
present. Estelle Jelinek (1980) says men tend to make their lives into a
coherent whole; conversely, women's narratives are "disconnected,
fragmentary
or organizing into self-sustained units rather than connecting chapters"
(17). Criteria such as orderliness and harmonious shaping, imported from
the
male tradition, not only are irrelevant to women's autobiographies but
also
misrepresent their value, Jelinek adds.
"The Kindness of Mankind"
Florence Finch Kelly's 1939 autobiography is exceptional in many respects,
not the least is which her sharp, remarkably modern-sounding bitterness
about
her difficulties--as a woman--securing a foothold in journalism. Kelly,
who
expressed her admiration of several "feminists" without explicitly using
that
word to describe herself, analyzed every era, every paper, and every city
she
mentioned in terms of how it treated women. Of the Boston Herald editor
who
tried to cheat her, she insisted: "It was my first, but far from my last,
experience of the ruthless injustice to which my sex would submit me in the
newspaper world. For I did not believe that he would have tried this
crooked
game upon me if I had been a man." (1939, 155). She emphasized how she
"burned with indignation" at the various injustices done her and at the
implausible explanations editors and publishers used to exclude women or
treat
them unfairly once hired. "In office after office I was met by the
stereotyped statement, 'We don't believe in women in journalism,' uttered
with
an air of finality that evidently was intended to destroy all hope in any
skirted applicant" (155). Kelly (then Finch) was not deterred; instead
of
retreating from the siege, she continued to butt her head against "the
stone
walls of entrenched conservatism."
At one point, Kelly's autobiography suddenly adopted a more conciliatory
tone, saying editors of the 1880s should not be judged by the very
different
views of the 1930s: "They were representatives of the ideas then almost
universally held, the voices of their own time; and if the desires and
ambitions of any young woman led her to challenge those ideas and to try to do
battle with them in their strongest entrenchments, inevitably she would have
a hard road to travel" (159). Furthermore, she stipulated, once hired,
she
was treated respectfully and courteously by male colleagues. But she
punctuated her account with accusations that men marginalized or trivialized
her work, simply because a woman had produced it. After one such
incident,
she said: "The injustice of my situation stung me to the quick. Viewing
my
work objectively and with all modesty, I knew that it was quite as good
and as
important as that of my men colleagues, and that it was more varied and more
difficult than that of most of them" (189). That the men earned at least
twice as much compounded the insult.
Elizabeth Banks' descriptions of her early efforts to find journalism work
expressed what a more common theme: the generosity of men despite her
own
naivete and immaturity, and the cruelty of women. The Wisconsin-born
Banks
dedicated The Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl (1902) to her editor,
"who,
being modest and retiring in his disposition, would not wish me to name
him."
Banks maintained a flat, self-mocking tone to describe how, after she
prepared herself for journalism by learning stenography and typing, no editor
wanted her "valuable services." She was forced to accept a secretarial
job,
where, to her embarrassment, she sat by a window where passersby could
watch
her. But what seemed to have been significant to her was not this
affront but
her ability to use this experience to write a story about her work as a
"typewriter girl." More importantly, as soon as it appeared, she first quit
her job and then demanded a job from the newspaper that published it.
According to Banks, the publisher responded, "Don't think of it, my poor
child. Be anything, but don't be a newspaper girl" (6). Nonetheless, in the
face of pleading and threats, he agreed to use her as a secretary in the
morning. In the afternoons, he advised her on the stories she wrote, at
first
primarily fashion pieces.
After Banks returned from a stint in Peru as assistant to the U.S.
ambassador, she resumed her career as "a newspaper girl." On one hand,
Banks
opposed the "old-fashioned" notion of her editor, an ex-confederate
colonel,
that a press office was not within "woman's sphere." In any case, he was
overruled by the publisher, who believed that the Baltimore paper needed
one
woman. Banks received carte blanche to do what and as she wanted. The
men on
the staff decorated her cubicle with flowers and curtains, and even once
raided a competitor's composing room so that she would get a scoop.
According
to Banks, kindly male reporters and editors, both in the United States and
England, often helped her. Banks admitted that after she once overheard
her
managing editor defend her privileges, she repudiated her special
treatment.
