Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space
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 creation of new, modern public spaces for American women at the turn of the century. As observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work, Fahs argues, to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.
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Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space
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 creation of new, modern public spaces for American women at the turn of the century. As observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work, Fahs argues, to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.
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Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space

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

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

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

by Alice Fahs

eBook

$29.99 

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Overview

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 creation of new, modern public spaces for American women at the turn of the century. As observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work, Fahs argues, to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807869031
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 11/17/2011
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 376
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Alice Fahs is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Her previous books include The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865.


Alice Fahs is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Her previous books include The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

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

Alice Fahs's excellent, lively, and entertaining book argues that, at the turn of the twentieth century, a group of women set their hats for careers in the newspaper business and in so doing pioneered new styles of reporting and a new style of womanhood. Filled with the voices of these women, Out on Assignment is a true pleasure to read.—Patricia Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara

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