Undaunted How women changed American journalism

Review by Booklist Review

Since the nation's inception, wise women have been pursuing the decidedly difficult goal of making their voices heard through the public record. Writers such as Ida Tarbell in the nineteenth century and Fannie Hurst in the early twentieth paved the way for such intrepid wartime correspondents as Martha Gellhorn and Marguerite Higgins in the later twentieth. They, in turn, provided the foundation for contemporary reporters such as Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jill Abramson. Kroeger, a journalism professor, biographer, reporter, and editor, chronicles their stories and those of dozens of other trailblazing women journalists who prevailed in a traditionally male-dominated industry. While their numbers may have waxed and waned over the years, their influence remains unwavering. Battling the sexism of their colleagues and publishers, they endeavored to break a ceiling made not of glass but of newsprint and Nielsen ratings. Kroeger's immersive history examines the myriad challenges they faced professionally and from society writ large and celebrates the ingenuity, valor, and integrity with which they pursued their goals. Merging feminist struggles with journalistic triumphs, Kroeger sheds an important light on both spheres.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

NYU emerita professor of journalism Kroeger (The Suffragents) delivers a sweeping history of female journalists from the mid-1800s to the present. Focusing on women at the top of the profession, Kroeger spotlights transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, who landed a job as the New York Tribune's literary editor and front-page columnist in 1844; crusading investigative journalists Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells; and WWII reporters Martha Gellhorn and Marguerite Higgins. In the 1960s, female journalists tapped into civil rights legislation and second-wave feminism to boost gender equity in the profession, enabling more women to move into top management positions. Yet overall progress proved "lackluster" in the face of sexual harassment, ageism, and other discriminatory beliefs and practices. A revitalized "feminist discourse" in the 2010s led to renewed efforts to diversify newsrooms, while the #MeToo movement empowered reporters like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey to break stories about Harvey Weinstein and other serial abusers. Kroeger more than proves that women have "faced down and overcome all manner of impediment to become integral to this enterprise," but the jumble of names, dates, and events can be dizzying at times. Still, it's a solidly researched and fluidly written overview of an important chapter in women's history. Illus. (May)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Preface Undaunted makes no claim to being all-inclusive. Rather, it seeks to share in a representative way how women have fared at the top of American journalism, a profession that men have dominated in the 180 years since mass media began. To arrive at the best way to tell the story, I began with two search terms, "women" and "journalism," applied together, decade by decade, to every relevant database from 1840 to the present. The approach was hardly scientific but provided consistency. It also gave me a good sense of the conditions that governed the presence and place of women as journalists, the ideas about them that prevailed in each period, and how those ideas changed, or did not change, over time. It became possible to identify the individuals whose achieve¬ments received the most attention. I considered how and why some women attracted publicity and if and how their stories fit into the wider context of women's advancement. Then came the winnowing. The telling is chronological. It gives precedence to the episodes that dealt with or dovetailed with the most significant news events and trends of each period. That meant leaving out many stories and people I would have liked to include. Twelve questions guided me. Which stories best illustrated what women were up against in their professional lives? How or why did the most successful women first get in the door? Who were the true trailblazers and pioneers? Assuming talent and hard work, how much did background, privilege, strategy, charisma, style, looks, advocacy, connections, or luck figure in their ascent? How well did women manage their successes and failures, their celebrity and censure? Were they "womanly" or "manly" in their reporting and writing or in their editorial vision? What impact did they have on the nation's news diet and on the profession? Whom among women has the wider journalism community chosen to honor? Which qualities and char¬acteristics fairly or unfairly attributed to women brought condem¬nation? Which brought respect? How did newsroom politics figure? Have women made a difference? I could not resist including some related anecdotes that were too good to omit, but in the interest of a reasonable page count I removed many names, including bylines that deserved to be in the text. If readers find themselves asking, "But what about ____?," the notes section contains many of those answers. I found value in highlighting great friendships and tracing the way some outstanding careers were built over decades. I endeavored to fairly praise men who gave deserving women an opportunity when it was not fashionable or usual to do so. Some of them might well have met a #MeToo-like fate had such a movement existed in their day. Others, because of the timing, did. The epilogue briefly details the social and cultural currents roiling in the early 2020s as my work on this book came to an end. It surprised me that the intertwining of gender and race would be such an unbroken through line and that the industry's economic crises, manpower shortages, and bat¬tered prestige at various points have proved as effective as changes in the law for creating opportunity for woman journalists, especially in the most coveted jobs. In writing the biographies of Nellie Bly and Fannie Hurst and the history of undercover reporting, I engaged with many of the memoirs, biographies, archives, articles, oral histories, and studies that anchor this book. (Bly lived from 1864 to 1922; Hurst, from 1885 to 1968.) Journalism has been the world I've lived in, worked in, stud¬ied, written about, and taught for more than fifty years. Yet only for Undaunted did I find myself considering the place of journalism's most successful women as one long continuum. I hope that comes through in the pages that follow. Against daunting odds, women have always found chairs at the most important tables of this vital profession, seats that often proved hard to keep. Very few of the woman journalists in these pages, alas, have legacies that endured or will endure much beyond their own moment. This is as expected. It is worth pointing out that this is just as true for a great proportion of the profession's outstanding men. The stories of the remarkable women included here provide a trove of still-sound career advice and some cautionary tales. Beyond that, we know now that it takes an ample mix of ages, races, genders, ethnicities, and political and cultural views to do American journal¬ism's essential tasks most effectively. We also know that journalism's propensity to exclude--addressed repeatedly over the years, but never vanquished--has made us all the poorer. Within that context, our primary focus here is the impact women have had on journalism and journalism's impact on them. --Brooke Kroeger July 2022 Excerpted from Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism by Brooke Kroeger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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