At right: Genevieve Forbes Herrick, who is very rarely depected in a photo.

The American newsroom of the first decades of the twentieth century, where front-page news was produced, was all but closed to women. Ishbell Ross, a respected journalist of the 1920s, believed that all city editors secretly thought: “Girls, we like you well enough, but we don’t altogether trust you.”

At the dawn of the 1900s, American journalism was changing at a dizzying pace. In newsrooms of major city papers, the clacking of typewriters had replaced the scribbling of pens. The linotype machine revolutionized the printing process. Now, each letter of type didn’t have to be set by hand.

Just as important, the kind of splashy undercover stories that made stunt girl reporters like Nellie Bly and Winifred Bonfils famous was falling out of favor. Investigative journalism, newly respectable, relied on careful research and fact-checking instead of wild set-ups and dramatic storytelling of earlier times.

Something else that was changing — finally — was the number of female journalists. In the 1880s there were just a few hundred in the entire country. By 1900 that number grew to nearly 2,200, and by the end of the 1930s, there were about 16,000 women in American journalism.

Sure, it was a great improvement. But the majority of “girl reporters,” as they were called, were assigned to women’s pages or features that weren’t front page news — society, home, fashion, and family.          

Of course, there was nothing wrong (and there still isn’t) with covering those topics — if that’s what a woman reporter chose to do. But for the most part, female journalists weren’t given that choice and continued to be unwelcome in city newsrooms. That doesn’t mean that women had failed.

Women’s pages, as they were called, helped sell papers. By the 1930s, women were serving as editors, producing longer features and Sunday magazines, and working in business, art, mechanical, and promotional departments. Here, we’ll look at the careers of three women journalists whose hard news reporting made it to the front page despite the odds.

. . . . . . . . . .

Ida Tarbell

Ida M. Tarbell in 1904

Ida M. Tarbell (1857 – 1944) was known as “muckraker” — a word coined by president Theodore Roosevelt describing journalists who exposed big business’s shady dealings. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Ida Tarbell’s reputation as a muckraker made her a pioneer in the new brand of detailed investigative journalism. She’s still considered one of the best ever.

Her most famous investigation was of Standard Oil’s unfair business practices, called The History of Standard Oil. This title might sound like a snoozefest, but Tarbell wrote the nineteen-part series in a way that captured readers’ imaginations and made them eager for the next installments.

Through her careful research, Tarbell proved that corporate monopolies hurt the public. Her series led to the 1911 Supreme Court decision that ruled against Standard Oil and broke it apart. Though this was the highlight of her career, Ida never stopped writing.

Tarbell was mainly interested in politics and presidents and was a Lincoln scholar. Strangely, she was against women’s right to vote, making her unpopular with other female journalists and reformers of her time. Still, whenever you see a list of most influential journalists of all time — male or female — Ida Tarbell’s name is always near the top.

. . . . . . . . . .

Genevieve Forbes Herrick

Herrick went undercover to investigate immigration in 1921

Genevieve Forbes Herrick (1894 – 1962) bridged the gap between stunt reporting and the newer breed of investigative journalist. Brilliant and ambitious, she joined the Chicago Tribune in 1921 with a master’s degree to her credit.

The Tribune wanted to steer her toward the women’s pages, but she refused. Instead, Herrick talked her editors into letting her pose as a poor Irish girl to experience what it was like to immigrate to America. Her reporting recounted the terror of the ocean voyage from Ireland and the terrible treatment immigrants faced after arriving through Ellis Island.

Herrick told the hidden truth of how women were forced to strip for unneeded medical exams; how passengers were kicked and shoved into lines by authorities; and how newly arrived parents and children were forcibly separated. Genevieve was asked to testify before the House of Representatives, which resulted in improved conditions at Ellis Island.

Because this exposé was so successful, the Tribune let Herrick report on whatever topics she chose. Through the 1920s and 1930s, she covered politics and promoted women running for office. One of them was Ruth Hanna McCormick, who ran for the House of Representatives in 1928 — and won.

Herrick’s reporting was fearless, whether she was going after Chicago’s corrupt politicians or the city’s mob bosses.

. . . . . . . . . .

Anne O’Hare McCormick

Anne O’Hare McCormick, 1941
(photo from the collection of the Library of Congress)

Anne O’Hare McCormick (1880–1954) started out freelancing for newspapers and magazines. Her career chugged along steadily, though writing about this and that wasn’t very exciting.

That changed in 1921 when her husband was sent to Europe for his work. She asked the New York Times’ managing editor if she could send him reports from overseas. For a woman to be a foreign correspondent was practically unheard of, but the editor agreed.

McCormick plunged right into some of the most challenging topics, including the first in-depth look at the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. She documented and reported on the gathering storm of fascism in Europe.

In 1936, McCormick became the first woman to be appointed to the New York Times’ editorial board. The paper’s publisher instructed her: “You are to be the ‘freedom’ editor. It will be your job to stand up … and shout whenever freedom is interfered with in any part of the world.” The following year Anne won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence — another female first.  

She continued to be an active journalist through the World War II years, and was called “the expert the experts looked up to.” Anne O’Hare McCormick often sounded the first alarm about dangerous dictators. She was trusted by American presidents and respected by everyday readers who learned about the world from her popular column, “Abroad.”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

More about trailblazing journalists on Literary Ladies Guide

• Radio Days: Trailblazing Women Journalists on the Airwaves
• Colonial America’s Intrepid Women Newspaper Publishers
• See the entire category featuring historic women journalists

The post Tarbell, Herrick & McCormick: Women Who Fought to Report Front Page News appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

She was best known for her coverage of the Middle East (as well as for her trademark black eyepatch, worn after losing her left eye in Sri Lanka). She died while covering the conflict in Syria in 2012, and the Syrian government has since been held responsible for her death.

Early life and education

Marie Catherine Colvin was born in Astoria, Queens, the eldest of five children. She was raised in the affluent Oyster Bay area, Her parents, Bill and Rosemarie, were both high school teachers. Bill was passionate about literature and Democratic politics and passed both passions on to Marie.

Marie studied anthropology at Yale, and during her four years there she “changed from a regular science major to a science major who only takes English courses (there was no time to change majors).”

She took a class with writer and journalist John Hersey, one of the first practitioners of “New Journalism” — in which storytelling techniques are applied to reporting. She was inspired to begin writing for the Yale Daily News and realized this was her calling.

Beginning a career of global reporting

After graduating in 1978, Marie began working as an editor for the newsletter for Teamsters Local 237 in New York City, then moved to a staff reporter position for United Press International in Trenton, New Jersey. In 1984 UPI had named her Paris Bureau Chief. She was responsible for the international news desk, which gave her the opportunity to cover the Middle East, a region that fascinated her.

Marie was determined to cover the possible outbreak of war in Libya in 1986. New York Times reporter Judith Miller told her to “Just go … Qaddafi is crazy, and he will like you.” She went, and indeed, he liked her; she was summoned to his private chambers.

“It was midnight,” she wrote, “when Col. Muammar Gadhafi, the man the world loves to hate, walked into the small underground room in a red silk shirt, baggy white silk pants, and a gold cape tied at his neck.” She recalled that he had introduced himself, “I am Qaddafi,” and she had responded, “No kidding,” before spending the rest of the night fending off his advances.

It was the first of dozens of interviews she conducted throughout her career with heads of state, world leaders and rebel leaders. These included Yasser Arafat, on whom she wrote and produced a BBC documentary based on over twenty personal interviews. She also accompanied him to the White House when peace talks were being conducted with Yitzhak Rabin. During the 1993 Oslo peace accords she reportedly told him, “Just put the pencil down and sign it already.”

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

In extremis: reporting for the Sunday Times

Marie moved to The Sunday Times in London in 1986 and reported on conflicts all over the world, including East Timor, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Chechnya. She continued to report on the Middle East and covered the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, both Gulf Wars, and the Arab Spring of 2011.

She became recognized for her intimate writing style, avoiding the dominant macho language and image of war reporting. She focused instead on the horrific human cost of every conflict. “My job,” she said, “is to bear witness. I have never been interested in knowing what make of plane just bombed a village.” She won several awards, including the Courage in Journalism Award, the British Press Award, and the Foreign Press International’s Journalist of the Year Award.

Publicly, she wasn’t a fan of feminism, quoting her heroine Martha Gellhorn: “Feminists nark me.” In private, however, she was aware that more was demanded of her than of her male colleagues. On the subject of female journalists, she wrote, “Maybe we feel the need to test ourselves more, to see how much we can take and survive.”

While on assignment, her determination to “go in bare and eat what they eat, drink what they drink, sleep where they sleep” often led her to take extreme risks. She went where other journalists would not, and stayed when others left, driven by the knowledge that “what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars…”

This drive was demonstrated in 1999 in East Timor when Marie and two female Dutch journalists chose to stay in a besieged UN compound with hundreds of refugees who were fleeing Indonesian-backed militia forces. UN staff and other journalists (mostly male) were evacuated, leading to Marie’s wry comment that, “They don’t make men like they used to.”

Marie’s determination to stay saved the lives of those refugees when the UN, embarrassed by her powerful reports, returned to the compound to evacuate them. A front-page headline read, “Her courage saved 1,500.”

Photographer Paul Conroy (one of the few photographers she was happy to work with and who was with her in Syria when she died) said of her bravery,

“People called her fearless, but they are absolutely wrong. She was terrified. Her bravery came from going back in even though she was terrified. That’s completely different from being fearless. It was just that curiosity overtook any sense of staying alive.”

