Profile of Eleanor Early: Negotiating Women’s Popular Writing in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

Profile of Eleanor Early:Negotiating Women’s Popular Writing in the Mid-Twentieth Century Brianne Jaquette (bio) In 1952, journalist and author Eleanor Early found herself being strangled by a snake while hunting for wild boars in Trinidad. In the summer of 2008, I found myself shifting through Early’s archives at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College. I had never heard of Early, but when I was searching the finding aids at Burns Library, I was immediately drawn to her name. Maybe it was the alliteration, but regardless of how trivial the initial appeal, she has stuck with me; I find myself thinking of her and her career path over and over again. With this profile, then, I want to draw attention to Early, a popular and widely known writer in the mid-twentieth century, in the hopes that others will be enticed by this figure as well. Early was an incredibly productive writer, and her work in a range of venues on a multitude of topics illustrates the negotiations that it took to be a woman in public and professional spaces over the course of the twentieth century. Early had a prosperous career spanning almost forty years from the early 1930s until her death in 1969 at the age of seventy-four. She was best known for her travel guides, including New Orleans Holiday (1947), Cape Cod Summer (1949), New York Holiday (1950), and Washington Holiday (1955). She also wrote other diverse books such as She Knew What He Wanted (1941) and New England Cookbook (1954).1 In addition to her numerous books, Early was a prolific journalist, who wrote on a variety of topics for major periodicals in the United States, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Although Early had a long-lasting and far-reaching career, she is now an obscure figure in American letters. She was born in Newton, Massachusetts on 27 April 1895, but little biographical information is available about Early as a young child.2 In a short outline of her life, written to publicize one of her books, she wrote, “It is fashionable these days to have had a miserable childhood, but mine was exceedingly happy. I adored my parents [and] loved my brothers and sisters.”3 We do know that in her early years, she moved with her family to Wellesley, Massachusetts, and after graduating from high school in Wellesley, she attended Miss Wheelock’s School in Boston, where she trained to be a kindergarten teacher, graduating in 1917.4 [End Page 201] Instead of becoming a teacher as planned, Early secured a job as a reporter for the Boston American.5 An informational piece about her life written for Rinehart Publishers notes that the “main road for Eleanor Early looked like a comfortable career as a kindergarten teacher in her home town,” but Early was not fond of already carved out paths and gave up the “too comfortable” route of teacher for a more exciting position as a reporter in Boston.6 This move was quite bold for the young Early; according to Olga Owens, she had to be an “amazing girl” to go to town and get “herself a job.”7 Early was viewed as exceptional because her chosen profession was not particularly hospitable to women at that time. Sally Joy White, the first woman hired for the staff of a major metropolitan newspaper, had only achieved this feat in 1870.8 While the number of female journalists was ever increasing from a dismal 288 in 1880 to the more substantial 4,000 by 1910, there was still not an abundance of positions, support, or role models available to young women like Early.9 In addition to societal disapprobation, Early had personal barriers to work around or overcome when starting her job with the Boston American. Apparently she could not even type when she applied to work as a reporter and had to ask other people to type her stories for her. Despite this fact, she eventually became the successful author of a sports column, “Girls in Sports.”10 According to a newspaper article saved by Early, hers was the first sports column in...