Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff foundation.

Black children are more likely than all other children to be raised in skipped generation households.

So you've got black kids who are more likely to end up in these households.

You've got black grandmothers who are more likely to be doing this without a parent or a partner.

And you've got black grandmothers and black children who are much more embedded in the child welfare system.

{MUSIC } Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe Welcome.

to To the Contrary a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives this week.

What is it like to be a black grandmother raising a grandchild or grandchildren?

Sociologist Dr. Lashonda Pittman felt these women were marginalized and had no voice, so she gave them an opportunity to voice their hardships, accomplishments and needs.

It's all in her new book, GrandMothering While Black.

Welcome, Dr. Pittman.

Thank you for your time and for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm such a fan of your show and I'm really excited to be able to talk to you at last about something that's near and dear, not just in my heart, but I think that is a pressing social issue that needs a lot more airtime.

Now.

Why?

What is this happening?

Is this is it happening more than it ever did in the past?

Is it happening less so?

And what are the social trends that are changing grandparenting in America?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So I would say that both and right.

So there are more grandparents raising grandchildren than at any other time in American history.

So I think the number of grandparents just in general, not just African-American grandparents, but grandparents overall, but also, I would say for African-American grandparents raising grandchildren It's sort of waxed and waned.

And right now they're at a lower point than they were when I did this research back in the 2000s.

What is also really different is that something you just spoke to, which are the trends differ, right?

So like how they're providing this care looks very differently today than it did in prior generations, which is something I really tried to shine a light on.

Not only that, there are more people doing it, but how they're doing it is so fundamentally different than before.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, So I mean, I think that there's this tendency, particularly with women of color, black grandmothers like this is just something they've always done.

My grandmother did it, or I know grandmothers that did it.

And I argue that there are three things that make contemporary grandmothers experiences significantly different than their historic counterparts, which is our grandchildren.

Circumstances have changed.

So you're dealing now with drug epidemics, both the crack cocaine epidemic of the eighties and nineties and now the opioid epidemic.

You're dealing with mass incarceration of parents, which is something that's a more contemporary phenomenon.

You're dealing with huge income and wealth inequalities that are contributing to parents being under and unemployed and all those kinds of things.

So their circumstances are different.

That's a big difference.

I think, secondly, the need to legalize this relationship is different, right?

Both with respect to the child welfare system, now relying on grandparents more and more to provide kinship care to children who need or they feel that it needs to be take that need to be taken out of the home.

But also the child welfare system.

And also there's more of a need to have legal authority when you're dealing with things like child rearing institutions to get a kid enrolled in school.

At times you need to legalize the relationship or to get a child medical care, you need consent.

And so I think the need to legalize the relationship is really different.

And then lastly, because now there are so many more black and brown children, African-American and American indigenous Pacific, Alaska, Native children that are in the child welfare system.

There is this very real and perceived threat of their grandchildren ending up in the child welfare system.

And so if I don't step in as a grandparent, then the next possible place for my grandchild is in a stranger's home.

And so I think those are all factors that really change the nature of grandparent caregiving today than it was past.

Has anything changed about grandfathers being more or less involved than in the past?

You know, I would I would say probably yes.

You know, there's not not nearly as not enough research done on grandfathers as there are on grandmothers.

The majority of these caregivers, 63%, I think, are women.

And so I think when the grandfathers are in the home, then they are likely to be involved.

At least that was what I found in my own research, and there's some evidence for it in other research.

There's still the sort of gender divisions of labor, though, right, that it's often women who assume the bulk of child rearing responsibility.

And that doesn't change just because you're older.

But what is really unique about black grandmothers experiences is that unlike any other grandparent, they're more likely to be raising their grandchildren without a parent living in the home and without a partner.

So they're they're doing this more than others alone.

To be clear, the vast majority of grandparents raising grandchildren are two parent or two grandparent households.

So there are grandfathers and grandmothers or or same sex couples that are doing this together.

But for black grandmothers, they have that unique distinction of doing this work alone more than others.

Let me go back a step, because what something you said surprised me.

If you're a grandma and your granddaughter is on a bicycle, gets hit by a car, breaks her leg falling on concrete, you can't take her to the hospital and check her in.

You don't have a legal right to do that?

You actually don't.

I think that what happens now is like there's been and this is something I didn't get to unpack as much as I wanted to in my book, because space constraints.