Paying the price: PTSD

Marie did not emerge unscathed from so many war zones. In 2001, while covering an upsurge of violence in the Sri Lankan civil war, she lost her left eye in a rocket-propelled grenade attack. She had already seen more combat than most soldiers; the trauma of the injury triggered the full-blown PTSD that she struggled with for the rest of her life.

At her worst times – often back home in London, where there was nothing to distract her from paranoia, panic attacks, and nightmares – she would disappear for days.

After Marie’s death, friends and colleagues recalled her long nights of partying and drinking, but the reality was a serious alcohol problem that she never quite mastered. Pressured by friends and family, she eventually sought help for PTSD, though she said, “I have no intention of not drinking, [but] I never drink when I am covering a war.”

In extremis II: personal life

Marie’s personal life was tumultuous. Not long after joining the Sunday Times she met her first husband, Patrick Bishop. A diplomatic correspondent, he was in Iraq at the same time as Marie to cover the Iran–Iraq war. He recalled wanting to impress her with his knowledge of artillery and the difference between incoming and outgoing fire.

“I explained that the bang we had just heard was outgoing and therefore nothing to worry about. Then there was another explosion. ‘And that one,’ I said, ‘is incoming!’ and threw myself headlong onto the ground. As the shell exploded some distance away, I looked up to see the woman I had been trying to show off to, gazing down at me with pity and amusement.”

They married in August 1989 but Bishop was unfaithful, and the marriage quickly dissolved.  After their divorce, Marie married Bolivian journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio in 1996. This time she suffered two miscarriages, and Gumucio proved to be violent and an alcoholic. They divorced, and he took his own life in 2002.

In 1999, Marie reunited with Bishop while covering the conflict in Kosovo, but the relationship didn’t last any longer the second time around. In 2003, she met Richard Flaye, a divorced company director, and was soon introducing him as “the love of my life.” They shared a passion for ocean sailing, and Flaye seemed to give Marie the kind of stability she’d never experienced. Their relationship lasted on and off until Marie’s death in 2012.

The last assignment: Syria, 2012

With her characteristic drive to report on the brutality of war, Marie was determined to cover the hostilities that began in Syria in 2011. Along with photographer Paul Conroy, she crossed into the city of Homs in February 2012, ignoring the Syrian government’s attempts to prevent journalists from covering the conflict. Homs was under direct attack from the Syrian army and foreign reporters were banned.

Along with other foreign journalists who had also made it in, Marie filed her reports from a makeshift media center surrounded by bombed-out buildings. Homs, she wrote, was: “

… the symbol of the revolt, a ghost town, echoing with the sound of shelling and the crack of sniper fire, the odd car careening down the street at speed. Hope to get to a conference hall basement where 300 women and children are living in the cold and dark. Candles, one baby born this week without medical care, little food.”

Marie and Paul left Homs after a few days when the situation rapidly deteriorated, but Marie was determined to return. This time, there was no space for them to carry video equipment, flak jackets, or helmets, and the Syrian army was under orders to kill any journalists found near the besieged area. They had to crawl for hours through a frigid tunnel from outside of the city. Even in such dire circumstances, though, Marie did not lose her sense of humor: she emailed Flaye that night, saying,

“You would have laughed. I had to climb over two stone walls tonight, and had trouble with the second (six feet) so a rebel made a cat’s cradle of his two hands and said, ‘Step here and I will give you a lift up.’ Except he thought I was much heavier than I am, so when he ‘lifted’ my foot, he launched me right over the wall and I landed on my head in the mud!”

Back at the media center, there were few journalists left. In an interview with CNN broadcast the night before she died, Marie said, “It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”

Marie was killed on February 22, when direct rocket fire hit the media center. French photographer Rémi Ochlik also died in the attack, while Conroy – along with Syrian translator Wael al-Omar and French journalist Edith Bouvier – was severely injured.

The aftermath of Marie Colvin’s death

Marie’s death triggered an outpouring of tributes from friends and colleagues around the world. Questions were raised as to why she went back into Homs when it was so clearly too dangerous. There was a huge backlash against the Sunday Times for “allowing” her to continue in Syria.

According to Vanity Fair journalist Marie Brenner, there was “rage” among foreign staff members at the paper at “what they considered the danger they now faced in the paper’s frenzy for press awards.”

Concerns were also raised about Marie’s mental state and the level of support she had received from her superiors. However, as Marie’s executor, Jane Wellesley, pointed out, “If the Sunday Times had not allowed Marie to continue the work she loved, it would have destroyed her.”

In 2016, a civil suit was filed against the Syrian government by Marie’s family. Three years later, a US court found that the government, led by Bashar al-Assad, was responsible for Marie’s death: Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that it had been an “extrajudicial killing” and ordered Damascus to pay over $300 million in damages for the “unconscionable crime.”

Later, the Marie Colvin Memorial Foundation was established at Stony Brook University to honor Marie’s legacy of supporting victims of conflict and the journalists who report on it. The foundation focuses on education, aid, and raising global awareness of conflict.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

A Private War and Marie Colvin’s Legacy

In 2018, two films and a biography were released about Marie’s life. A Private War is perhaps the best-known. Starring Rosamund Pike as Marie and with Paul Conroy as a consultant, it received positive reviews from critics as well as Marie’s family and friends.

The level of realistic detail in the film was remarkable. Director Matthew Heineman was also a documentary film maker, and ensured that all the extras cast had actually lived through the events being recreated: they were Syrians who had been shelled in a basement in Homs, they were Libyans who had been shaken by the traumas of war.

A documentary film called Under the Wire was also produced, based on Paul Conroy’s memoir about his time with Marie, and Syria in particular.

A biography titled In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin was written by her longtime friend and colleague Lindsay Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News in the UK. Based on hundreds of interviews with Marie’s family, friends, and other colleagues, as well as Marie’s extensive private journals going back to her childhood, it was a remarkably rounded biography. It won the 2019 James Tait Black Award as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

Hilsum later said, “Part of me thinks Marie is looking down saying, ‘Hey, what’s all the fuss, this is what we do’. But I also think she would be glad that people were talking about Homs again, and hope that maybe some of the attention would be focused on Yemen and other under-reported conflicts and the people suffering in them.”

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.

. . . . . . . . . 

Further reading

• In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsay Hilsum, 2018
• A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels and Renegades by Marie Brenner, 2019
• On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin by Marie Colvin, 2012

The post Bearing Witness: the Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Historically, women had to fight like crazy to participate in every form of journalism. Though women faced less resistance in the early days of radio, they still had to fight for the right to report hard news.

Early days of radio broadcasting

Radio started crackling its way into American homes in the early 1920s. The airwaves expanded the way news and entertainment reached people. Stations sprang up in cities everywhere, exciting listeners with sounds coming out of a strange little box. Radio came on the scene several years even before the first “talkie” movie (1927), so it truly seemed like magic.

You might think of early radio as an old-fashioned form of podcasting. After all, podcasts are basically radio shows, except they’re distributed on the internet. For people who were lonely and isolated (especially during the Great Depression), radio helped them feel more connected to what was going on in the country and the world.

The industry welcomed women broadcasters because they were good for business. In the 1920s, women spent eighty percent of American income (though they certainly weren’t earning that share), so advertisers loved programs by and for the ladies.

In turn, this opened up other jobs in radio: research, publicity, advertising, talent search, secretarial, and more. A good number of women became executives, too.

Early radio programs were filled with lots of fluff, soap operas, and “women’s topic” programs aimed at housewives. But there was also plenty of serious journalism on the air. It wasn’t all smooth sailing for female journalists, who were sometimes told that their voices didn’t have as much authority as men’s. But a good number of women broke through to bring the important news of their day to the airwaves. Here are three of them.

. . . . . . . . . .

Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson advocates for repeal of Neutrality Act, 1939
Photo by Harris & Ewing, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Dorothy Thompson (1893 – 1961) used her charm, wit, sense of adventure, and strong work ethic to create an incredibly varied career in journalism. She started out by promoting the suffrage movement.

After women won the right to vote in 1920, she moved to Europe and became one of America’s first foreign correspondents. Based in Berlin, she reported from across the continent and at the same time enjoyed a fabulous social life. Her circle of friends included many writers and artists that we still remember today.   

By the 1930s, Dorothy was one of the most trusted American journalists. She never sugar-coated the truth, and because she warned so loudly against the rise of fascism, she was thrown out of Germany in 1933.

As a news commentator for NBC radio in the 1930s, Dorothy’s show, “On the Record” was heard by millions. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, legend has it that Dorothy stayed on the air for fifteen days and nights in a row (it’s not clear what she did about sleep!). The June 12, 1939 issue of Time magazine featured her on the cover, speaking into an NBC radio microphone.

“Peace has to be created in order to be maintained. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.” That’s just one of the countless pearls of wisdom on the strands of radio pioneer Dorothy Thompson’s life.

Dorothy Thompson’s life and work inspired a 1942 film, Woman of the Year. Katherine Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a character based on Dorothy. It also became a Broadway musical, with Lauren Bacall as Tess.

Dorothy Thompson was considered the most influential American woman, second only to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. With all she accomplished, and being immortalized in a movie and a musical, isn’t it amazing that few people today have heard of her?

. . . . . . . . . .

Pauline Frederick

Pauline Frederick (1908 – 1990) was one of the journalists who was told that “a woman’s voice doesn’t carry authority” when she first tried breaking into broadcast news. After doors had been opened to women in radio, after World War II, they started to close. Pauline pried them open, over and over again.           