But when he subsequently sent her out in the rain to cover a story, she
decided she did not like being treated like a man. "So I was restored to my
former happy state of mind" (44).
Although the other women were far less complacent about their special status,
a couple of the other autobiographers used remarkably similar self-effacing
language to recall how men gave them getting work, despite their
inexperience.
Elizabeth Jordan described how the World editor granted her an interview and
a job (on her own unreasonable terms) despite her evident immaturity.
"Never
before, I am sure, had he come into contact with such a combination of
ignorance and ambition, frankness and reserve, self-confidence and childish
modesty, as I was revealing" (19). But Jordan also remembered some
unpleasant
experiences as a young reporter, including some "horribly degrading" winks
and passes. "There was a period when I was wretched over them--when I
felt
that they not only smirched me but that, in a way, I might be responsible
for
them." Apparently, she stopped blaming herself when she realized that
her
friend Margaret Sangster, then in her 60s and an editor at Harper's
Bazar,
endured the same thing.
Joan Lowell began Gal Reporter (1933) by ridiculing her ignorance of newsroom
jargon and structure. Given her own earlier unpleasant experiences with the
press, she had looked on reporters "as a special brand of lice who butted
into
your affairs and then wrote lies about you..." (4).4 She found reporters to
be very different from the drunken monsters seen in film. Lowell called
her
editor "a marvel of quiet, low-voiced efficiency" and she appreciated
both his
patience and his confidence in her. Referring to Walter Hovey, she said, "I
didn't see any lecherous look in his eyes that would bespeak a life
devoted to
digging up exposes of love nests, unwed mothers and yellow sheet scandal."
On the other hand, unlike Kelly, Joan Lowell also complained of rude
colleagues and crude competitors. Lowell described several sexist
incidents
involving sources and colleagues. She claimed she did not stoop to their
tricks, although she also explicitly advised would-be women reporters to
follow her model and exploit their femininity, when advantageous. Becoming
a
"good Gal Reporter" required a woman to pocket her pride and use her
feminine
wiles (49).
These journalists also complained of mistreatment by women. Regarding her
job as full-time society editor, Banks said: "Honesty compels me to say
that
during those first few months of my journalistic career there were not
very
many kind hands stretched out to me by the members of my own sex with
whom my
reportorial duties brought me in contact" (13). Society women were
particularly arrogant and inconsiderate. Banks explicitly contrasted the
"thoughtlessness of the womankind" with the "kindness of the mankind" (15).
She went to some effort to clarify that men helped her, apparently
anticipating that otherwise readers might imagine the men were merely
being
patronizing. For example, the policemen who chivalrously escorted her
home
after covering late-night parties apparently referred to her as "the
little
reporter" (a couple of policemen and reporters were willing to marry her
so
that she shouldn't have to work at all). She hastened to explain that
she
"felt it no dishonor and not derogatory to my dignity to be known among
the
police only by that name." Lowell, too, appreciated the genial, generous
Irish cops who looked out for her. "I can't say as much for those of my
own
sex. To paraphrase Bobby Burns, 'Woman's inhumanity to woman makes
countless
thousands mourn.'" (54).
Disparaging the women's page
The five women all saw worthy work as that written for general sections of
general newspapers and they reserved some of their most severe criticism
for
the kinds of writing they understood to be typically associated with
women.
Covering millinery openings was Kelly's first job, and she admitted a
brief
stint writing society news had provided basic training in journalistic
technique. Nonetheless, Kelly equated society reporting with unimportant
work. Kelly was extremely proud of her writing about women, including her
columns for women for the Globe and the Los Angles Times. Kelly, then,
was
path-breaking in her ability to break out a wholly new form of writing
for and
about women that had nothing to do with traditional women's pages.
Jordan's first job (after learning shorthand at a local business school) was
editing the woman's page of a Milwaukee newspaper owned by a family
friend.
Jordan was not thrilled with the opportunity to supply "light and warmth
to
the women of the universe": "It is a miracle that the stuff I had to
carry in
'Sunshine' did not permanently destroy my interest in newspaper work."
