Bringing Women to the Sports Pages: Margaret Goss and the 1920s

Abstract

As a writer for the New York Herald Tribune in 1924 and 1925, Margaret Goss described herself as the first American female journalist to cover women's sports for a daily newspaper. She was also the first woman with a regularly appearing sports column. Titled “Women in Sport,” the column provided Goss a forum to champion female athletics at a time when society had not yet fully embraced athletic competition among women. Goss's columns, which often shared the same page as columns by the legendary Grantland Rice, proved that a woman could stand toe-to-toe with male writers in producing the kind of highly stylized writing demanded during the so-called “golden age” of sports journalism. Apart from that, Goss also developed her own unique voice, thus helping usher in a new style of writing that illuminated the personalities of sports heroes and helped to change the sports pages themselves. In the process, Goss challenged institutional practices and cultural norms that had steered female journalists away from sports and so paved the way for women to crack the sports pages at other New York City newspapers shortly after her own emergence. Although her career lasted just a year and a half, Goss clearly deserves recognition as a pioneer among female sports journalists.