Pauline couldn’t convince any radio network to hire her. That frustrated her because as a print journalist she’d covered international news, including the Nuremberg trials. Finally, she freelanced for ABC radio, where she was assigned to the kind of women’s topics she dreaded. One of them was “How to Get a Husband.” Pauline regretted it, saying, “I don’t think I learned anything from it, and I don’t think the audience did either.”

Pauline persisted and finally got to report on news stories. She became the first female journalist to broadcast from China in the late 1940s and followed that with reporting from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

After she covered the first televised political convention in 1948, ABC hired her to do a weekday news program called Pauline Frederick Reports. That made her the first woman news commentator on TV. She was also the first woman to moderate a televised presidential debate (1976).

Toward the end of her career, Pauline Frederick returned to her passion for radio. Now one of the stars of broadcast news, she no longer had to struggle for the chance to get on the air. She worked on National Public Radio for five years before retiring in 1980.  

. . . . . . . . . .

Kathryn Cochran Cravens
 

[Photo: Kathryn Cochran Cravens, 1938. Image available online
and used in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.]

Kathryn Cochran Cravens (1899 – 1991) started out as an actress in stock theater companies and silent films. Needing more work during the Depression, she found a job in radio. Food, fashion, health, children, and saving money were popular topics, so KMOX in St. Louis hired her to do a broadcast called “Let’s Compare Notes.” It went on air in 1933.

But Kathryn soon grew bored and noticed that there weren’t any women hosting news programs. She convinced the station to let her do a show called “News Through a Woman’s Eyes.” That made her the first-ever female radio news broadcaster. With her acting background, she brought wit and drama to the program. It was such a success that CBS swooped in and lured her to New York City.

By 1936 she had two million listeners and was making a thousand dollars a week — a fortune at the time. And getting more than 3,000 pieces of fan mail every week proved that she was a big hit in the big city!

With every passing year, there was more competition for Kathryn as a female radio news broadcaster. Having blazed the trail, she was no longer a novelty. In 1938, CBS dropped her program. But her experiences sharpened her skills as a journalist, and she became a radio war correspondent during World War II — another first for women.

You may also enjoy …

• 8 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
• Ladies of the Black Press
• 4 Trailblazing Femail Photojournalists

The post Radio Days: Trailblazing Women Journalists on the Airwaves appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Here we’ll explore the work of Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy, and Barbara Ehrenreich in this context as three impactful female gonzo journalists.

Where the author becomes central to the story or investigation is an example of immersive or gonzo journalism.

A Brief Introduction to Immersive Journalism

The first use of the term “New Journalism” is credited to Matthew Arnold in 1887, and in more recent times, to Tom Wolfe. Gonzo journalism evolved from there, originating from a 1970s article about the Kentucky Derby published in Scanlan’s Monthly. Since then, immersive nonfiction is another broad, descriptive phrase for this particular journalistic style.

However, some sources have stated that the first use of the word “gonzo” was used by the Boston Globe editor to describe Thompson’s writing style. Collins Dictionary lists the meanings for gonzo as “wild or crazy” or alternatively as “explicitly indicating the writer’s feelings at the time of witnessing the events.”

The phrase “crazy” would also be used to describe any events surrounding the gonzo author or observer, with Thompson noting: “If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”

Gonzo, immersive, or investigative journalism sometimes adds responsibility or risk to reporting a story. However, gonzo journalism is never written as deliberate recklessness on the author’s part—there’s always a sense of responsibility even if stories or topics might get “crazy”.

Once the journalist becomes central to their story, you have a possible contender for what might be immersive nonfiction or gonzo journalism. For example, it can be argued that one of its early pioneers was Nellie Bly (1864–1922) who had herself institutionalized so that she could write the now-famous exposé, Ten Days in a Madhouse.

Bly’s writing also took her on a trip around the world in 72 days— she took inspiration from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1872) to see whether it was truly possible. Her real journey beat the fictional one by more than a week.

Modern gonzo journalism and immersive nonfiction have shown no signs of stopping or slowing down. The Gonzo Foundation promotes modern gonzo journalism by preserving Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy and writings.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Joan Didion

Joan Didion (1934–2021) was one of gonzo journalism’s pioneers. Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway’s works as a writing exercise. This technique was echoed by Hunter S. Thompson, who did the same with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing.

She published her debut novel Run River in 1963, though focused much of her work on immersive nonfiction. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) is a seminal work that explores California life and the countercultural hippie movement.

Didion’s  essay for The Saturday Evening Post in 1967 described the darker side of Haight-Ashbury counterculture—shooting meth and dropping acid, a sharp contrast to the Summer of Love that was being portrayed in the media.

The nonfiction work Salvador (1983) covered the Salvadorian civil war from first-hand perspective—truly immersive journalism. In 1992, she published another essay collection titled After Henry. 

Her New York Times essay “Why I Write” explored Didion’s motivations: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”

Didion’s essay “In Bed” described her struggle with chronic migraines. She wrote: “Four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me.”

The Year of Magical Thinking chronicled the grieving process after her husband’s death. Written in 2004, it was published in 2005. Didion’s last book was an essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021).

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy (1936 – 2020) was a pivotal immersive nonfiction writer, journalist, and political essayist. She examined the dark side of city living, often intermingled with her first-person perspective. She wrote for some of creative nonfiction’s most familiar magazines and publications, including Vanity Fair and New York.

Sheehy began writing sales and advertising copy for retailer J.C. Penney. She later became known for serious, hard-hitting feature writing. Like many immersive nonfiction authors, Sheehy’s writing put controversial topics under the spotlight. Famously, Sheehy provided in-depth and never-before-seen coverage of the Kennedy family.

Gail Sheehy wrote a 1969 feature article called Speed City for New York Magazine. Eventually, the idea evolved into the longer work Speed is of the Essence (1971), a book highlighting the evils of drug addiction and methamphetamine.

Redpants and Sugarman later became an explorative 1971 feature article about city prostitution.

The song Sugar Man by Rodriguez (professional mononym of Sixto Diaz Rodriguez) was recorded in 1969—and released in 1970 from the album Cold Fact. The Tom Waits song Downtown Train also makes a passing reference to “redpants and the sugar man” in 1985.

Sheehy’s influence stretched beyond journalism and into popular culture. Her writing continued to follow immersive journalism and gonzo-related writing.

Sheehy joined the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP) as an associate in 1977. Today, the list contains a worldwide list of female journalists and press staff, including Sena Christian, Kashini Maistry, and Dorothy Abbott.

She continued in her highly detailed political coverage, and some of her focused pieces about Hillary Clinton were collected in the book Hillary’s Choice (1999). Sheehy’s writing evolved as she aged, and her later essays more readily covered aging and grief. Later books included Sex and the Seasoned Woman (2006) and Passages Into Caregiving (2010).

Gail Sheehy’s final work was a memoir—Daring: My Passages: A Memoir (2014). She passed away in 2020 at the age of 83. In her New York Times obituary, Sheehy was described as a “journalist, author, and social observer.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941 – 2022) was an influential news writer, journalist, and creative nonfiction author. She received her PhD in cellular immunology. However, she dedicated her life to social causes and commentary after giving birth to her daughter in a public healthcare clinic in 1970.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) lauds Ehrenreich’s “pen and sarcastic wit,” which became part of her characteristic writing style. Ehrenreich focused much of her writing on social causes, including healthcare, economics, and women’s rights. She became familiar as a columnist whose work turned into more than twenty published books.

In 1978, Ehrenreich published one of her most famous titles: For Her Own Good. This work explored the treatment of women, illustrated with “150 years of expert advice” that put women at a disadvantage in healthcare and science.

Ehrenreich was also known for such nonfiction works as The American Health Empire (1971); Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1972); and The Snarling Citizen (1995). The Worst Years of Our Lives (1990) collected more of Ehrenreich’s essays, focusing on the progression of female rights—and the lack thereof.

The 2001 nonfiction book Nickeled and Dimed continues the tradition of immersive journalism. In this case, Ehrenreich cast a spotlight on American income by living the actual experience of getting by on minimum-wage jobs, and then documenting the results.

The 2005 book Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream was another one of Ehrenreich’s immersive works. For this book, she assumed the role of a corporate employee climbing the company ladder—the description calling it “the shadowy world of the corporate unemployed.”

Bright-Sided (2009) explored the downsides of “positive thinking” and the psychological impact of being told to be happier in the face of financial or social issues. This was a deliberate commentary on “guru-like” thinking, published during the self-help boom.

Her writing focused often on topics like social or economic injustices, and took an insider’s perspective on these issues. Ehrenreich stands out as an important gonzo journalist, because she was never afraid to immerse herself in the story — Living with a Wild God (2014) explored her thoughts on religion as a nonbeliever.

Ehrenreich wrote features for numerous publications, including Vogue, Salon.com, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. Her last book was a collection of essays called Had I Known, published in 2020. Barbara Ehrenreich, called a “myth-busting writer and activist” in an obituary, passed away in 2022.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Alex J. Coyne, a journalist, author, and proofreader. He has written for a variety of publications and websites, with a radar calibrated for gothic, gonzo and the weird. His features, posts, articles and interviews have been published in People Magazine, ATKV Taalgenoot, LitNet, The Citizen, Funds for Writers, and The South African, among other publications.

