Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space

Abstract

Alice Fahs argues that women newspaper reporters working between roughly 1885 and 1910 carved out new public space for women both by roaming across urban space searching for the “woman's angle” in American public life and by writing about the wide new world for women. Even the “woman's pages” in which they chronicled the emerging public woman staked out new public space for women. Fahs's engaging exploration of this symbiotic relationship offers a fresh perspective for evaluating the history of women in journalism partly because it traces the unheralded culture of women reporters who personified the “bachelor girls” they wrote about. This new breed of independent young working women lived on their own in hotels or apartment houses, defying traditional notions of home. “They live alone, depend upon no one for livelihood, mentality, or entertainment, and in fact paddle their own canoe with all the nerve and independence of a full-fledged bachelor,” the journalist Margherita Arlina Hamm wrote in 1892 (p. 138). Fahs, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, argues that the zestful newspaper accounts of bachelor girls connected to the embryonic suffrage movement “by enabling women to imagine themselves as independent actors in metropolitan life” (p. 161).