UNDAUNTED

A substantial work of research on women journalists over the last 180 years, underscoring both sexist hurdles and tremendous breakthroughs.

A historian who has published biographies of Fannie Hurst and Nellie Bly, Kroeger, the founding director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, moves chronologically in this monumental study of journalists who made a significant impact in their time and forged the way for those who came later. She begins with one of the most influential: Margaret Fuller, a friend of the transcendentalists and leading advocate for birth control and other progressive causes. In 1870, “long before Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle,” Midy Morgan exposed the animal abuse in New York City’s cattle market for the Times. The author then turns to the two ferocious Idas: Wells, a crusader against lynching, and Tarbell, who revealed the extent of the monopoly of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in McClure’s from 1902 to 1904. By the turn of the century, it was assumed that women journalists were paid less than men, and women accepted it along with the sexist treatment and the belief that they should be relegated to the “soft” pages rather than hard news. Nonetheless, many young women continued to seek out the glamorous career of journalism. Many uncelebrated women journalists covered the world wars—so-called “front-page girls”—often without credit, though many achieved real breakthroughs—e.g., Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Dorothy Thompson, and Rachel Carson. Despite feats by “supernovas” in the 1960s and ’70s (Lois Wille, Ada Louise Huxtable, Charlotte Curtis), Kroeger cites the lawsuit by women journalists against Newsweek in 1970 as a turning point. Decades later, the #MeToo movement amplified the concerns of discrimination and won important victories. A recent study shows that women are still “sorely lacking” in “all realms of media,” emphasizing the age-old refrain: “progress, setback; push, pull.”

A tour de force that should be in every library and school in the country.