The post From New Journalism to Modern Gonzo: Joan Didion, Gail Sheehy & Barbara Ehrenreich appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

She was extraordinarily talented in her own right, moving with ease from the fashion circles of New York, to the Surrealist circles of Paris, to front-line photography in World War II.

Her life and work has been painstakingly documented and promoted by her son Antony Penrose, and most recently has been the subject of a 2023 film produced by and starring Kate Winslet.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her mother, Florence, was a nurse and her father Theodore was an engineer. She had two brothers: John (1905) and Erik (1910).

Theodore was a keen amateur photographer, and owned both a Kodak Brownie camera and a home darkroom. He taught Lee the basics of photography while she was just a girl. She was also his favorite model, and he took dozens of photographs of her, her friends, and her brothers over the years.

Despite having this loving family, Lee’s childhood was a difficult one. At age seven, while visiting relatives, she was raped by a family friend; this left her traumatized and suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. In the days before penicillin, the only treatment was douching with dichloride of mercury. As a nurse, it fell to Florence to administer these treatments, an experience which was horrendous for both her and Lee.

A few years later, Lee endured another tragedy when her teenage sweetheart died of heart failure while out on a lake in a rowing boat.

As a result, Lee struggled in school and was expelled several times. She did, however, show an interest in the theatre, and in an attempt to encourage her pursue something worthwhile, her parents agreed to send her to the L’École Medgyés pour la Technique du Théâtre in Paris for seven months.

She studied set design and lighting, but, as her son later wrote, she was “not one of the school’s star pupils. She was eighteen, gregarious, fabulously beautiful in the exactly the style of the period, and far more interested in celebrating her newfound freedom than in formal studies. Informally, what she was learning was what it meant to be a fully emancipated woman in charge of her own destiny.”

Lee returned to New York in 1926, where she attended the Experimental Theatre at Vassar College, studying Dramatic Production under Hallie Flannigan.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Modeling in New York City

Lee’s career as a fashion model began that winter, when the publishing magnate Condé Nast reputedly saved her from being hit by oncoming traffic as she tried to cross the road in Manhattan. Impressed by her good looks, he offered her a job as a model for Vogue.

She was on the cover of both the British and American March 1927 editions. Subsequently, she worked with some of the greatest fashion photographers of the time including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.

Lee was hugely successful as a model, but quickly decided that she would “rather take a picture than be one.”

She abandoned modeling altogether when, in July 1928, a photograph taken of her by Edward Steichen was used as a advertisement for Kotex sanitary towels. At the time, feminine hygiene was considered far too personal and delicate to discuss in public, and after the image was the focal point of a massive nationwide advertising campaign, Lee found herself out on a limb — though also proud of the scandal it had caused.

On the other side of the camera in Paris

Lee moved to Paris in 1929, and sought out the Surrealist artist Man Ray. For several years she was his muse, lover, confidant, and collaborator, and she also established her own photographic studio in the city. Her portrait photography was highly sought after by writers, artists, socialites, and royalty — she even photographed the pet lizard of a French socialite.

However, it was her Surrealist photographs that are probably best known from this period. Alongside Man Ray, she experimented with juxtaposition — the technique of combining two elements within the same photo — and solarization, which partially reverses the positive and negative spaces of a photo, producing halo-like outlines that emphasize both light and shadow.

Even outside of the studio, her work had a quirky style. Later, her son Antony wrote, “The thing that became her distinctive, Surrealist style was what I call the ‘found image.’ She takes a photograph of, perhaps, an everyday occurrence, and she does it in such a way that it becomes an image that is containing ‘the marvelous.’”

While in Paris, Lee became part of the Surrealist circle of artists, including Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró.

According to Antony, “When Lee arrived in Paris she had, in a way, been a Surrealist for some time — before the movement even had a name — because she had that determination to pursue her life free of the constraints of society which the Surrealists were already rebelling against. They wanted to create a new world which was not governed by religion or law or whatever…The Surrealist movement was going in tremendous force, and she was ready-made for it, and it for her.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

New York and Egypt

She and Man Ray separated in 1932. Lee returned to New York to establish another studio there with her younger brother Erik. She specialized in advertising and celebrity portraits, including photographs of actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and continued to experiment with Surrealist styles and techniques.

Her work was included in Julian Levy’s exhibition Modern European Photographers in 1932, and he subsequently gave her a one-woman show which brought her work to the attention of the art world. Soon afterwards, she was listed by Vanity Fair as one of the “most distinguished living photographers.”

She married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, and moved with him to Cairo. She became fascinated with the idea of desert travel, and photographed the pyramids, desert, villages and ruins.

The photographs show a sense of dislocation, perhaps drawn from her experiences as an expatriate, and her best-known Egyptian image, Portrait of Space, 1937, views the desert through a torn fly screen door, turning it into a dream-like, Surrealist space.

Lee continued to travel to Europe, and during a return visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, a Surrealist artist. They began an affair, and in 1939 she officially left Bey and moved with Penrose to London.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
See also: 8 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
. . . . . . . . . . . 

Grim Glory: The World War II Years

In London, Lee met Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue. It was a connection that would prove vital for both Lee and for the magazine when, in 1940, Lee photographed London during and after the Blitz. Vogue published these photos, along with several photo essays by Lee about the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

It not only gave Lee an outlet for her photography in a new country and with a new subject, but it also helped to change Vogue’s reputation from solely a luxury fashion magazine — an indulgence that wasn’t much in demand during the war years — to a magazine that also published serious news.

Lee also published her images in a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941).

By 1943 she had become an accredited war correspondent through Condé Nast Publications, one of the very few women to do so, and in 1944 teamed up with Life photojournalist David E. Scherman.

She became the first female photojournalist to follow the US Army as it advanced on the front lines, and photographed major events such as the battle of Saint-Malo, the Liberation of Paris, and the liberation of both the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. She also taught herself to write articles, and the pieces that accompanied the photographs in print were almost always her own.

Lee was unsure whether the photos from the concentration camps would be publishable, given the horrific subject matter, but she sent them back to Vogue with a telegram: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” In June 1945, American Vogue printed the photos under the title, “Believe It.”

In 1945, she traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe, documenting the horrific aftermath of the war on mostly ordinary people, and had an eye for the detail of combat that her male counterparts often overlooked.

As Meredith Herndon wrote for The Smithsonian, “Miller’s eye for Surrealist elements resulted in haunting photos that juxtaposed images of ordinary beauty with violence and destruction.”

. . . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

After the war

Lee married Roland Penrose in 1947, and gave birth to their son Antony at the age of forty. The family moved out of London to Farleys, a farm in the East Sussex countryside.

She continued to cover fashion, art, and celebrity culture for Vogue, and Farleys became known as a gathering place for the Surrealists. Many of Lee’s more intimate (and now iconic) photographs, of friends including Man Ray, Picasso, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, were taken here.

Sadly, she suffered from severe (and at that time undiagnosed) post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in alcoholism and depression, and never spoke of her war work to her son, Antony.

In the early 1950s, Lee moved away from professional photography. Her final tongue-in-cheek piece for Vogue, “Working Guests” (1953), showed major art world figures (such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then the director of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC) feeding the pigs at Farleys.

Last years

In the last two decades of her life, Lee managed what her son would later call “the most astonishing achievement of her whole career … self-recovery … somehow she found the strength to get her drinking under control.”

A large part of this recovery came through cooking. Lee had given up photography, but she still longed for a creative outlet, and sent herself to the Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris for six months.

Cooking, her son wrote, was “a kind of displacement activity for the demons that must have been rushing around inside her head all the time.” She became an award-winning cook, known for her Surrealism-inspired dishes such as green chicken and blue fish.

Lee died at Farleys in July 1977 of cancer at the age of seventy.

. . . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . . 

Legacy: Redefining femininity

After Lee Millers’s death, Antony and his wife discovered some sixty thousand negatives and twenty thousand photographic prints, along with contact sheets, writings, and documents, all boxed up in the attic at Farleys.

From the 1980s, Antony worked to archive and promote her photographic work, which had been largely forgotten by the art world. Farleys is now the home of the Lee Miller Archive, along with a gallery which hosts rotating exhibitions.

Her work has also been shown in several major retrospectives, including at the Imperial War Museum and V&A Museum in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico.

Most recently, her war work has been the focus of the 2023 film Lee, produced by and starring Kate Winslet. Years of research went into making the film, along with a great deal of collaboration with Antony, and Kate Winslet reportedly spent days in the archives at Farleys.

According to Antony, “Other attempts to make a feature film about Lee had failed in the past, but this one succeeded…it owes much of its force and integrity to being a film about a women made by women.” On Lee, Kate Winslet said, “I think we live in a time when femininity is starting to mean something new, but Lee was already redefining femininity as resilience and power and courage and tenacity.”

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Lee Miller’s work

• Women at War:  The National WWII Museum
• Photographer Lee Miller’s Second World War
• Lee Miller Archives

Further reading:

• Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera by Carolyn Burke (2006)
• Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day by Antony Penrose (2020)
• The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose (2021)
• Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain by Robin Muir and Amber Butchart
  (Lee Miller Archives Publishing, 2021)
• Lee Miller: Photographs by Antony Penrose and Kate Winslet (2023)
• Lee Miller Man Ray: Fashion, Love, War by Victoria Noel-Johnson (2023)
• Lee Miller: The True Story (Sky Original – Kate Winslet and Antony Penrose
  discussing the film Lee) on YouTube

The post The Many Lives of Lee Miller, Photographer & War Correspondent appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

By the start of the American Revolution (1765), there were more than a dozen women printer-publishers operating on their own in the colonies. Most of them, called “widow-printers,” inherited their presses and newspapers after their husbands’ deaths.

