In the news business there’s long been a race to be first, the classic contest among rival media to “scoop” the competition. In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, when the scooper happened to be a woman, that made news, too. In 1887, a brash young reporter named Elizabeth Cochrane managed to get herself committed to an insane asylum on New York’s Blackwell’s Island, a living hell for its mentally ill inmates. Ten days later she emerged and wrote about her experiences under the pen name “Nellie Bly” for the New York World. She had scooped every other New York paper with her outrageous exposé, and the World loudly paraded her as its “stunt girl.” Nellie Bly became America’s first big name among investigative journalists who wore dresses to work.
Historians of American journalism have ferreted out more women “firsts.” Among them were the first woman to publish a newspaper (Elizabeth Timothy of the South Carolina Gazette, 1759); the first to publish the full, official Declaration of Independence (Mary Katherine Goddard of the Maryland Journal, 1777); the first woman to edit a national magazine (Sarah Josepha Hale of Godey’s Ladies Book, 1836); and the first woman editor at a daily newspaper (Cornelia Walter of the Boston Transcript, 1842). The outspoken Anne Newport Royall, a rabble-rouser and writer during the 1820s and ’30s, probably holds the claim as the nation’s first official woman reporter.
Historians also have looked back to decide who could be called America’s first woman war correspondent. She was probably Margaret Fuller, a rare bird among women in the years before the American Civil War. Fuller was a full-fledged intellectual and free thinker. Her remarkable writing—like a man’s, in fact—appalled many men who dominated America’s literary circles. But she had her male admirers too, and one, a newspaper editor named Horace Greeley, hired her to send dispatches— letters—from Europe as she witnessed the Italian revolution in 1847. In the process, Fuller found love and had a child with an Italian count. All three perished when their ship sank just offshore as they returned to the United States.
Margaret Fuller, a philosopher and woman of letters, was probably America’s first woman war correspondent. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-47039
World traveler Elizabeth Cochrane, “Nellie Bly,” was heralded as a stunt reporter for the New York World. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-59924
There were others. During the Civil War, a Southern woman known to the world only as “Joan” left her home to be near her son, a Confederate soldier in Virginia. To support herself, Joan wrote for the Charleston Courier, her pen name a protection because well-bred ladies weren’t supposed to dirty themselves with work. In the North, Jane Swisshelm owned her own newspaper in Minnesota before the Civil War and was said to have reported on events as she nursed Union soldiers near Washington, DC.
Not exactly a war correspondent but a globetrotter nonetheless, Nellie Bly famously circled the world in seventy-two days in 1889, topping the fictitious record set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. And Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly dispatched Anna Benjamin to Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898, where she became the nation’s first female photojournalist.
For the better part of the 1800s, Victorian ideals confined middle- and upper-class American women to home, a sphere of domesticity where women ran their households and raised their children. However, late in the century, Victorian rules loosened, and some women stepped into the workplace in their high-button shoes. They filled traditional roles as teachers and nurses and also took jobs in factories or as clerks in offices and department stores. Women were a common sight at newspapers, although they were confined to working on the ever more popular “women’s pages.” The gritty job of reporting on crime, corruption, and general evil on the streets wasn’t thought to be ladylike. “Girl reporters,” as newspapermen called them, weren’t welcome to work at the city desk, the heart and soul of a daily newspaper.
Given that women rarely wrote hard news at home in the United States, it was even more of a reach for a young girl to dream of reporting from overseas. But as the 19th century rolled into the 20th, and as more and more girls got an education, a few began to think beyond the boundaries set for women just 20 years earlier. After all, there were fashion stories to be written from Paris and society news from London, and so a few young women reporters found their way to Europe. And when male reporters flocked overseas in 1917 to cover the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War, a handful of young women followed them to the front lines. All kinds of obstacles stood in their way, namely editors at home and army officials both at home and overseas. It was unthinkable that someone wearing a skirt had any business in a battle zone.