Later, too, Jordan specified her willingness to work hard at any assignment
except society news. "I drew the line at that." Furthermore, Jordan was
not
happy to get caught in a power struggle between Colonel Cockerill, who
hired
her but whose authority was waning, and Ballard Smith, the managing
editor.
Yet, she did not complain, even when temporarily banished to the World's
Brooklyn edition. She merely commented coolly, that once she returned to
Smith's good graces with a scoop, "My real working life had begun."
Elizabeth Banks clearly regarded her position as society editor as lesser in
value than "straight" reporting. But she accepted it as her due. Banks
described her agonized decision when one unhappy actress poured out her woes
to Banks (when male reporters were unable to get the story) and then
suddenly
announced that her confession had been told to Banks, as a woman, in
confidence, and that Banks must not publish anything about their conversation.
Banks first replied that, as a woman with a living to earn, she must print
it. But the actress apparently convinced Banks that no woman should help
send
another to ruination in a world already hard on woman. "Promise that you
will never for the sake of your own success tread on another woman and try
to
crush her." Banks reluctantly promised. The editor did not fire her, as
would
have been the case, she suspected, had she been male. Nonetheless, not
surprisingly appalled by Banks' concession, the editor told Banks: "As you
are
a woman, I will say that you have not the journalistic instinct. You will
never be able to do big things in journalism....The fact is, you're all
woman
and no journalist."
Banks agreed. She stuck to the women's page and produced no more "special
features," the exclusive preserve of "real" journalists. Ironically,
much of
the remainder of her autobiography, and the rest of her professional
life,
Banks spent on/in England, where she was a tremendously successful
journalist,
famous for her enterprising stories. Based on a two-week stint as a maid,
Banks produced a long series on the hardships of servant life; she also
became, albeit on false pretenses, a flower girl, a laundry worker, and a
dressmaker's apprentice.
Ethics
These women virtually echo one another in describing conflicts between their
identities as reporters and their sensibilities as woman. As Banks'
debate
with the actress illustrated, these women primarily experienced their
sense of
membership in a female sorority as undermining their professionalism. Yet,
ethical dilemmas were not always occasioned by loyalties to women. In a
chapter titled "Story of a Failure," Banks recalled why her editor sent her
to
interview a Washington, D.C. diplomat: "You've got diplomacy, tact,
shrewdness, discretion, and above all, you are absolutely feminine, and you
haven't got 'newspaper woman' and 'interviewer' placarded all over you"
(249).
Whether it was because of Banks' femininity, the man, whom she knew from her
days in Peru, spilled some important secrets whose publication would
allegedly have damaged American interests. Again, Banks agonized over the
question: "Should she govern her womanhood and her honor by her
journalistic
instinct, or should she govern that journalistic instinct by that honor
and
that womanhood?" (256). Ultimately, having stacked the deck against work
and
having decided he had talked to her as a woman, not a reporter, Banks
merely
told her editor the diplomat had refused to talk.
In one highly sentimental chapter Banks presented the pitiful tale of a
colleague who, as assigned, covered a funeral in a highly professional
manner,
never telling anyone that the deceased was her fiancee. Banks did not
assume, however, that all women journalists would be guided by noble
feelings.
Banks once received a marriage proposal through the mail from a reader who
believed she really was living on $3 a week. She speculated that some
women
reporters would have obtained material for yet another story by
contacting the
man but continuing to pose as a poor working girl. She claimed she would not
exploit her reader that way.
A short story that Jordan published in Cosmopolitan and then included in a
collection of fiction (1898), perhaps illustrated Jordan's approach to
ethics.
Jordan's heroine, reporter Ruth Herrick, was assigned--because her managing
editor realized no one else could do it--to interview a woman on trial
for m
urder. The defendant poured out her soul to Herrick, regaling her with
an
awful tale of being cruelly abused by her husband, who she had poisoned,
after
he attacked her mother. The reporter promised not to publish the pitiful
confession of the dignified, regal, noble defendant, who eventually was
acquitted. Believing that Herrick simply failed to get the story, the
managing editor asserted, "But, after all, you can't depend on a woman in this
business." Jordan's tale ended: "The managing editor was more nearly right
than he knew" (1898, 29).
