Just Journalists

To the Editors:

I greatly appreciated Susan Faludi’s recent essay, “All the News That’s Fit to Feel” [NYR, August 15], on the attitudes and expectations that have historically greeted women in the press room. But I would like to stick up for the female journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their work had more value than this article presents. The essay uncritically employs the terms “stunt girl” and “sob sister,” slurs coined by male writers to belittle their very successful, well-paid peers; most of the women despised these names, considering themselves just journalists.

Faludi notes that, in terms of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, “the women they hired weren’t brought on to report serious news.” Whatever the publishers’ intent, these reporters did cover serious news: strikes, presidential races, unsafe factory conditions, overcrowded tenement houses, the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes. Admittedly, they often included a first-person voice, an offer to report from “a woman’s perspective,” but society at the time had a gaping hole where a woman’s perspective should be. As easy as it is to make fun of the “sob sisters” who charted their emotive responses to statements from the witness stand, the fact was that women didn’t sit on juries. Cases of domestic violence, rape, and illegal abortion faced exclusively male judgment; under these circumstances, the role of the “sob sisters” or the all-women panels created by The World’s Elizabeth Garver Jordan to analyze newsworthy trials seems an important one.

Those who did their job particularly well, like Elizabeth Cochrane (Nellie Bly), provided an invaluable service. In any given situation, she noted the plight of women—those suffering the Pullman Strike or looking for work in a tough job market or put out on the street in winter during “vice” raids. Bly considered their experiences to be news. It was a population ignored by most other reporters of her day.

Bly and many other turn-of-the-century female reporters did what Faludi would have them do: “examine ‘the system’ and hold it accountable.” Even if their style seems dated, their accomplishments created opportunities for journalists who came after, whether or not they choose to write in the first person.

Kim Todd
Minneapolis

Susan Faludi replies:

I have no quarrel with Kim Todd’s observation that turn-of-the-century female reporters used their entrée into journalism to do serious work. And I thank her for elaborating on a point that I would have liked to explore more fully. Indeed, as my piece notes, Cochrane and her cohort exposed dire conditions for women that otherwise would have gone unexplored and unaddressed. Nevertheless, the early newspaper publishers, with the public’s collusion, created a particular persona for women writers that has curiously morphed into a present-day tendency exhibited industry-wide, regardless of sex. With an important distinction: whereas the “stunt girls” and “sob sisters” used the profile of a stereotypical female vulnerability and emotionality to do substantive reporting, the modern inclination in the social media age is to treat serious assignments (including presidential campaigns) as an invitation to emotional and self-promotional display.