By Lennlee Keep
The power of the press has been apparent since the first newspapers began circulating in the early 17th century. A story can create or destroy fortunes, change social norms, or change the people in power. As media conglomerates grow stronger every day and the number of mainstream daily newspapers shrinks in size, the role of smaller news outlets and alternative press has become more vital in breaking the stories that don’t make the big news cycle, but shape our daily lives. The news startup The 19th*, featured in Breaking the News, found a path to success by breaking through the noise and sharing the stories of the overlooked and undervalued.
But the battle to be seen and heard is nothing new. Women journalists have been fighting to share these untold stories for decades.
Historically, the original alternative presses were created and run by those who had no voice or little representation: women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Since the early 1800s, women have used the pen and the press to create opportunities, raise awareness, and change the world
Anne Royall: A “Thorn in the Side”
One of the first women to gain notoriety as a journalist was Anne Royall (June 11, 1769-October 1, 1854). Her work combined necessity and tenacity, as with most movements. After her husband had died, his family contested his will in court. The litigation went on for seven years, ultimately leaving Royall penniless. She had a knack for storytelling and humor, and her work was well-liked—until she turned her pen on the people in power. She published a paper called Paul Pry, which exposed government fraud and corruption in Washington, D.C.
Royall was suddenly a maligned writer and a popular target for other papers. The local press called her “a literary wildcat from the back woods and a virago (a loud and overbearing woman with masculine attributes). The negative press led to declining subscriptions and ultimately failed when the mail carriers refused to deliver the paper to subscribers. She was charged in 1829 with “being a public nuisance, a common brawler and a common scold,” though was fortunate to have charges reduced to just “common scold.”
As Jeff Biggers in Smithsonian Magazine wrote, “Royall knew how to make her readers laugh, and laugh at men—a dangerous talent, especially for a freethinking woman who rattled the bones of Capitol Hill and made Congress ‘bow down in fear of her’ as the whistleblower of political corruption, fraudulent land schemes, and banking scandals. She was also a thorn in the side of a powerful evangelical movement sweeping across the country.”
Margaret Fuller
Around the same time as Royall, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was making a name for herself as a journalist and for her radical views on women’s rights and education. Her career is a list of firsts; she was the first woman allowed access to the library at Harvard, considered to be the first female war correspondent (covering war and revolution in Europe), and her book Women in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the U.S. She was also the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Fuller “my vivacious friend.”
Fuller was an early champion of feminism, and her writing helped to make women’s issues part of the national conversation. Fuller used her platform to promote women’s rights to education and employment, prison reform, and the emancipation of enslaved people.
Author Megan Marshall wrote more about the dynamic of Fuller and her groundbreaking body of work in her novel, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and talked to WUWM public radio about Fuller. Tragically, Fuller died in a shipwreck just off the coast of Long Island, New York, in 1850, but her legacy as an early American feminist journalist lives on.
Amelia Bloomer
In 1849, the first issue of The Lily was published. Initially, it was created as a magazine for the women in the Seneca Falls Women’s Temperance Society and was the first magazine written by and for women. By 1850, The Lily had moved away from temperance themes and was described as “Devoted to the issues of Women,” which included everything from divorce, drinking, and slavery. The publisher was Amelia Bloomer, and the paper’s journalists included famous women’s rights activists like Elizabeth Stady Canton—writing under the nom de plume “Sunflower.”
Bloomer was a serious journalist and, accidentally, a trendsetter.
The fashion for women at the time consisted of long skirts that dragged on the ground with layers of petticoats and a tight whalebone corset. Bloomer was an avid proponent of a new style (also called a reform dress) that consisted of a tunic and pantalettes. This style gave women more physical freedom and symbolized the women’s rights movement. Bloomer wrote about this trend so often in The Lily that the pantalettes became known as “bloomers,” which still holds today.
This association with the scandalous fashion trend led to increased circulation and awareness about women’s issues. The paper had a peak national circulation of around 6,000.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
While some white journalists wrote and advocated for abolition, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) wrote with unique insight and personal knowledge. Wells was born into slavery but was freed with her family at the end of the Civil War. Her parents realized the importance of education and instilled in her a love of activism, and she soon combined the two into a career in journalism. When a friend was lynched in Memphis, Wells was dubious of his guilt, which led her to explore the crimes of other men murdered in this brutal, unjust, and cruel way.
She investigated some of the more high-profile cases and found that the evidence of guilt was thin or, sometimes, nonexistent. Wells began publishing her findings in local papers and ultimately combined this work into a widely distributed pamphlet. As a result, her printing press was destroyed, and, fearing for her safety, she fled from Memphis to Chicago, where she continued her activism and writing. Eventually, she traveled to Europe and other countries to expose the savage practice of lynching internationally. “Abroad, she openly confronted white women in the suffrage movement who ignored lynching,” wrote the National Women’s History Museum‘s Arlisha R. Norwood. “Because of her stance, she was often ridiculed and ostracized by women’s suffrage organizations in the United States.”
The Black newspaper the Chicago Defender published a poem in tribute to Wells upon her death, excerpted here:
“Your future is no turmoil bare
Of reward, etched in the glare
Of right and wrong, bubbling for
redress
Of black men.”
Hazel Garland
Inroads were made for women and Black people in the 19th century, but challenges persisted into the next one.