But the the need for legal consent has changed a lot over time with more and more medical care providers being concerned about being sued, wanting to make sure that that the child that they're treating is the person who is bringing that child in is actually has authority to make decisions on behalf of their child, because if they don't, then the medical care provider could be found responsible.

And so often what will happen is that grandmothers, particularly the ones in my study, what they did in lieu of legal guardianship, was if they were on the child's medical card, because if the kid was receiving welfare benefits or they had a medical card and the grandmother was the representative payee, they would use that in lieu of legal guardianship.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

And I think that's a really big part of it, is that you may or may not be able to do this.

And when a kid needs medical care, you can't go on who may or may not, Right.

Like and who wants to see their grandkid in need of care and support and they can't themselves provide it.

And so I think that's a really big, big thing.

Is that's something states are working on or is there any legislative activity or regulatory activity to try to give this to grandparents?

Yeah, you know, that's a really great question.

So I'll say California led the way in terms of providing what we call medical and legal consent to kinship caregivers.

And so it very much depends on the state that a grandparent is raising or relative.

Right.

So we know that grandmothers are the first line of defense, aunt comes second.

So it depends on where they are in terms of whether they are able to utilize a medical consent.

And the same is true with respect to educational consents, which aren't nearly as popular as medical concerns because there's so much controversy around wanting to make sure that children are not being enrolled in schools in districts where they don't live.

And so these medical and legal consents exist depending on which state you live in.

I don't have the number off the top of my head.

It's in my book, the number of states that have these consents.

But if you're in a state that they don't have a more if the grandparent doesn't know that they exist, then it's as good as not having one.

And so there is some legislation around that.

It would be wonderful if it were universal and that it honor how families actually operate.

But it does not.

When perfect strangers take in foster children, they get subsidies.

And I once met a family where that was the dad's full time job.

He had five or six grandchildren to help with the increased costs, of course, utilities, food, housing, etc.. Do grandmothers get these?

You know, I love that question.

You know, it's a very sort of to me, the perfect sort of question to talk about American values.

Right.

I think that one of the things that we hold dear is that it's the families responsibility when at the end of the day, I'm a sociologist, so I know that it's not the family that creates these dynamics entirely themselves.

Right.

Like, we have to honor systemic and structural issues that lead to more and more grandparents needing to raise their grandchildren.

And so this idea that it should just all fall to families and it's their responsibility to do, I think is ridiculous.

Children cost money and more and more, you know, we are in a whole different time period in terms of just like the costs of raising a child.

And so that and this is interesting.

Some of the grandmothers talk about this.

They're obviously want to raise their grandchildren and the bulk of them do with very little government support for the grandchild itself.

Like a lot of them are relying on their own Social Security retirement, pensions and so on in order to provide this care and the majority provide care outside of the child welfare system where all they have access to are the social safety net programs that poor families have access to, which is basically a small cash stipend if they're getting a ten of child only grant.

And when I was doing this research in Illinois, it was $107 a month and they're having a hard time getting $107 a month.

Right.

And so children cost money.

And I think that that's important.

So these families often experience what we call the the care of the love penalty.

They actually love and care about the children in their care, and therefore, they're not given support for those children.

And it causes the poverty that we see in these families, grandparent headed households, those that the parent does not live in the home are more likely to be impoverished than most families in America.

And when they're headed by women, like 67% or two thirds of them live in poverty, it shouldn't it's not acceptable.

We should be providing support for some of these families if they're providing care inside of the child welfare system.

As a foster parent, if they are a subsidized guardian, if they've adopted, then they do get a stipend that's significantly larger than that $107.10 of child only grant.

And so they the vast majority don't.

And they should.

Can they get can you adopt your own grandchild?

You can.

So the vast majority are providing care outside of the child welfare system.

I think that one of the things that my book does, which I think is really important, it even complicates what that looks like because we have a tendency to romanticize that, that like, oh, the parent and the grant and then the parent and the grandparent got together and like had this moment of like, this is what should happen and like, whatever.

And sometimes that does happen.

But oftentimes it's also fraught with conflict over who should be responsible for the kid and so on and so forth.

You got that's where the bulk of caregiving takes place.

Then you get to the child welfare system where often if a kid is coming across the radar of the child welfare system, what often happens?

Not all the time, because we're now using the state is using what's called kinship diversion, where the kid comes across the radar of the child welfare system.

