Impertinences: selected writings of Elia Peattie, a journalist in the Gilded Age

Abstract

Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie is a collection of articles, editorials, and narratives by Elia Peattie written during her tenure at the Omaha World-Herald from 1888 to 1896, richly illustrated with photographs from the period. Elia (Wilkinson) Peattie (1862-1935) was born during the Civil War and came of age at the advent of the era of the New Woman. In many ways Peattie embodied this new age of independence for women, writing both fiction and journalism and becoming one of the first Plains women to write editorial columns in a major newspaper that addressed public issues. Not shy with her opinions about current events in the state of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, Peattie tackled subjects such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, capital punishment and lynchings, prostitution, the Omaha stockyards, beet-field workers in Grand Island, schools and child rearing, the need for orphanages, shelters for unwed mothers, charity hospitals, and the New Woman. Editor Susanne George Bloomfield includes a biography of Peattie, who is described as tall, dignified, and kindly, and possessing a wicked sense of humor. Peattie's work now stands as a rare and valuable history of Nebraska, showing us a lively frontier society through the eyes of a woman engaged in the life of her community and her own struggle to balance her family and career