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

Fahs, Alice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807834963 ISBN 13: 9780807834961

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Using extraordinary archival research, Alice Fahs unearths a richly networked community of female journalists drawn by the hundreds to major cities--especially New York--from all parts of the United States. Newspaper women were part of a wave of women seeking new, independent, urban lives, but they struggled to obtain the newspaper work of their dreams. Although some female journalists embraced more adventurous reporting, including stunt work and undercover assignments, many were relegated to the women's page. However, these intrepid female journalists made the women's page their own. Fahs reveals how their writings--including celebrity interviews, witty sketches of urban life, celebrations of being "bachelor girls," advice columns, and a campaign in support of suffrage--had far-reaching implications for the crea

About this title

Book Description

"Enormously rich. Fahs succeeds in showing us how these bright, pioneering, and often swashbuckling newspaperwomen carved out new ways for people to think not just about women, but about life. Every problem I ever encountered as a newspaperwoman, every delight I felt, every insult from a macho craft, is here fifty times over. This book is a delight not only for feminists and historians, but for anyone looking to find a way forward for journalism."--Geneva Overholser, University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism

From the Inside Flap

Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Fahs argues that, as observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0807834963
• ISBN 13: 9780807834961
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 376