They don't take the kid into state custody and divert that kid to the grandparents home with very little, if any, support.

So that is a thing.

And that's happening more and more and it's not being tracked nearly enough.

The second thing is that they actually take that kid in the state custody.

The grandparent becomes a foster parent.

The parent gets a certain amount of time to get themselves together.

If they don't, then the grandparent is given a couple of options.

You can become a subsidized guardian in some states or you can adopt the grandchild.

And so, yeah, you can adopt.

Grandparents are less likely to adopt because one they still most honored that parent child relationship in matters and to something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough which my book does, is that they actually want their grandchild to be in the care of their parent if their parent is able to care for them, because guess what?

They have their own needs and hopes and desires at the stages in their lives where they're faced with raising a grandkid.

They're 50, they're 60 to 70, 80 in some cases.

So, you know, they actually would love to kind of have some time to themselves, their partners, and to do other kinds of things that matter to them.

We talked a little bit about trends having an impact, and there are two more recent ones that come to mind.

The first is the lack of stigma that used to exist when I was younger.

Children born out of wedlock were considered to be illegitimate children.

Has that, do you think, led to more kids ending up in their grandmother's care?

Because instead of going and getting an abortion or whatever else they might do or not having sex in the first place with someone they're not married to, boom, they do.

And it happens.

And there's a child.

And then, of course, along with that is the dad's decision of a year ago.

And making abortion unattainable in 20 plus U.S. states.

And now conservatives going after birth control, over-the-counter or doctor prescribed via telemedicine.

Getting rid of that.

Are either of both of or both of those having an impact on the number of children born to one parent with no other parent involved?

Without a doubt, the increase in single mother headed households has increased not just in the United States and most certainly not just among African-Americans.

It is world wide phenomenon in the United States.

I would say that African-Americans are more likely to be there's more single mother headed households within the African-American community for all kinds of reasons, and one which we should be absolutely talking about.

First and foremost is the mass incarceration of African-American men.

And so I think that that's something that has to be acknowledged.

I think also with respect to grandparent headed households, one of the things that's really important to distinguish is grandparents head of households that are three generation households where there is a grandparent or grandparent of the parent generation and grandchildren.

And then those that I study, which are skip generation households, they form for different reasons.

Right.

And so what we find is that there are many more multigenerational households where there is a single mom, often.

Right.

Who's living with her parents most often than not.

And they're helping her raise her children for a certain period of time, often when the kid is the youngest and childcare is expensive.

So when parents have to pay for both childcare and rent, that's a lot in play.

Some places childcare is more expensive than rent, right?

And so I think you see those kinds of households more prevalent with respect to think generation households.

It's not just single motherhood, it's things like, you know, what happens when that one parent that's involved is taken down, right, for various reasons, whether it's health problems, untreated, mental health issues, incarceration under unemployment, inability to find housing and so on, so forth.

So I think all of those are real issues.

I think any family is really vulnerable when it's just one parent, so that if something happens to that one parent, guess where guess what the next safety net is?

It's grandma oftentimes.

So I think those are two big issues that absolutely affects these households.

But but sort of differently.

Do you think we'll see a day where there will be more single grandparents in I'm thinking skipped generation households?

You know, they still are the major the minority of grandparent headed households.

But I think as we're seeing, I mean, you've got different demographic things that are going to contribute to this, right?

So women outlive men.

Right.

And then with African-American women and women of color, increasingly they're less likely to be married.

Right.

And so this is what I see with my own population, which is that whereas these women would have historically have been married and they would have been doing this with a partner, they're increasingly not doing it with the partner.

And so some of the biggest increases that we're seeing in grandparent here, in grandparent headed households right now are among white and Latin X families.

Right.

And so they're still not on par with African-American and American Indian, Alaska Native families, but they're increasing.

And so I think to the degree that those women are like not married, we're going to see maybe an increase in women who are doing it by themselves.

But I mean, as fathers, for example, take greater roles in child care and house care, and it's still creeping.

It's not like a fire hose.

It's an explosion of activity.

But do you see grandfathers doing the same thing, especially when it comes to helping grandmother, heirs or, you know, grandmother, a grandmother on one side of the child's family and the grandfather on the other, sort of both pitching in together?

Wouldn't that make it a lot easier on the grandmothers?

It absolutely would.

You know, what I found in my own study and, you know, and the the results are mixed with respect to this.