Even so, it was rare for any woman to run a newspaper on her own. Not until much later could American women own property. They were property, though not to the extreme degree as their slaves and servants.

Women of all classes and races had no voice, no vote, no say in matters large or small. Running a newspaper was a rare feat of personal power for a woman in pre-Revolutionary times.

The early pioneers of journalism blazed trails for generations of women who came after them. From that time forward, journalists shared a sense of curiosity and empathy for others. They asked questions, made startling discoveries, and didn’t shy away from controversy.

Female journalists wore their independence proudly, often refusing to conform to gender roles and society’s limitations for women. The journalists you’ll meet  ahead used the power of the press to advance women’s rights and civil rights, advocate for the end to slavery, report on war, improve labor conditions, and share accounts of triumph and accomplishment.

Most of all, they used their love for truth to tell a good story while striving to make the world a better, more just place.

. . . . . . . . . .

Elizabeth Glover

The earliest “first” of all happened long before the American Revolution. The first printing press came to the colonies in 1638 with the family of Reverend Joseph Glover of Surrey, England.

On board with him were his wife, Elizabeth Glover, and five children along with their furniture, linens, silver, a slew of indentured servants — and even some horses and cattle! They also brought their precious printing press, lots of paper, type cases, ink, and printers’ tools.

Reverend Glover died during the ocean voyage, but Mrs. Glover had the sense to install the press in the house she bought in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She started a printing enterprise that was later taken over by her second husband, the president of Harvard College (now Harvard University). Though they didn’t remain in the news business, we’ve got to give a nod to Mrs. Glover for getting the presses rolling.

. . . . . . . . . .

Elizabeth Ann Villin Timothy

Elizabeth Ann Villin Timothy

Printing was a difficult trade for anyone involved. Fathers passed along skills to their sons, yet many wives and daughters were also trained in the family business. Female colonists from printing families were luckier than most girls and women, many of whom were barely taught to read and write.

A woman who inherited a press had to be an excellent reader, writer, editor, and typesetter. And it didn’t hurt to have a head for business.

The widow-printers not only continued to run the newspapers left to them but made them grow and thrive. One of them was Elizabeth Ann Villin Timothy (1702 – 1757). Considered the first woman newspaper publisher in the colonies, she edited and printed the South Carolina Gazette in Charleston for seven years following her husband’s death.

When Elizabeth took over the paper, she published a notice in its pages asking readers “to continue their Favours and good Offices to this poor afflicted widow and six small children and another hourly expected.” Modern translation: “I have six kids and counting — please continue to subscribe to my newspaper!”

Elizabeth was fond of publishing dramas, poetry, and stories, especially by up-and-coming Southern writers. Not wishing to offend anyone, she mostly steered clear of politics and opinion. Thanks to her efforts, the paper was quite profitable. When she died, she passed the thriving Gazette on to one of her sons.

Elizabeth Timothy’s story is fairly typical of the early American widow-printers. Little else is known about her, and the same is true for most women of that era who took over their husbands’ newspaper businesses. Snippets and images of their newspapers survive, but portraits of the women themselves are quite rare.

As the post-revolutionary 1800s dawned, women involved with the news in any way clamored to voice their views on social and political issues, wishing to use their pens and presses to promote change. 

. . . . . . . . . .

Anne Newport Royall

“Free thought, free speech, and a free press!” That was the rallying cry of Anne Newport Royall (1769 – 1854) considered America’s first female journalist. Growing up impoverished and fatherless, she started her youth and adult life as a domestic servant.

Her writing career was launched later in life with a series of books filled with colorful accounts of southern states and territories. That made her a pioneering travel journalist, and she also broke ground as a political and investigative reporter.

Always poor and forever struggling, Anne used all of her resources to start a newspaper. She was in her early 60s when she launched it in 1831 under the odd name Paul Pry.  Later, she updated the name to The Huntress. There are no existing images of Anne Newport Royall, so we have to be content with an advertisement for Paul Pry, above.

In her own words, the paper was “dedicated to exposing all and every species of political evil and religious fraud, without fear or affection.”

Indeed, publishing her paper was hard going. It was written of her venture that “snow sometimes covered the floor where her paper was printed and the ink froze before it could record her blistering phrases.”

Anne was feared and scorned by Washington, D.C.’s powerful men — politicians, businessmen, and religious leaders — who dreaded seeing their names in her newspaper. But she dared to publish the truth. She was even convicted of being “a public scold” — which was actually a crime at the time!

Pushed down flights of stairs, beaten about the head, and ducking rocks thrown through her windows, nothing stopped her and no one intimidated her. She continued to publish The Huntress until she drew her last breath at age eighty-five, in 1854. It was all the more remarkable that she accomplished much of what she did before women officially began agitating for rights in the 19th century.

. . . . . . . . . .

See also:
4 Fearless American Female Newspaper Publishers of the 1800s

The post Colonial America’s Intrepid Women Newspaper Publishers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

From the publisher:

“This monumental collection of speeches charts the story of America as it unfolded through the decades, showing that at every critical juncture, women were speaking. It’s a long-needed corrective to the story we have always told ourselves about whose ideas and voices shaped the nation—a search for long-buried truths, a celebration, and an inspiration.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Available now from Amplify Publishing
and for pre-order on Bookshop.org* and Amazon.* 
. . . . . . . . . . .

Ida B Wells’ 1892 lynch law speech—an introduction

Born into slavery, journalist Ida B. Wells grew up in the South and intended to stay there, believing that with rising wealth and education, thrift, and economy — the doctrine of self-help — Blacks would be accepted into the wider American culture.

But everything changed for her in March 1892, when a fight outside a store in a Memphis neighborhood known as “the Curve” led to the wounding of two White police officers.

Three Black men were arrested, including her close friend, Tom Moss. While in police custody, the men were tortured, and as Wells put it, “found in an old field horribly shot to pieces.”

In an 1893 speech at Boston’s Tremont Temple, Wells did not spare her audience the wrenching details. Moss, she said, had “begged for his life, for the sake of his wife, his little daughter and his unborn infant.” His last word to his tormenters were: “If you will kill us, turn our faces to the West.”

As Wells put it: “I have no power to describe the feeling of horror that possessed every member of the race in Memphis when the truth dawned upon us that the protection of the law which we had so long enjoyed was no longer ours; all had been destroyed in a night.”

Death threats in the wake of those events drove Wells to Chicago, where she made her life’s mission the campaign against lynching – essentially, mob-driven murder of individuals with no due process of law. She investigated dozens of abhorrent cases, conducted countless interviews, collected data, and used her own insubstantial funds to publish her findings.

She also wrote and spoke bluntly about “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women” as a would-be justification for lynching.

An impassioned speaker, she made her case at large conferences, in meeting halls, and in modest churches, helping turn the tide against the atrocity of lynching with her words. It was an uphill battle. She endured harassment and financial hardship. Most of her editorials and articles were published in the Black-owned press, and only occasionally picked up by mainstream publications.

In 1898, she went to the White House to plead with President William McKinley for federal response to a lynching in South Carolina, and for compensation for the victim’s widow and children. She told him that in the previous twenty years, some ten thousand Black citizens had been lynched in America.

Ida B. Wells passed away in 1931. At the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, one of her most enduring lines is emblazoned on the wall:

“The way to right wrongs its to turn the light of truth on them.”

Contributed by Dana Rubin, a consultant, speechwriter, and speaker focused on expanding diverse voices and viewpoints in the public discourse. She works with organizations to develop their talent and support underrepresented voices in becoming recognized experts, brand ambassadors, rainmakers, and role models for the next generation.

An award-winning journalist, she lives in New York, where she writes and speaks about the history of women’s speech and voice. She created the Speaking While Female Speech Bank to broaden our understanding of who actually spoke in history. Visit SpeakingWhileFemale.co to find more speeches by women.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Ida B. Wells
. . . . . . . . . . .

Ida B. Wells: “Lynch Law in All its Phases”

February 13, 1893 — Boston Monday Lectureship, Tremont Temple, Boston MA

I am before the American people today through no inclination of my own, but because of a deep seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the Republic nor the conditions which force into exile those who speak the truth. I cannot believe that the apathy and indifference which so largely obtains regarding mob rule is other than the result of ignorance of the true situation.

And yet, the observing and thoughtful must know that in one section, at least, of our common country, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, means a government by the mob; where the land of the free and home of the brave means a land of lawlessness, murder and outrage; and where liberty of speech means the license of might to destroy the business and drive from home those who exercise this privilege contrary to the will of the mob.

Repeated attacks on the life, liberty and happiness of any citizen or class of citizens are attacks on distinctive American institutions; such attacks imperiling as they do the foundation of government, law and order, merit the thoughtful consideration of far sighted Americans; not from a standpoint of sentiment, not even so much from a standpoint of justice to a weak race, as from a desire to preserve our institutions. 

The race problem or negro question, as it has been called, has been omnipresent and all pervading since long before the Afro-American was raised from the degradation of the slave to the dignity of the citizen. It has never been settled because the right methods have not been employed in the solution.

It is the Banquo’s ghost of politics, religion, and sociology which will not down at the bidding of those who are tormented with its ubiquitous appearance on every occasion.

Times without number, since invested with citizenship, the race has been indicted for ignorance, immorality and general worthlessness declared guilty and executed by its self constituted judges. The operations of law do not dispose of negroes fast enough, and lynching bees have become the favorite pastime of the South.