Forty years later, in her autobiography, Jordan denied, despite widespread
rumor to the contrary, that this story represented an autobiographical
response to the real trial of Lizzie Borden.5 Even Jordan's own managing
editor said, after reading the fiction, "So that's the kind of reporter you
are." According to her autobiography, when she told fellow newsman
Julian
Ralph that she believed (as did many feminists of the day) in Borden's
innoc
ence, her friend looked suddenly relieved. With rare sarcasm, Banks
commented: "All the newspaper men had been afraid that being a woman, and
therefore without man's great natural sympathy, I would show a bias in my
reports that might divert some of the current of popular feeling which was
sweeping toward Miss Borden" (120-21). The issue is not whether Jordan
based
her story on Borden. Rather, the point is whether Jordan--and her female
colleagues--believed they should treat people as subjects, not objects.
Apparently they did.
Like Banks, Jordan was willing to forgo a good story for reasons of sympathy
that she did not explicit mark as gendered. Jordan once worked on a
story
about a poor woman whose wealthy son-in-law would not help her, until
Jordan
put the fear of God and the newspaper world into him. She did not
publish the
story, however. "Its withholding was the price of an aged gentlewoman's
safety and comfort" (48). Lowell reversed this story, self-critically
confessing that she once volunteered to do a sensational, tabloid story about
a young unmarried girl who had suffocated her baby. Her editor told her
to
drop the idea, and investigate instead homeless and jobless women. The
suggestion apparently inspired Lowell to undertake a number of disguises--
dishwasher, charwoman, rag picker, taxi-dancer, and sweat shop worker--as
a
way of investigating exploitation of poor girls.
MONEY
All five autobiographers emphasized their financial worries. In some sense,
their anxieties underscore the precarious financial status of all
journalists
during this period. But their adamancy on their need to support themselves
suggests their determination to distance themselves from the image of
both
frivolous society dilettantes and idealistic social reformers. In a
society
where work was increasingly paid in cash and status was correlated to
income,
these women argued that they needed money and deserved to be paid no less
than
men. Once she realized the possibility of supporting herself with newspaper
work (as a prelude to creative writing), Kelly explained: "I leaped to my
feet
aglow with hope. In that moment my newspaper career was born. It was born
out of economic necessity, and economic necessity kept it going until it
ended" (121). Kelly was consistently specific about how much (that is, how
little) she was paid. More to the point, she connected her ill-pay to
male
prejudice. For example, Kelly conceded that the $10 a San Francisco
editor
once paid her was a lot of money in 1880--when she was desperate for
cash.
"Nonetheless, I am very much inclined to think that if I had not been a
woman,
young, inexperienced and not very prosperous in appearance, the smiling
editor would have given me a larger order on the cashier" (129).
Banks saw several potential conflicts between journalism and womanhood
exacerbated by economics. Having somewhat defensively explained both her
reluctance to become a yellow journalist and her justification of yellow
journalism, she added that not all women would succeed with sensational
stories. Moreover, although she both retained her self-respect and kept the
"pot-aboiling" with exotic stories, she told editors not to assign her
anything they wouldn't want their sisters to do. She outright refused to let
herself get arrested as a prostitute, for example, merely to dramatize
the
need for reform. On the other hand, although Banks' stories led to
certain
institutional investigations (for example, of the practice of buying
British
"pedigrees") and reforms, she took pains to point out that she was far
more
concerned with earning a living than reform. Her autobiography frequent
referred to money woes and her need to support herself. Jordan also
underlined her concern with money, after her father went down in the panic of
1893. "After years of regarding it as a trivial detail, the amount I
earned
had suddenly become important" (105). According to Lowell, she only
stooped
to journalism because during the Depression she lost all the money earned
from
her 1929 book.6
Romance and Domestic Life
Kelly's autobiography is interesting both for the relatively little that she
said about her personal life and for how she discussed the conflict
between
personal and professional life. After Allen Kelly, an editorial writer
with
whom she had worked at the Globe, proposed both a business partnership
and
marriage, Florence Finch Kelly described fighting "the battle between love
and
ambition." Although as a "normal" woman, she said she certainly had expected
marriage and motherhood, she assumed these would come in the distant future,
"after the desires and ambitions of intellectual life had been at least
partly
gratified." In any event, after privately wrestling with her dilemma, she
accepted Allen's proposal; she recalled waving herself good-by in a
mirror
before going to the small Globe ceremony (226). In late 1885, she
resigned
to have a child and did not resume regular professional work for several
months. In the choice between work and motherhood, she chose the latter.