Many studies really note that these women don't feel like they get adequate support.

Right.

And I think that's very real.

What I found for the women in my study was that it wasn't that they didn't get any support, it was that the buck stops with them.

And there's a certain level of stress and responsibility that goes along with like at the end of the day, this is on me.

Right.

Like I'm the one who is getting up every day dealing with this kid every single day and everything associated with with raising another generation.

I also found that for the women in my study that had partners, they may not have been married, all of them, but that had active boyfriends, long term partners.

They were involved.

They helped.

I did have a minority of women who had conflict in relationships because they had decided that they were going to raise their grandchildren and their partners didn't want to.

I had at least a couple of women whose partners left because they didn't want the responsibility.

But I'll say the vast majority of these women did it with partners who were involved and who helped with their other adult children.

So maybe not the parent of the kids that they were raising.

In some cases, parents helped, even if they weren't living in the home.

I think that's important to acknowledge with their other children, with their siblings.

And so I felt like one of the things that really differed with that when I was looking at this compared to like young, poor moms who say they have less support is we're talking about older women, not old necessarily, but older.

They have a more seasoned network, right.

They've got their moms, their sisters and brothers, their nieces and nephews, their own other children.

And so they had a cadre of support that they could rely on.

That I think is really important to acknowledge and they acknowledge it.

And it's it's detailed in my book, everything from emotional and social support to economic support.

They they couldn't have done it by themselves.

Lastly, how does it vary by race or African?

Why did you write this?

Just about black grandmas.

Are Latinas close behind in terms of numbers of them or a percentage of the population?

White grandmothers.

I love that question for a number of reasons.

One is that black children are more likely than all other children to be raised and skipped generation households.

I think one in ten black kids will end up at some point in their lives living in with their grandparent in this way compared to the next highest group was Latin X, which was 5%.

So like 10% versus five is literally double.

So I think the experiences of African-Americans is really unique in that way.

So you've got black kids who are more likely to end up in these households.

You've got black grandmothers who are more likely to be doing this without a parent or a partner, and you've got black grandmothers and black children who are much more embedded in the child welfare system.

The only other group that comes close are American Indian, Alaska Native Families.

And so I think really giving voice to a community that's been incredibly hard hit by the criminal justice system, by the child welfare system, by these trends around grandparent caregiving is really critical.

And frankly, I think they have a lot to teach all of these other racial ethnic groups that are starting to feel more of this.

Now.

What these groups are experiencing now.

These grandmothers have been experiencing for some time.

And so I thought it was really important to talk about what they had to offer the world in terms of their knowledge and to bring attention to this phenomena where they need more support, they need a lot more support.

We need to stop romanticizing this experience and provide these families with a lot more support.

And since the country has in the last few years gone through a major revision of American history, particularly on enslavement and of course the slave system, the slave owners system all the time broke up.

Families ripped mothers away from children at their breasts and and married parents, etc.. Do you think there's a vestige of that playing into this?

One of the things that I teach African American families here at the University of Washington, and I think one of the things that's really important to know is that a lot happened between slavery and today.

There's no direct line between slavery.

People like, you know, that we see slavery today.

Like, you know, there was a point in American history where African-Americans had higher marriage rates than white people did.

And so, you know, there are as so one of the the first civil rights that we took advantage of when slavery ended was to marry each other.

You know, there's a wonderful historian, Tara Hunter, who is at I think she's at Princeton, who really captures this really rich history.

Right.

And so I think it's really important to look at all the different things that happened across these different historic time periods that have contributed to this.

Right at different time periods.

It's been caused by different kinds of things.

And so one of the things I really wanted to highlight with Highlight with this book, my next book will deal with the historical the historical sort of legacy of grandparent caregiving and what grandmother and it looks like in all these other historical time periods.

But for this book, what's causing this today are some of the things that are impacting not just black families.

We're feeling it more than other families, but families today.

And so I think it's really important to to sort of put slavery where it needs to be, but to look at all the things that black people have done to hold on to and create family.

Between slavery and today.

And it's been pretty remarkable.

Lashonda Pittman, author of the new book Grand Mothering While Black.

We really appreciate your time.

Appreciate your time and your elucidation of this amazing aspect of American life.

Thank you so much.

That's it for this edition.

Please keep the conversation going with us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and visit our PBS website, pbs.org.

slash To ghe Contrary and whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next time.

[ Music] Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E,.

Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation The Park Foundatiom and the Charles A. Frueauff FoundATION Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Park Foundation and the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation This week On To the Contrary, what impact have women had on journalism in the United States?

What impact people having on the field and what impact the field was having on them, which wasn't always to The struggles have been so difficult and remains so difficult.

It's about women doing the jobs that men would envy, at points that it was really not easy to achieve.

{MUSIC } Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe' Welcome to To the Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Women are now a major force in reporting the news, but that wasn't always the case.

It took many women and countless years to get to this point.

So who were the trailblazers and what have their contributions been to American journalism?

This week's Woman Thought Leader has a new book that chronicles these pioneering women and their journey to make sure women's voices were heard.

Joining us today is Brooke Kroeger, a professor and author of Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism.

Welcome to you, professor.

So thank you.

And I'm just Brooke.

Brooke, okay.

Welcome to you, Brooke.

So, first of all, you were on the leading edge of retirement and a vice president from a big publishing company came to you and said, here's the book I want written and I want you to write it.

So tell me about that.

Well, I didn't quite say that.

He said he wanted to discuss the project, that he was keen to have such a project written.

And my name had come up from, I guess, several camps.

So I didn't know him.

I had announced at NYU that I was going to retire in about two years at that point.

And knowing that I had a sabbatical and it was all going to work out and here comes this cold call email I thought I would pass out.

So it was it was very, very welcome.

And then we had lunch.

She had very, very specific ideas about how this book should be written for a trade audience.

You know, there are books like this in the academic sphere.

But, you know, that's a little bit different than a book that's meant for a general audience.

And the reason this happened was that he went looking for one in connection with some work that he was doing and he couldn't find one.

I know of one.

I have it here, actually.

I'll show you.

It's the last time this was done.

1936.

It's called Ladies of Ladies of the Press by Isabel Ross, who was the consummate front page girl of the twenties and early thirties.

And she does it very differently.

She does it by genre and by region.

And her her idea is basically to do a celebration of women in the field.

Up to that point, though, she starts where I start in 1840 at the beginning of mass media, and it's a celebration of the Midwestern women and the New York women and the front page girls and the stunt girls and the subsistence every every women's incarnation that comes along.

And so my book is not like that.

It's very different in concept.

It's very chronological.

It takes the field decade by decade by decade, looking at each decade distinctly to see what emerged in that period, who matter, who who rose to public attention when it wasn't normal for women to rise to public attention in quite that way.

And then from that, I could start to see, well, what was happening to women generally?

What was really going on and what impact were they having on the field and what impact the field was having on them, which wasn't always terrific.

So let's start from the beginning then.

Tell me in 1840, who was working?

How was she?

How did the first woman get into mass media?

So I'm really careful about the first because, you know, when you say first, somebody else is the first, before that first.

One of the things that drives me crazy personally is, you know, even recently, I mean, you can find it in the paper practically once a month, someone dies after a wonderful career and they're described as a trailblazer or a pioneer.

And they just aren't because every time I see that, I say, Oh, but there was Pauline Frederick, you're wrong.

You know, it just comes to me that way.

And I think it's, you know, it's it denies the history when we do that.

And I think it has to do with I tried to get over myself on this because it irritates me so much, obviously, because I know too much.

But I realize that the reason this happens for two reasons.

One is nobody's done the history as a continuum where you really see the stretch of it.

And so you're looking at your place in the in the pond and someone's throwing a stone and the ripples come out and you say, oh, this is the whole universe, but really it's an ocean.

So that's one thing that happens.

The other is that I think the struggles have been so difficult and remain so difficult that you have the feeling that you're a pioneer.

Because even though you're clearing underbrush and overgrowth, it feels like you're blazing the trail.

So that's where I cut some slack.

Interesting.

So you you think women going into the field are still pioneers?

No, I'm saying that will notice that if you see obituaries, like just look in the papers.

Yeah.

Everybody's a pioneer.

They're not pioneers.

Pioneers have happened long before.

That's all right.

Why did you pick the forties?

Because I think, you know, clearly there have been books written about some very famous female journalists.

You know, Nellie Bly comes to mind.

Or Ida Wells later, Bonnie.

So I start in 1840 with Margaret Fuller.

Gordon Okay.

All right.

The year predates them by 50 years.

So it goes back further in 1840 is kind of an accepted date for the start of mass media.