As excuse for the same, a new cry, as false as it is foul, is raised in an effort to blast race character, a cry which has proclaimed to the world that virtue and innocence are violated by Afro-Americans who must be killed like wild beasts to protect womanhood and childhood.

Born and reared in the South, I had never expected to live elsewhere. Until this past year I was one among those who believed the condition of masses gave large excuse for the humiliations and proscriptions under which we labored; that when wealth, education and character became more general among us, the cause being removed the effect would cease, and justice being accorded to all alike.

I shared the general belief that good newspapers entering regularly the homes of our people in every state could do more to bring about this result than any agency. Preaching the doctrine of self help, thrift and economy every week, they would be the teachers to those who had been deprived of school advantages, yet were making history every day and train to think for themselves our mental children of a larger growth.

And so, three years ago last June, I became editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech. As editor, I had occasion to criticize the city School Board’s employment of inefficient teachers and poor school buildings for Afro-American children. I was in the employ of that board at the time, and at the close of that school term one year ago, was not re elected to a position I had held in the city schools for seven years.

Accepting the decision of the Board of Education, I set out to make a race newspaper pay a thing which older and wiser heads said could not be done. But there were enough of our people in Memphis and surrounding territory to support a paper, and I believed they would do so.

With nine months hard work the circulation increased from 1,500 to 3,500; in twelve months it was on a good paying basis. Throughout the Mississippi Valley in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi on plantations and in towns, the demand for and interest in the paper increased among the masses. The newsboys who would not sell it on the trains, voluntarily testified that they had never known colored people to demand a paper so eagerly.

To make the paper a paying business I became advertising agent, solicitor, as well as editor, and was continually on the go. Wherever I went among the people, I gave them in church, school, public gatherings, and home, the benefit of my honest conviction that maintenance of character, money getting and education would finally solve our problem and that it depended us to say how soon this would be brought about.

This sentiment bore good fruit in Memphis. We had nice homes, representatives in almost every branch of business and profession, and refined society. We had learned helping each other helped all, and every well conducted business by Afro-Americans prospered.

With all our proscription in theatres, hotels and railroads, we had never had a lynching and did not believe we could have one. There had been lynchings and brutal outrages of all sorts in our state and those adjoining us, but we had confidence and pride in our city and the majesty of its laws. So far in advance of other Southern cities was ours, we were content to endure the evils we had, to labor and to wait.

But there was a rude awakening. On the morning of March 9, the bodies of three of our best young men were found in an old field horribly shot to pieces. These young men had owned and operated the “People’s Grocery,” situated at what was known as the Curve, a suburb made up almost entirely of colored people about a mile from city limits.

Thomas Moss, one of the oldest letter carriers in the city, was president of the company, Cal McDowell was manager and Will Stewart was a clerk. There were about ten other stockholders, all colored men.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

The young men were well known and popular and their business flourished, and that of Barrett, a white grocer who kept store there before the “People’s Grocery” was established, went down. One day an officer came to the “People’s Grocery” and inquired for a colored man who lived in the neighborhood, and for whom the officer had a warrant.

Barrett was with him and when McDowell said he knew nothing as to the whereabouts of the man for whom they were searching, Barrett, not the officer, then accused McDowell of harboring the man, and McDowell gave the lie. 

Barrett drew his pistol and struck McDowell with it; thereupon McDowell who was a tall, fine looking six footer, took Barrett’s pistol from him, knocked him down and gave him a good thrashing, while Will Stewart, the clerk, kept the special officer at bay. Barrett went to town, swore out a warrant for their arrest on a charge of assault and battery.

McDowell went before the Criminal Court, immediately gave bond and returned to his store. Barrett then threatened (to use his own words) that he was going to clean out the whole store.

Knowing how anxious he was to destroy their business, these young men consulted a lawyer who told them they were justified in defending themselves if attacked, as they were a mile beyond city limits and police protection. They accordingly armed several of their friends not to assail, but to resist the threatened Saturday night attack. 

When they saw Barrett enter the front door and a half dozen men at the rear door at 11 o’clock that night, they supposed the attack was on and immediately fired into the crowd, wounding three men.

These men, dressed in citizen’s clothes, turned out to be deputies who claimed to be hunting for another man for whom they had a warrant, and whom any one of them could have arrested without trouble. When these men found they had fired upon officer of the law, they threw away their firearms and submitted to arrest, confident they should establish their innocence of intent to fire upon officers of the law.

The daily papers in flaming headlines roused the evil passions of whites, denounced these poor boys in unmeasured terms, nor permitted a word in their own defense. 

The neighborhood of the Curve was searched next day, and about thirty persons were thrown into jail, charged with conspiracy. No communication was to be had with friends any of the three days these men were in jail; bail was refused and Thomas Moss was not allowed to eat the food his wife prepared for him.

The judge is reported to have said, “Any one can see them after three days.” They were seen after three days, but they were no longer able to respond to the greetings of friends. On Tuesday following the shootings at the grocery, the papers which had made much of the sufferings of the wounded deputies, and promised it would go hard with those who did the shooting, if they died, announced that the officers were all out of danger, and would recover.

Read the rest of this speech at Speaking While Female.

 Sources

• Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform 11 (January-June), 1893, pp. 333-347
• Our Day, ed. Joseph Cook, May 1893
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893-1930, by Mildred Thompson (New York: Carlson), 1990, p. 177

More about Ida B. Wells

• Wikipedia
• National Women’s History Museum
• Works by Ida B. Wells-Barnett at Project Gutenberg

*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Lynch Law in All its Phases, 1892 Speech by Ida B. Wells (excerpt) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A photojournalist is a reporter with a camera. Some photojournalists (past and present) have only taken pictures, and a different reporter writes the text that goes with them. Others take photos as well as write articles.

The challenges of photojournalism

In some ways, a photojournalist’s job can be trickier than that of a text-only reporter. They need to consider whether a photo might be an invasion of privacy — for example, a shot of someone who’s injured, or even dead.

Decisions must be made in a flash — pardon the pun. When news is happening in real time, there are no do-overs!

News stories with photos weren’t common until the late 1920s, when what we now call the “golden age of photojournalism” dawned. Along with it came the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Photography has been around since the mid-1800s, so why did it take so long for it to become an important part of news reporting?

To begin with, the printing process for images was slow and tedious. Cameras were big, heavy boxes with awkward tripods; they made photographers stick out like a sore thumb. And action photography was impossible because both camera and subject had to be very still to get a decent picture.

. . . . . . . . .

Jessie Tarbox Beals

Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870 – 1942) photographed the Massachusetts State Prison at the turn of the twentieth century, making her the first American woman to have her work published in a newspaper.

She was also the first woman to be hired as a staff photographer (The Buffalo Inquirer, 1902). She’s considered America’s first female photojournalist.

Photography was just a hobby for Jessie when she took it up in 1888. By 1904, she’d become successful at news and portrait photography in Buffalo, New York.

Setting her sights even higher, she closed her studio and moved to New York City. She wanted to conquer news photography in America’s biggest city, but because she was a woman, no newspaper would hire her. Once again, she opened her own portrait studio as a way to make a living.

Jessie wouldn’t give up. She decided to photograph newsworthy stories she found interesting and sold them to newspaper editors afterward. One of them was on the poor living conditions of immigrant families in tenements. It worked — a newspaper bought her photos and assigned a reporter to write a story around it. After that, she had no trouble getting assignments.

Hauling around fifty pounds of equipment dressed in hoop skirts and big hats didn’t slow Jessie down a bit. She became famous for climbing ladders and jumping into hot air balloons to get the best angles for her shots.

While always busy capturing news events, Jessie Tarbox Beals also continued to do portraits. Her subjects included presidents Taft and Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and other authors and artists of her time.

Learn more about Jessie Tarbox Beals on this site and at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

. . . . . . . . .

Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971) broke ground with several firsts as a photojournalist. She was the first American woman …

• war photographer and war correspondent
• to be allowed to document World War II combat zones
• to fly a bombing mission
• hired by Life magazine as a staff photojournalist

Margaret came by her interest from her father, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was an avid hobby photographer. Always a restless spirit, she recalled, “I knew I had to travel.” Photojournalism became her passport to the world.

While still a student at Cornell University (the seventh college she attended), Margaret started selling photos. Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Inc. summoned her to New York City after she graduated to work for his new magazine, Fortune. Later she joined the staff of Life magazine.

Like her colleague Dorothea Lange, Margaret took some of the most memorable photographs from the Great Depression era. Later, she broke some of journalism’s toughest barriers, becoming the first American female war photographer during World War II.

In the course of her long career, Margaret captured many of the world’s major news events on film. In the 1982 film Gandhi, the actress Candice Bergen portrayed Margaret during the time of the India-Pakistan partition.

Respected in her own lifetime, Margaret Bourke-White continues to be celebrated as a true pioneer in the  field of photojournalism. Learn more about her at the International Center for Photography.

. . . . . . . . .

Dorothea Lange

Photo: Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965) never let a permanent limp from childhood polio stop her from making great strides as one of America’s most important photojournalists.

After studying photography in college, Dorothea longed to explore the world. But she was robbed just as she was about to set sail from San Francisco, forcing her to stay put and earn money.

What started out as a short detour became a very long one. She married, set up a portrait studio, and had two children. When the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, Dorothea was in her own thirties, starting to hit her stride as a photographer.

