New York City's Penny Press and the Issue of Woman's Rights, 1848–1860

Abstract

Historians have generally held that before the Civil War the popular press did little to help the woman's rights movement. But careful analysis of the New York Daily Herald, the New York Daily Tribune, and the New York Daily Times during the antebellum period indicates the movement received wide attention in New York's penny press. These papers became a conduit through which woman's rights activists communicated with the general public and helped to rescue a movement without a newspaper of its own from relative obscurity.