This is when Horace Greeley, you know, develops the New York Tribune, and this is where all the penny press happens.

I mean, it's a it's an important period in the development of the news industry.

The 1840s that women did not have.

I mean, there certainly wasn't the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote for much.

There was not until 1920 and that 1840 we didn't even have Seneca Falls until 1848.

So we're talking about a very early point where feminism was having its early, you know, buds.

The buds were happening.

Women were starting to talk about it.

Margaret Fuller's treatise is considered very important on this subject and a founding feminist document.

You know her her story is fabulous, though.

She dies very young.

And tragically, I say it's, you know, a German fairy tale for grown ups.

I mean, it's a really sad story, but she has a fantastic career up to the point that she she is no longer with us.

And other women at that time just did remarkable things to get into the field and not to be writing about, you know, flower shows and society gossip.

There really were women who triumphed.

The conceit of the book, though, my editor didn't love me saying this, that really is the conceit of the book, that it's about women doing men's jobs.

It's about women doing the jobs men would envy at points where that was really not easy to achieve.

And then when it got easier to do, of course.

So.

So tell me.

Yeah.

And tell the audience more importantly, where the book starts and why.

You mentioned that you picked the 1840s because it was the beginning with my first meeting with Martha.

Exactly.

And Margaret Fuller, who is just a remarkable character and all the things we think about women who got to achieve early, that they were beautiful or had great personalities or, you know, other things that helped them along the way.

None of this is true of Margaret Fuller.

She was homely by her own description.

She was off putting in her style, irritating, but she had a remarkable gift of discourse, remarkable and had been allowed to be trained, have her mind trained by her father, who taught her the classics, who taught her German literature, who taught her everything.

He really tutored her.

Whereas most women at that time, even if they were educated, were going to charm school.

I mean, that that's what happened.

So people saw them as having a real defect when it came to training their minds, you know, their ability to catalog knowledge.

So Margaret Fuller took it on herself in Boston to start something she called the conversations.

She's very involved with the transcendental community.

And and these conversations are enormously popular.

And she has an explored Mary gift of gab.

And so that that happens.

In the meantime, she's a master networker.

Like most of the women I talk about, they are master networkers.

From the beginning, she wants to know the greatest mind of the century, who she thinks is Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she makes it her business to befriend him.

She's invited to his home finally by the wife, spends two weeks with them in Concord, and he comes around to liking her, which she was not predisposed to do.

He found her offputting.

He didn't like her quirks to her eyes all the time.

I mean, she does things that are really annoying.

So that happens.

She does the conversations.

And Greeley's wife is enthralled with her.

Absolutely enthralled.

And they are coming to Boston all the time.

And Greeley's wife, Mary, wants to become close to Margaret Fuller, so she convinces her husband to hire her as the literary editor of the Tribune, meaning she writes a column right next to Greeley's on the front page, signing it with an asterisk, as she does.

And so and what else happens?

Mary invites you to live in the Greeley household.

So imagine the ingratiating that has taken place.

After a short time, she's writing about literature and good things that she cares about.

She decides that she really needs to investigate the underclass in New York.

So she becomes a metro reporter.

She's really doing, you know, really what we would call serious metro work, city, city kind of news work does that for a couple of years.

In addition to her literary stuff.

And then she decides she'd like to go to Europe and, oh, cover the Italian Revolution, which she does.

And so her story is like that.

I mean, I think of it as her having done everything any journalist would love to have had is to be able to call a career, especially if you die at 40.

I mean, remarkable.

And then that's a pretty great story.

Alongside her is a woman eight years older named Lydia Maria Child.

There's a recent biography of her, another very interesting woman, also from Boston.

And she and Fuller were friends, even though they were eight years apart from the time Fuller was a teenager, because they shared interest in studying John Locke.

I mean, they were these are really intellectuals.

And she spends her life, most of it for two decades, writing about the frugal housewife, how girls should behave.

And she's doing things like that, plus biographies of women, women's interest work.

And then she makes this giant turn to abolition and writes a treatise on how African Americans should be treated, including, you know, ending ending the prohibition against miscegenation.

I mean, she makes some radical stands for the Time, which destroys her career for a decade, and then she becomes shunned.

No one will talk to her, but that ingratiated her to the abolition movement where she rebuilds her career, that gives the idea to the next generation, the people of the 1860s and 1870s, they start in the abolition press and find their way.

Why?