She took photographs that put a face on the suffering of the homeless in cities and migrants in rural areas. Her 1936 photograph, “Migrant Mother,” is one of the most famous images ever taken.

Dorothea photographed Japanese American internment camps in the World War II years. Her images were so heartbreaking that the Army seized them and censored them from public viewing for several decades. Dorothea continued to dedicate her career to bearing witness and inspiring compassion for fellow human beings.

Learn more about Dorothea Lange on this site and at NPR.org.

. . . . . . . . .

Ruth Gruber

Ruth Gruber (1911 –2016) was a Brooklyn born-and-bred daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. A brilliant student, by age twenty she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cologne in Germany.

Ruth’s decision to linger in Germany as the Nazis were coming into power was terribly risky, but risk wasn’t something she avoided. Upon returning to the U.S., she wrote a series of articles about women’s lives under fascism for the New York Herald Tribune. A career in journalism was born. Ruth discovered a talent for photography that was a perfect partner to her writing.

“I had two tools to fight injustice — words and images, my typewriter and my camera. I just felt that I had to fight evil, and I’ve felt like that since I was twenty years old. I’ve never been an observer. I have to live a story to write it.”

Ruth helped bring nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees to the U.S. during World War II. She also documented the voyage of the ship Exodus that carried more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine in 1947.

The British navy intercepted the ship and forced it to Cyprus. Ruth flew to the island nation to record the horrific conditions forced on people who had already endured so much, now stuck in crowded refugee camps. 

Ruth Gruber considered herself a witness to history, especially when it came to the plight of displaced Jews. By the end of her 105-year life, she was recognized as much for her work as a human rights advocate as for her incredible career as a photojournalist.

Learn more about Ruth Gruber on this site and at Jewish Women’s Archive.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . .

More trailblazing women photojournalists

• Marion Carpenter
• Helen Johns Kirtland
• Ann Rosener
• Marion Post Wolcott
• Esther Bubley
• Alice Rohe
• Frances Benjamin Johnston

. . . . . . . . .

See also: 6 Female Journalists of the World War II Era

The post Worth a Thousand Words: 4 Trailblazing Women Photojournalists appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Under the pen name Gênet, she authored the magazine’s “Letter from Paris” for almost fifty years.

She was a prominent member of the expatriate community that settled in Paris between two World Wars, and made her home there until 1975, after which she returned to New York. Portrait at right, Janet Flanner in 1940 (National Portrait Gallery).

Early years

Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Frank and Mary Ellen Flanner (née Hockett), both of whom were Quakers. Frank was a successful businessman, co-owning a mortuary and running the first crematorium in the state of Indiana. He also speculated in real estate. Janet was the middle child between her two sisters, Marie and June Hildegarde (known as Hildegarde.

The family was comfortably middle-class, enjoying the trappings of suburban life. All three girls attended Tudor Hall, a respected private school. Mary Ellen was known as a poet and playwright, and Frank was heavily involved in the local community.

Later, Hildegarde would recall, “We had a wonderful childhood. We were not rich, and we were not poor. And we did not lead dull lives. Mother was always putting on some kind of dramatic performance for family and friends, and Father had taste and liked to buy things…”

Family drama and tragedy

However, there were tensions under the surface. Mary Ellen was often frustrated at family life, and at times even resented her children and their talents in music, literature, and drama. She once told Hildegarde that, between them, they had “robbed her of all her talent.”

Later, Janet informed her mother that her decision not to have children was partly due to her belief that children had ruined Mary Ellen’s life, and in fact, Mary Ellen’s frustrations were often taken out on Janet, who was a precocious child who liked to do things her own way. Often, she was locked in the closet as punishment.

On February 17, 1912, the entire community was shocked when Frank killed himself at his mortuary. The family had just returned from a year spent largely in Berlin, where Marie was studying music, but had to return when Frank lost about $5,000 backing an invention that resembled the teletype machine.

Despite his property portfolio and the expanding mortuary business, he still felt the loss keenly. The man that most people knew as kind, good-natured and a pillar of the community became despondent, irritable, and unreliable, and he eventually took his life with a combination of prussic acid, strychnine, carbolic acid, and morphine. It became a local scandal, and the gossip and speculation would haunt Janet for the rest of her life.

Breaking away

In an attempt to escape the now stifling confines of the middle-class community, Janet enrolled at the University of Chicago. The city was buzzing with artists and writers, and Janet rejected the traditional university societies in favor of the clubs, bars, and theatres the city had to offer.

She had no real interest in classes, barely attending, and failed various courses, including political economy, psychology and English. She withdrew in 1914 and returned to Indianapolis. Later, she would say that she had dropped out because of her father’s suicide; even after two years, continued grief and confusion may have impacted her decision.

Once home, she took up her first writing post as film critic for the Indianapolis Star. She had kept in touch with some of her friends from university, in particular William Lane Rehm, who graduated in 1914. In 1918, to the surprise of all their family and friends, the two decided to get married.

There was little formality and even less notice: the engagement was announced only two days before the wedding. The ceremony was conducted at the Flanner home.

. . . . . . . . .

Solita Solano
. . . . . . . . .

New York City life

By August 1918, the couple was living in New York City, in an apartment on Washington Place in Greenwich Village. Janet was determined to live as independently as she could, and even had a prenuptial agreement drawn up with Rehm stating that neither would lay claim to the other’s finances in the event of a divorce. She had an income from her father’s estate, her own social life and standing; and Rehm was supportive of her.

Later Janet would fondly say that Rehm was “too good for me.” Known for her wit, she was quickly accepted into the social circles of the Village. She became close friends with Neysa McMein, one of the highest-paid magazine illustrators in the country, and with Harold Ross and Jane Grant, both well-respected journalists and editors.

Janet’s life was to change when, in December of 1918, Solita Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) moved to New York as the new drama editor for the New York Tribune. When the two women met, sometime during the winter, they fell in love. However, even in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, it became clear that social conventions would not allow the two women to fully lead the life they desired.

In the summer of 1921, they were given an opportunity when Solita was asked to travel to Greece for National Geographic magazine. With Janet’s income and Solita’s salary, they could survive financially. It was the escape they had been looking for. While Janet wavered, ridden with guilt over Rehm (whom she would eventually divorce amicably), Solita was insistent, and Janet would always be grateful that Solita had persuaded her to leave.

. . . . . . . . .

Janet Flanner in 1927 by Berenice Abbott, courtesy of Clark Art Institute
. . . . . . . . .

Settling in Europe, and Letters from Paris

After traveling through Europe, Janet and Solita found themselves in Paris. With no desire to return to America, they settled on the Left Bank, then a haven for expatriate artists and writers. Solita continued to write and edit for various magazines, while Janet worked on her first and only novel, The Cubical City, and entrenched herself into the social fabric of Left Bank life.

Janet and Solita became close friends with many of the most prominent members of the community, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1925, after her old Greenwich Village friend Harold Ross launched The New Yorker, he and his wife Jane Grant were on the lookout for contributing journalists. He particularly wanted a regular European viewpoint for the magazine, and Jane approached Janet with the idea of a bi-weekly Letter from Paris. Janet took the offer and, writing under the pen name Gênet, would continue to write for The New Yorker for the next fifty years.

Her letters covered everything she felt her readers should know about what was going on in Paris and what the French thought of it all. She wrote about art exhibitions, fashion shows, theatre, music, literature, crime, current affairs (although she never felt that comfortable writing about politics), and celebrity gossip. Her prose came to epitomize what has since become known as “The New Yorker style” — sharp, witty, to the point, with little room for personal opinion.

Although she left Paris during World War II, she continued to write articles and profiles for the magazine, gathering information from her friends that had stayed behind. She didn’t return to Paris until 1944, when she covered the liberation of the city and also contributed a series of weekly radio broadcasts for the Blue Network.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

A tumultuous personal life

Janet’s personal life was never settled. In 1932, while in Paris, she met and fell in love with Noël Haskins Murphy, a singer who lived just outside Paris in Orgeval. Their romance didn’t affect her relationship with Solita (who also had affairs of her own), and Orgeval itself became an important escape for Janet. She felt the pressures of her position keenly and often doubted her ability as a writer.

While in New York in 1942, she met Natalia Danesi Murray, an Italian working at the National Broadcasting Company, at a party on Fire Island. The two were quickly smitten and, although their relationship would last until Janet’s death, Solita and Noel also continued to be important in Janet’s life. She found herself unable to break with any of her lovers, and it would cause her much guilt and anguish over the years, never feeling that she could give any of them what they deserved.

After returning to Paris, Janet frequently traveled back and forth to America to see Natalia and to care for her mother. Now elderly and frail, Mary Ellen Flanner lived in California with Janet’s sister Hildegarde, now a well-known poet.

She was unwilling to give up her position at The New Yorker to move back to America permanently, but the constant travel took its toll; she grew exhausted and was unwell and irritable much of the time. Even after her mother died, in 1947, Janet continued her trips to the U.S. at least once or twice a year.

Last years

Between travels, Janet continued her regular Letter from Paris, as well as contributing longer articles about the Nuremberg Trials, the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the Algerian conflict.

Only much later, in 1975, did she concede that the situation was no longer tenable. Her health was frail, and Noel and Solita were no longer able to look after her in Paris. Janet returned to New York permanently to be cared for by Natalia; a month later Solita died.

Janet grew more and more confused and frail, finally passing away of unknown causes on November 7, 1978. Her ashes were scattered over Cherry Grove on Fire Island, where she and Natalia had met.

