Nytimes front page may 31 series#

Yet few readers today will place Ross’s name, let alone those of the “front-page girls” she celebrated.Īnother generation, another rescue effort: In 1986, in “Brilliant Bylines,” Barbara Belford offered longer profiles, two dozen in all. By 1936, there were enough leading women to fill a 600-page volume, “Ladies of the Press.” Its author, Ishbel Ross, wrote for The New York Tribune and insisted that her sisters had “arrived in a convincing way.” Harper published multiple editions a reprint was issued in 1974 a Chinese-language version came out in 2020.

Many said yes by the beginning of the last century, they numbered more than 2,000, some 7 percent of the country’s reporters. Tarbell, whose reporting on Standard Oil for McClure’s magazine at the turn of the 20th century played a role in the conglomerate’s breakup, enumerated the signal successes of women in the field as of 1887, suggesting that aspiring presswomen ask themselves, “Can you thrive under drudgery?” Kroeger’s copious endnotes demonstrate just how many times, over how many generations, others have tried to change the status quo by cataloging the achievements of journalism’s women. Deeply researched and encyclopedic in the best sense, the book attempts to create a broad new canon of unforgettables. Clocking in at over 500 pages, “Undaunted” sweeps across centuries and thumbs through reams of bylines. In “Undaunted” - a book commissioned, as Kroeger explains, by its editor - she tries a different tack. Kroeger, an eminent journalist and editor herself, as well as a professor emerita at N.Y.U., has written well-regarded lives of some of her best-known predecessors: the stunt reporter Nellie Bly, and the magazine writer and novelist Fannie Hurst. How best to correct the record is a different question, with murkier answers. As Kroeger writes, “Who creates the record, who promotes it and who wins recognition all matter, as do the arbiters, the people who make the selections.” The Times called Payne “ the nation’s pre-eminent Black female journalist,” yet allotted her obituary only a couple of inches on the middle of. They smashed barriers Payne was one of the first Black women in the White House press corps, needling President Eisenhower on race issues. A tribute by her colleagues, printed under a bar of mourning black, celebrated her “ genius for seeing.” Knopf published a posthumous volume of her reporting, “The World at Home,” with a fawning introduction by the columnist James Reston, whose name you probably do know.

Nytimes front page may 31 series#

It’s tempting to imagine McCormick as one of those figures, so often female, whom history has ignored: a candidate for a post-hoc obituary series like “ Overlooked No More.” In fact, when she died, in 1954, her obituary ran on The Times’s front page. At the New York World’s Fair, she was presented as “the Woman of 1939,” chosen for the honor by an all-female jury over Eleanor Roosevelt and Georgia O’Keeffe, among other nominees. In a photograph of that table of mandarins, it’s easy to spot her, among 15 white men.

The Times put McCormick on the payroll and then on the editorial board, a first for a woman.

Male colleagues were left sputtering as this “sparkly, matronly freelancer” regularly “big-footed them with dainty toes,” Kroeger writes. In the coming years, she would also interview Stalin, Hitler and the Irish revolutionary leader Eamon de Valera. In 1921, while working as a stringer for The New York Times in Rome, she took the measure of a rising young legislator named Benito Mussolini. Brooke Kroeger’s compendious and lively “Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism” introduced me to her.īorn in England in the early 1880s, McCormick became as eminent a reporter as any in the United States. I hadn’t, and as the director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, which holds peerless collections documenting pioneers in print journalism, I could have, and definitely should have. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Anne O’Hare McCormick. UNDAUNTED: How Women Changed American Journalism, by Brooke Kroeger