Because the abolition press isn't going to be able to afford the alpha males, the white alpha males.

They are going to be more open to other people, a more diverse collection of people who can write about this topic or other topics.

Well, the good thing about that for women was they they had platform because they were willing to write for pennies and B) everybody read the abolition press.

So from there you see Gail Hamilton and Grace Greenwood move to the New York Times and the Atlantic right afterwards and build phenomenal careers at very high pay, as does Mary Clement, -Covering what ?

Covering whatever you cover, mostly do travel writing essays and politics Washington politics plenty of that so right leading up to and then after the Civil War.

Correct.

And Mary Clemmer, who is a minister's wife, quite unhappily married, is in the Maryland Heights of Virginia and covers the battle at her kitchen window.

And it's interesting but the story, of course, isn't cabled real time like the regular reporters.

It's mailed in to The New York Post.

It runs two weeks later, but zillions of papers across the country pick it up.

So really a fantastic battle story because she sees the whole thing out the window.

And and of course, it's called as a Woman Saw it, which becomes a tagline that sticks around for about 60, 70 years.

Tell me, since you read her work, how did her work differ stylistically from the men who were covering the Civil War at the time?

Well, her piece is only different at the end, where she says, I ran to the basement, you know, being a coward.

I mean, she does say that, but if you hear her description of the battle, it's pretty good.

The other thing you find not long after around the 1890s when there was, you know, the war in Cuba, the Philippines, and Greece, it becomes common for male men, correspondents to take their wives with them to war and they the wives basically become aides to camp.

They can copy off to the cable head, but they become very good at interviewing generals and getting information to spill out.

And James (inaudible), who was an exemplary war correspondent of that period, tells in one of his memoirs how these wives were in the foxholes and ready to jump into battle.

And, of course, they're unnamed, but that was happening very early.

Women willing to and doing that kind of work at at a serious level.

And then there are others who go on their own and are violent.

Were any of them killed?

Not in that period.

I don't know of any deaths in that period.

Of course, later we have deaths in Vietnam and elsewhere.

We do have deaths and terrible injuries even in the Spanish Civil War.

I remember covering the debate back during the post Reagan years or the Reagan years about women in the military and women taking combat jobs.

And one of the reasons conservatives cited against allowing women into combat positions was that the public wouldn't be able to take it when women died or were gravely wounded in war.

Oh, interesting.

I have I haven't heard that one for the reporters, the issues that were brought up, especially during World War Two, when this got more organized, was that they would distract the men that men, you know, soldiers, that men would feel the need to protect them, which would distract them from what their primary goals.

Things like that.

None of which were true for the women who actually did it.

And many had to defy regulations to do it because it was against regulations for women to go to the front.

They weren't supposed to go any further forward than where the WAACs or the nurses went, which was way behind battle lines.

Nonetheless, numerous did.

Some of them were wire correspondents which were sent to report.

So, I mean, they did their job even though it was against regulations they faced house arrest, court martial loss of credentials like Martha Gellhorn did, I mean, for doing what they simply intended to do.

So a blind eye pass was given to some women, though, very quietly, because the mass of women who when in World War Two really weren't equipped to cover battles, a lot of them will feature writers who had not come from the city desk because every paper at that time basically had one city room or two metro reporters who were women.

The rest feature writers, which was the normal place where women came up in the field or on the women's pages and really were sent to cover those soft aspects of the war.

The interesting thing about that, I think, is that it really developed another whole genre of war reporting or conflict reporting that we now value very much.

I think maybe as much as we do the bang bang.

Yeah, I mean, you're so you're talking about features, generally ?

Shortages, how the soldiers are coping, you know, what their meal fare is.

I mean, the sorts of things they were sent to cover because you figured that what the the U.S..

Propaganda machine figured was every young man or officer had at least four women at home very concerned about what was happening to him, his mother, his wife, his sister and his lover.

You know, I mean, everybody was concerned.

So that became an important aspect of coverage.

And, you know, a lot of the work that women did is the work men did not want to do.

So it was like that.

Women's pages were lucrative.

That's department store advertising.

That's perfume advertising.

That's big advertising.

So the problem with women's pages in general, if you're the editor, is you've got to have somebody to write that stuff.

And the men did not want to do it.

So that created a place for the women.

Often that meant in their mind that they might use that as a way to segway out of that bastion.

And of course, that was rarely possible.