While there were many women journalists in the 1940s, it wasn’t a profession that most women could choose for themselves. A young, Black newlywed named Hazel Garland worked as a maid but dreamt of a life as a journalist. Hazel had been an excellent student in school, but her father—who had taken work in Pennsylvania as a coal miner—refused to continue her high school education because she was a woman. She worked as a maid to contribute to her family but still read and wrote as much as possible.
In 1943, her talent coincided with a life-changing opportunity. She was on the YWCA publicity committee, and they held a tea in honor of the first Black staff worker. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier got lost on the way to the event. Garland seized the opportunity and wrote the story herself. The editors at the Courier were impressed, launching her career.
Garland always looked at more profound issues of any story through a human and local lens. She had a thriving, popular local column called “Things to Talk About,” and continued to move up the ladder. She wrote for New Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s most widely-read Black newspapers. In 1974, Hazel moved to the top at the Courier and became the first African American woman to serve as the editor-in-chief of a nationally circulated newspaper chain.
“We tell the stories. We tell the stories of the people. We told the stories of Colored people, we told the stories of Negroes, we told the stories of Black people and now we tell the stories of African-Americans. Does it really matter, sports, social, entertainment, or political? They are all our stories, and if we don’t tell it, who will?”—Hazel Garland
Edythe Eyde
Despite these advances, women in the LGBTQ+ community had no place for their stories until 1947, when Edythe Eyde, a secretary at RKO Pictures in Hollywood, wrote the first issue of Vice Versa, which she dubbed “America’s Gayest Magazine.” Writing under the name Lisa Ben (anagram for “lesbian”), Edythe Eyde mailed three copies and distributed the rest by hand. She estimated that about twelve people read each copy.
Eyde said that she wrote Vice Versa to find and reach others like her: “I knew the way I felt, but I didn’t know how to go about finding someone else that was that way, and there was just no way to find out in those days. You know, everything was pretty closed about things like that. I wrote Vice Versa mainly to keep myself company because I thought that although I don’t know any gay gals now, by the time I finish a couple of these magazines, I’m sure I will. I was such a little optimist.” (via Making Gay History)
Ultimately, there were only nine issues of Vice Versa published because Eyde became fearful of violating the Comstock Act, which “prohibits the mailing of ‘obscene, lewd, or lascivious’ materials, like pornography, or any article or thing intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” By the 1960s, the government no longer enforced the Comstock laws, but they remain on the books today. (In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, Comstock laws could play an important role for anti-abortion groups fighting abortion pills.)
Even though Eyde ceased publication of Vice Versa, its legacy lives on. The magazine’s mix of editorials, reviews, short stories, and letters is still a format that is used in publications today. In 2010, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association inducted Eyde into its Hall of Fame.
Queer Music History has posted all the issues of Vice Versa here, courtesy ONE Archives at the USC Library.
Frances FitzGerald
Women in journalism have challenged and changed existing societal narratives about underserved and, sometimes, invisible groups. During the Vietnam War, the daily news was filled with reports of combat missions, political dealings, and a running tally of servicemen killed in action. However, journalist Frances FitzGerald was on the ground in Vietnam, giving a perspective on the war that was not seen in the United States. She wrote about Vietnamese culture and politics as well as the devastating impact of the war on the average citizens of Vietnam.
FitzGerald’s work appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Her boots-on-the-ground journalism shared stories that gave a much-needed perspective that humanized a people and place under siege.
She ultimately wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, the first significant book about Vietnam written by an American. In her 80s, she continues to be an active investigative writer, publishing the book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, a comprehensive history of white evangelical movements in the United States, in 2017.
Connie Walker
News has moved beyond print (lovingly referred to as “dead tree” publishing), newsreels, and the nightly TV news, and has embraced a digital world. Podcasting has exploded, and intimate, first-person storytelling has brought essential stories to a broader audience.
One of the most prominent voices in podcasting is journalist Connie Walker, a member of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada. She has written and reported on the violence and struggles of Indigenous women and the institutional racism that keeps crime against Indigenous people unreported and unprosecuted. Walker contends that Indigenous women are eager to tell their stories but are underrepresented in the media. As Walker puts it, “Indigenous women don’t need a voice. We need more microphones.”
Walker’s reporting and exposure of corruption and abuse are making waves and bringing awareness to the buried history and suffering that haunts the indigenous tribes of Canada. In her Peabody and Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast, “Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels,” she investigated the systemic abuses in the Canadian residential school system and revealed her own family’s generational trauma from this corrupt and devastating system.
Just Getting Started
From print to podcasts [The 19th* now has a podcast, too], blog to broadcast, women continue claiming more space in journalism. But despite this increased presence, unique stories by, about, and for underrepresented populations are becoming more challenging to find. With major media now in the hands of few corporations, there is justifiable concern that giant media’s megaphone will drown out the voices of unique populations. For over 150 years, American women journalists have written groundbreaking stories that have changed minds, guided society, and opened doors that led to healing and justice, and they are just getting started.
Lennlee Keep is a nonfiction writer, filmmaker, storyteller, and reticent D&D player. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Southeast Review, and ESME. Her films have been shown on PBS, A&E, and the BBC. The ex-wife of a dead guy, she talks about death more than most people are comfortable with. She is working on a memoir about addiction, grief and a literally broken heart. She lives in Seattle with her son and their guinea pig, Chuck Norris.
Related Films