Being a "first-class Jersey cow" was important to her, she said, and
trying to
write lessened her ability to produce enough good milk (232).
Although Kelly explained her husband's frequent job changes, she offered no
discussion of their relationship. Despite her philosophizing on many
issues,
she said nothing about marriage, much less hers. Kelly skipped over the
death
of her first son and only occasionally mentioned her second "boykin," who
apparently suffered serious health problems. Eventually she chose to live
in
New York City, for her son's sake. Apparently her husband believed that
California sunshine was good for his health, while she believed that colder
weather was better for Sherwin. Allen Kelly remained in Los Angeles
until his
death, which she casually mentioned in one sentence (357).
Banks was silent on the subject of her personal life, except for her maid and
her dog. When her black maid decided to ignore Banks' protestations and
return to her abusive husband, Banks expressed concern about Dinah's future
in
Alabama. Dinah's love for an unworthy man illustrated a problem that, in
Banks' stated view, all women, black and white, shared. Although her
autobiography was dotted with references to men who proposed marriage out of
professional chivalry, Banks never mentioned romantic possibilities or
relationships.
Jordan, who attended a convent high school and had considered becoming a nun
(until her father begged her to try newspaper work instead), extensively
discussed close, long-lasting friendships with men, including male reporters
and writers, and women, including a number of reporters and writers, as
well
as society women, social reformers, and activists. One of her best
friends
was a somewhat under-employed journalist who provided regular escort
service,
especially to mass; at her urging, he called her "Mother" and treated
her as
such. Jordan also openly speculated why she never fell in love with
Arthur
Brisbane, journalism's "Napoleon," under whom she worked as assistant
Sunday
editor of the World. She supposed that much of the reason was her "basic
and
lifelong prejudice against any combination of office work and sentimental
dalliance--a prejudice Mr. Brisbane and other fine men I have worked with
obviously shared" (128).
One of Jordan's fictional tales concerned a woman who left the convent to go
into journalism. (The advice a nun gave this character was precisely the
advice Jordan received from a nun quoted in her autobiography.) The
reporter
found herself mislabeled after she volunteered for a somewhat sleazy
reporting
assignment. The reporter soon realized she had made a horrible mistake.
Luckily, it seems, the paper's political editor offered her an alternative
assignment: marry him. And so, in "Miss Van Dyke's Best Story" the
reporter
accepted: "After all, a woman's place is in a home." Like Banks, Jordan
herself never married. For at least some 40 years she shared an apartment
with
two women friends, with her mother a frequent guest.
Conclusion
Jelinek (1980) asserts that women's autobiographies rarely mirror the
establishment history of the times; they deemphasize the public aspects of
their lives, concentrating instead on domestic details, family
difficulties,
close friends, and people who influenced them. Mentioning
autobiographies by
several women writers, she finds that even women famous as professionals
referred only obliquely to their careers. "This emphasis by women on the
personal, especially on other people, rather than on their work life, their
professional success, or their connectedness to current political or
intellectual history clearly contradicts the established criterion about
the
content of autonomy" (10). Jane Marcus says the autobiographies of
certain
privileged, successful women at the turn-of-the-century represent a
"re/signing" of their names in women's history. "Enacting a deliberate
resignation from the public world and patriarchal history, which had already
erased or was expected to erase their names and their works, they
re/signed
their private lives into domestic discourse" (1988).