I do remember there was a a cook in the Persian Gulf War named Shoshana Johnson, who got a lot of publicity because, first of all, she was African-American and she was on the front lines.

And I think she was wounded.

It's been a while.

So yeah, but not a journalist.

So she wouldn't have no mind.

But what what we're talking about like women couldn't do the bang bang and couldn't do the front lines.

An example that a lot of women getting into that because the men didn't want to do it.

But they did go to battle.

The top did.

What I found that I think is a through there are several through lines.

One is race and gender, which just travels through the entire book.

And really so I don't know why it was surprising to me, but it was surprising in one way.

I wouldn't have expected it to be such a through line.

But it is.

That's one thing.

And then, I don't know.

It's there.

Just a lot of things like that that came through in a way that I hadn't expected.

But how really, that's a very interesting thing that you say because how could you write a woman about a book about women trailblazers and not sort of to expect gender and even race to be major issues?

No, no, I didn't mean that they were issues.

I meant that they intersected in really interesting ways.

We see it in this early period around the 1850s where women will use or will I don't want to say use, but find a way into journalism through writing for the abolition press where they find place.

And then of course, from that it gets seen by the bigger venues and then get real position.

This is not a lot of women.

These are the A-plus plus plus women that that's who gets opportunity.

I want to be very clear about that.

We're not talking about masses.

We're talking about the select few.

Then later on, you'll see things like Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who gets a job at The New York Times after The New Yorker and after a Washington, local investigative TV job she has for a while.

And at The Times, there's an episode where she goes to Chicago to cover a group of black women in an important meeting.

She dictates her story over the phone, as one did in the late sixties.

12 different editors look at it, and at some point along the line, everywhere she has written, Black has been changed to Negro.

And by the time she gets back to New York, it's already in print.

She throws a flaming fit and writes a memo back to all 12 editors explaining why this is not okay and the Times changes its policy.

So we see things like that happen all along the route.

And then, of course, now we see it also in the 1619 project and other things that have happened of of a profound nature.

So it's there's that women invented the interview.

I mean, this is not about gender and race, but it's things that women pioneered in many ways.

They turned out to be very good at the interview.

They aren't the only ones who did it, but they were exceptional at it.

And that's a very established form We now, of course, honor and admire.

We talked already about at war how women were covering the more humanity prone aspects of war.

And that's become, I think, you know, as we said, as important as as the battle reports or the politics, what's happening on the ground to everyday people in the course of this and other ways that that work has become as important.

So these are all things that women have a real stake in.

Most recently, we're moving away from gender and race, but not really.

We found that at three nonprofits that I talk about at the end of the book, the 19, The Marshall Project and the Kaiser Kaiser Foundation.

All of these are run by women, and all of them have exceptional employee benefits packages that go way beyond where the industry is.

So that's another form of pioneering and taking care of the people who do the work.

So I just found over and over again these moments where what women were doing and the way they were doing it sometimes because they were forced to, because other opportunities weren't available.

But something very rich has come out of that.

Also, some lousy stuff like sob sisters.

And there's some bad stuff too, but it's generally pretty good.

And to close, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but you said there's still change to come.

Well, I don't know what I see coming.

You know, I worry that so many women are in charge now because that's usually a sign of things falling apart.

That's another through line of the book that when a company is in trouble, suddenly the woman is the, the city editor, or she's the executive editor.

So somebody had a picture the other day of all the women in broadcast who were in charge of so many networks.

And I thought, oh, my goodness, this is scary.

So there's that.

But there's also the online abuse of women, which is just so extreme right now.

So there's still are really battles to to address.

Like, why is that?

Why why sexualized, atrocious attacking for work people are doing that men also do why, why in that way men also get attacked.

I don't mean to say they don't, but not with the same viciousness, not with the same hideousness, not the same.

And of course, the MeToo movement is certainly far from having completed its job.

And.

Well, but we.

But we'd have to say that what happened has held.

I mean, those men have not found their way back into grace.

They have not.

So there is, you know, a residual effect.

And I think it's kind of difficult now to to take the posture that many men very comfortably took for a very, very long time.

I think that would be hard to do right now.

Thank you so much for all of the enlightenment you shared with us.

My pleasure.

That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

And visit our website, pbs.org.

Slash to the contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next time.

{MUSIC } Funding for.

To the contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fundation The Park Foundation.

And the Charles A. Frueauff Foundation