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Accolades and legacy

Janet Flanner was an intrinsic part of the history of The New Yorker, defining a style and a generation through her Paris letters. Many of her contributions can still be read on the magazine’s website, and Paris Was Yesterday is still popular, having been reissued by Virago Modern Classics.

During her lifetime, Janet Flanner’s work was recognized with a Legion d’Honneur and an honorary doctorate from Smith College. Her letters for The New Yorker were collected in various volumes, and Paris Journal won a U.S. National Book Award in 1966.

Her legacy is still very much in evidence: In 2019, Park Tudor School (the successor to Tudor Hall School), posthumously awarded her their Distinguished Alumni award, and also created a speaker series called the “Janet Flanner Visiting Artist Series.” 

She is also credited as being one of the inspirations behind the 2021 film The French Dispatch. But she didn’t want to be known only as a journalist. She was a woman who cared deeply for those around her and for her friends. After her death, Kay Boyle recalled Janet’s own words: “When I die, let it not be said that I wrote for The New Yorker for fifty years. Let it be said that once I stood by a friend.”

. . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online, and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

More about Janet Flanner

On this site

• Signed Gênet: Janet Flanner’s Letters from Paris

Books

• The Cubical City (1926)
• Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939, edited by Irving Drutman (1972)
• Paris Journal, 1944–1955 (1965)
• Paris Journal, 1956–1964 (1965)
• Paris Journal, 1965–1970 (1971)
• Janet Flanner’s World: New and Uncollected Pieces, 1932–1975 (1979)
• Men & Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, & Malraux (1957)

Biographies and letters

• Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner by Brenda Wineapple (Harper Collins, 1989)
• Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend, Janet Flanner, edited and introduced by Natalia Danesi Murray (Harvest / HBJ, 1986)
• Janet, My Mother and Me by William Murray (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

More information

• Contributor for The New Yorker
• The Paris Journals of Janet Flanner
• Reader discussions on Goodreads
• Janet Flanner: A Writer of Not so Few Words

The post Janet Flanner, Paris Correspondent for The New Yorker appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Though she is most known for her iconic Depression-era photograph “Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s photographs put a face to nearly every major historical event of the twentieth century, including World War II and the Japanese American internment camps. 

Her photographs are infused with a deep and abiding dedication to documenting the lives of the have-nots in our country—those banished to the fringes by poverty, hardship, forced migration, and discrimination. She also dedicated herself to documenting environmental degradation, as in her series Death of a Valley.

A California transplant, she died in Berkeley in 1965, months before the first major retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She’s one of the photographers whose work is included in the current Met exhibit “The New Woman Behind the Camera.”

Her name wasn’t always Dorothea Lange

She was born Dorothea Nutzhorn, the daughter of first-generation German immigrants, in 1895 and went by that name until she left the East Coast in 1918.

Though she never explained her reasons for taking her mother’s surname, the cross-country move likely afforded her the chance to break free of her painful past, which included her father’s abandonment of the family when she was twelve. Whatever her reasons, once she settled in California, she only ever went by Dorothea Lange.

She nearly died of polio as a child

At age seven, Lange contracted polio, which left her with a weakened right foot and permanent limp. Years later she would remark of the experience: “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”

She spent a year confined at home, and when she finally returned to school, she was mocked by the other children and shamed by her own family. Eventually, she trained herself to walk so that her limp was more or less imperceptible. She also wore long skirts and pants to further disguise it.

Lange’s legendary empathy as a photographer grew from this trauma. She had a particular genius for the language of the body and could suggest a whole story from how people held themselves. Her limp also made her vulnerable in ways she drew upon in her work. When walking into a migrant camp during the Depression, for example, she’d sometimes let people see her disability, which helped her establish a connection with them. 

. . . . . . . . . .

The Bohemians (a novel of Dorothea Lange’s early career)
is available wherever books are sold
. . . . . . . . . .

She was a truant

After Lange’s father disappeared, her mother went to work as a librarian, then as a social worker. Since the commute took her to New York, she enrolled her daughter in a school on the Lower East Side. Lange would later speak rapturously of the hours she spent ditching school to roam around the city, looking at all different kinds of people.

During this time, she learned to make herself invisible—to carry herself in a way that attracted the least attention—which allowed her greater freedom of movement. This talent would serve her well later when she became a documentary photographer. She knew how to get lost and how to fall in with strangers and felt these were an essential part of creating good pictures.

A thief altered her fate

In 1918, Lange decided to take a trip around the world. She saved up for it for several years, working as a photographer’s assistant in various Manhattan studios. With the US having just entered the war, it was impossible to travel to Europe (the usual destination for a person with an artistic bent), and so she went west intending to travel to Mexico, Hawaii, and the Far East.

Her plans were derailed just as soon as she arrived in San Francisco. A thief stole all her money and she was suddenly stranded in a city where she knew no one. Ever resourceful, she got a job in a five-and-dime shop, where she worked as a photo finisher. A little over a year later, she was running one of the premier portrait studios in San Francisco. California, the place she’d only meant to visit, became the heart of her life’s work—and all on account of a thief.

Before documenting the downtrodden, she did portraits of the rich and famous

While Lange’s name is synonymous with documentary photography, she only started on this path after many years as a portrait photographer. In the 1920s, her clients included the wealthiest families in San Francisco—the Levi-Straus family, the de Youngs, and the Hasses.

It may be hard to reconcile this work with her documentary photography, but Lange never regretted the time she spent in the studio. Portrait photography taught her how to work closely with people, how to draw them out, and how to show them not just as they wished to be seen, but how they truly were. She never stopped making portraits; what changed were the subjects.

. . . . . . . . . .

Dorothea Lange in the 1930s
. . . . . . . . . .

She didn’t consider herself an “Artist”

The reigning figure in photography in Lange’s day, Alfred Stieglitz, advocated for photographs that rose to the level of art. As a single woman from a working-class background, Lange couldn’t indulge such ideals. She kept up with artistic movements and brought an artist’s keen eye to her work, yet she called herself a “tradeswoman” and took true pride in the title.

She wasn’t a solitary genius

San Francisco in the 1920s was a fantastically exciting place for women artists. The 1906 Earthquake and Fires had displaced the photography establishment, which wound up creating opportunities for women.

By 1918, the year Lange came to the city, photographers such as Imogen Cunningham, Anne Brigman, and Consuelo Kanaga were busy doing phenomenal work there. They were Bohemians, bent on living their lives on their own terms. Lange was able to find friends, colleagues, and mentors. This community emboldened and transformed her.

A homeless man pulled her out of the studio and into the street

The Great Depression hit both Lange’s and her painter-husband Maynard Dixon’s businesses hard. It was from the window of her studio on Montgomery Street that she witnessed strikes and the struggles of the unemployed and homeless.

One day she looked up from her work and saw a man who was lost, destitute, and alone. It was a moment of profound reckoning, as she would later reflect: “The discrepancy between what I was working on … and what was going on up the street was more than I could assimilate.”

That was the first time she went into the streets with the aim of taking photographs. Though it took time to dismantle her business, from then on, she knew she had to be part of what was happening in the world.

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . 

Her iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother,” almost didn’t happen

One day in 1936, Lange was returning home to the Bay Area after a month alone on the road. She’d been separated from her young sons, which was by then a regular occurrence given the nature of her work. She was tired and frazzled and eager to make it home quickly. When she saw a handwritten sign with the words “Pea Pickers Camp,” she drove past it. A few miles on, she suddenly decided to turn around.

“Migrant Mother,” one of the most iconic and most reproduced images in the history of photography, was taken on that day.

She was regularly censored for her photographs of people of color

When working for the Farm Securities Administration during the Great Depression, she was expressly told to photograph white Americans as this would engender the most support for New Deal programs. Lange regularly flouted these rules, photographing Asian, Latino, and African Americans, as well as Euro-Americans. These pictures were never included in official government pamphlets, but she continued taking them anyway.

Later, when working for the War Department during WWII, she was forbidden from documenting the Japanese internment camps in any way that suggested they were anything other than organized and dignified. She found creative workarounds, such as photographing the shadow of a barbed-wire fence rather than the fence itself.

Lange also smuggled out her more daring pictures, lending them to the efforts to halt the internment. Eventually she was fired, and all her photographs of the camps were impounded. They only became known to the public seven decades after she took them.

Contributed by Jasmin Darznik. Jasmin’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, longlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize, and awarded the Writers’ Center’s First Novel Prize. Darznik is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life.  Her books have been published in seventeen countries.

Jasmin was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a JD from the University of California, and a PhD in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. To learn more, visit Jasmin Darznik.

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik

In 1918, a young and bright-eyed Dorothea Lange steps off the train in San Francisco, where a disaster kick-starts a new life. Her friendship with Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, gives Dorothea entrée into Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city.

Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself unexpectedly falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. Dorothea and Caroline eventually create a flourishing portrait studio, but a devastating betrayal pushes their friendship to the breaking point and alters the course of their lives.

The Bohemians captures a glittering and gritty 1920s San Francisco, with a cast of unforgettable characters, including cameos from Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence.

A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, it is also eerily resonant with contemporary themes, as anti-immigration sentiment, corrupt politicians, and a devastating pandemic bring tumult to the city—and the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.

. . . . . . . . . .

You may also enjoy: Learning to See by Elise Hooper,
another novel of Dorothea Lange

See more Fascinating Biofiction: Novels About Real-Life Women.

The post 10 Fascinating Facts About Dorothea Lange appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.