This (re)turn to the personal does not seem apply to women journalists, who
for the most part ruthlessly excised their personal life, or emphasized
that
work required them to do so. Gender is not necessarily and always the
"hermeneutic key" to authorial intention and textual production (Peterson
1993). But the five autobiographies share certain features. Consistent
with
the era and the theorizing, these women were all close to their parents,
whom
they regaraded as influential, especially mothers. Kelly told mothers
specifically not to worry if their children seemed not to appreciate their
advice. They also mentioned good friends--usually friends who were public
figures and/or writers. Nonetheless, these women, as reporters, focussed
on
their careers, dedicated themselves to their work, and measured
themselves by
male standards. They varied in their modesty but they all underlined
their
career ambition. Presumably Heilbrun would not find these women
particularly
angry. On the other hand, they announced their sense of injustice and
inequity. Ironically, Kelly, who was the most openly resentful, claimed that
the re-living she experienced while drafting the book was more
satisfactory
that the actual living, since it brought "ampler and serener tolerance of
events and conditions and personalities that formerly had deeply disturbed
and
perhaps irritated" (xv).
While the stereotype insists that the mode of personal narrative is
relatively introspective and intimate, these autobiographers generally
avoided
emotional life, especially painful memories (cf. Jelinek 1980). One might
expect that women journalists in particular would avoid a female literary
tradition. More importantly, the exceptions to the rule are highly
significant, especially as they elicit particular responses from critics
and
readers and suggest the impact of publishers' decision-making, from how
manuscripts are selected (or rejected) to how they are edited. Only Milly
Bennett was forthcoming about personal affairs, including relationships
with
particular men. Milly Bennett confessed that, as a seasoned reporter in
San
Francisco, she covered fires just to be near the cub reporter she had
fallen
in love with. She followed him to Hawaii, where, as she described it,
she
could not think straight for thinking about Mike Mitchell. Bennett poured
out
details about her despair at the eventual disintegration of her marriage.
Bennett agonized over work and career choices, although at one point she
claimed to prefer living hand-to-mouth while doing stories about Chiang
Kai-shek to being trapped inside an apartment, sterilizing bottles. Notably,
Bennett's autobiography essentially did not get published. Bennett
stopped
working on her manuscript in 1939, apparently because no publisher was
interested. Moreover, Tom Grunfeld, who found her papers and published an
annotated version of her autobiography in 1993, told Bennett's story
almost
exclusively in sexual language. Much of his introduction outlined her
three
husbands (the second marriage was an unsuccessful attempt to protect a
homosexual Soviet dancer; the third husband, whom she met while covering the
Spanish Civil War, died). And Grunfeld himself highlighted how Bennett's
friends apparently saw her embodying a "contradiction between her physical
appearance and her strong emotional allure, and especially her strong
sexual
attractiveness to men" (xv).7 Grunfeld recalled a newspaperman giving "a
wink
that suggested Milly's charm lay not strictly in her ability to gather and
write the news" (xv).
Another angle on this emerges in Howard Good's treatment of women
autobiographers. Of Joan Lowell's admittedly gory description of how a
notorious "white slaver" literally attacked her during an under-cover
investigation (he was eventually convicted for this attack), Good comments,
"Sex gave her power over sources and readers, or at least the illusion of
it,
but power...tends to corrupt. Lowell was so corrupted--so lost in
tabloidism--that even when she described herself being assaulted...she
was
tempted to titillate" (1993, 92). Good is much gentler on Jordan, whose
autobiography was considerably more modest, self-deprecating, and critical
of
women who would flaunt their sexuality. Jordan described walking home
very
late one night and being approached by a driver who tried to get her into
his
cab. She ran away in terror when inside the cab she saw a repulsive
cadaverous-looking man staring back at her, his skin "indescribably
horrible--yellow, with an undertone of green." Good comments, "She was
still
running years later" (85).
In my view Jordan expressed healthy, valid satisfaction with career,
religious commitment, and good friends--not fear of sex. The point is that on
one hand, these women's autobiographies have arisen, and continue to be
judged, in terms of particular constructions of womanhood and particular
notions about what is appropriate for female narrative. And on the other
hand, these women were clearly struggling to be heard on their own terms.
All
five autobiographers addressed--both as warning and encouragement--women
readers. Neither as individuals nor as a group do they offer solutions to
the
problems of being perceived as female in a male profession or to the problems
of combining career and domestic responsibility. By visibly struggling over
these dilemmas, however, they dramatize the problems that women reporters
confronted in the 1900-1940 period and also suggest the origins of a long
tradition confronting, and perhaps even confining, women journalists years
later.
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