Because of the Places She Had to Go

Abstract

This article uses archival evidence about the Women's Press Club of Pittsburgh, which is the second-oldest women's press club in the United States that has retained its single-gender status, to examine the ways that women's press clubs helped newswomen of the late nineteenth century bend gender roles while tweaking public perceptions of appropriate women's work. Archival evidence shows that nineteenth-century women journalists used the public image of womanhood espoused by the Cult of Domesticity or Cult of True Womanhood to reinforce their right to stand as representatives of women as a whole while their public work as journalists constantly challenged and, eventually, undermined that very same image of femininity.