“Flipping the Script”

Abstract

This article examines the work of Alma Whitaker—feminist, reporter, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1910 to 1944. Widely known in her time but almost totally forgotten today, Whitaker’s work illustrates the formative role of newspaperwomen in the expansion of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, and specifically in promoting a settler fantasy that redefined notions of white women’s selfhood in the frontier space of Los Angeles. Her popular articles and columns both bolstered the white settler campaign to create Los Angeles as a white settlement and challenged patriarchal norms. Situating Whitaker within the emergence of the mass-circulating urban newspaper industry and the colonization of Los Angeles, this article contributes to the fields of women/gender history, hegemonic feminism, borderlands/California, and recent scholarship on settler colonialism as a framework for understanding U.S. history.