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.

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{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 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.

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