Women of The World and Other Dailies: The Lives and Times of Vancouver Newspaperwomen in the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the spring of 1904, Sara McLagan, owner of one of Vancouver's three daily newspapers, The World, embarked on a journey across the continent to cover the St. Louis World's Fair. She joined a group of eastern women journalists who were mustering as many of their number as they could find to cover the fair. They wanted to make visible the presence of newspaperwomen in the Canadian press. The end result of this gathering was the formation of the first nationally organized women's press club in the world, The Canadian Women's Press Club. Members aimed to advance the status of journalism as a profession which women could honourably and profitably practise. Within a few years the club embraced press women all across Canada, but of the original sixteen members only two were from west of Ontario, both from Vancouver: Sara McLagan and Sarah Crowe Atkins, who supplied the Province with news of the fair. The small number of newspaperwomen who were able to make a living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found their opportunities either in sophisticated and diverse urban settings with markets for the specialist journalist or in sparsely populated pioneering communities with comparatively few obstacles to the enterprising woman. To a certain extent Vancouver represented both extremes. Despite its youth, Vancouver had a lively newspaper scene. In the newly inaugurated city of 1886, three newspapers shared the fate of destruction by fire. From the outset, women contributed to the expansion and diversification of the Vancouver press. Sara McLagan headed the tradition of newspaperwomen in Vancouver. With