Bess Furman

Abstract

Front page girl Bobbie O'Dare of the Omaha Daily News, wearing bobbed hair and driving a Model T Ford, went anywhere and saw everything for stories that opened with rhymes. She debuted in the Omaha Daily News' Sunday Rotogravure Magazine with a bylined story in December 1923, introducing a ward-by-ward survey of the city to find every eligible man in time for the coming leap year. Her article attracted enough reaction to merit a page one follow up the next week. When Bobbie O'Dare's byline first graced the Omaha Daily News, tabloid-style newspapers had just appeared in New York City.1 The tabloids jolted journalism around the country. They featured an unusual format, composite photographs, and stunts. They also employed more reporters-more girls were welcomed into the warmth of newspaper city rooms. Out in the Midwest, Bobbie O'Dare was one of those girls.2 Bobbie O'Dare was the alter ego of Bess Furman, a native Nebraskan whose father ran a weekly newspaper in the southwestern part of the state. Hired by the Omaha Daily News at age twenty-five, Forman had already experinced a lifetime in newspapering. She soaked it up as a child and adopted it as her career. Her childhood, early journalistic experiences, and her work at the Omaha Daily News serve as a microcosm of the woman reporter's experience in the early part of the twentieth century. Scholars such as Bonnie Brennen have criticized journalism histories for their representations of women. These histories have tended to present descriptions of who stood apart and were exceptional cases. They have not treated the actual problems of reporters as a class of workers. This research takes a year-to-year look at a woman journalist's life and work. It covers specifically Forman's early years. She came from humble, small-town origins, worked first as a teacher and then broke into newspaper work in 1917 as the summer editor of her teachers' college newspaper. She eventually left teaching and worked for both a small town daily and a metropolitan daily before being hired as a reporter for Associated Press in 1929. Forman did not treat these early years in her autobiography, and researchers apparently have not traced her life's story. However, a study of her clippings and the newspapers she worked for reveals a picture of her rise from a school newspaper editor to a front-page girl to a reporter with a solid reputation for good journalism.3 Bess Furman worked in other journalism-a journalism for, about, and by women. In Furman's day, the definition of women's news exemplified long-standing attitudes toward women, both as readers and writers, and toward what produced for the mass media. Women have always been prolific writers and readers, yet men's view about differences between what men and could write and what men and would read undermined women's status in the publications world. This view has a long heritage. According to historian Emily Stipes Watts, after the Revolutionary War, poets were relegated secondary status because sales of men's verse fell behind the sales of women's verse. A school of criticism emerged to deal with women's poems, which were too public and too popular. Men's poems, on the hand, were private, and they attempted to resolve past and present conflicts with a different language that readers must learn.4 Nevertheless, publishers gathered women's poems in anthologies that enjoyed wide distribution and popularity. Despite criticism, went on writing. They wrote poetry and novels, and they joined publication staffs or contributed to newspapers and magazines. They wrote for the popular magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book, Grahams 'Magazine and the Lady's Wreath and for newspapers such as the New York Ledger and the New York Tribune, to name a few. Male authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne derided the mob of scribbling women whose trash prevented them from success. …