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The first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters like Henrietta Stackpole, the lady-correspondent in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It chronicles the exploits of a neglected group of American women writers and uncovers an alternative reporter-novelist tradition that runs counter to the more familiar story of gritty realism generated in male-dominated newsrooms. Taking up actual newspaper accounts written by women, fictional portrayals of female journalists, and the work of reporters-turned-novelists such as Willa Cather and Djuna Barnes, Jean Marie Lutes finds in women's journalism a rich and complex source for modern American fiction. Female journalists, cast as both standard-bearers and scapegoats of an emergent mass culture, created fictions of themselves that far outlasted the fleeting news value of the stories they covered. Front-Page Girls revives the spectacular stories of now-forgotten newspaperwomen who were not afraid of becoming the news themselves--the defiant few who wrote for the city desks of mainstream newspapers and resisted the growing demand to fill women's columns with fashion news and household hints. It also examines, for the first time, how women's journalism shaped the path from news to novels for women writers.

Some of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century are autobiographical comics by women. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a pioneer of the autobiographical form, showing women's everyday lives, especially through the lens of the body. Phoebe Gloeckner places teenage sexuality at the center of her work, while Lynda Barry uses collage and the empty spaces between frames to capture the process of memory. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis experiments with visual witness to frame her personal and historical narrative, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home meticulously incorporates family documents by hand to re-present the author's past. These five cartoonists move the art of autobiography and graphic storytelling in new directions, particularly through the depiction of sex, gender, and lived experience. Hillary L. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The 20th century was a time of rapid expansion in media industries, as well as of accelerating demands for equality and recognition for women. While women's agency has typically been defined through the domestic sphere, the introduction of media into the home destabilised firm boundaries between public and private spheres. Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age demonstrates how women as media producers and audiences in three countries with public service broadcasters (UK, Canada and Australia) have contributed to changes in our understandings of public and private. Justine Lloyd offers a new way of understanding how tremendous changes in social definitions of gender roles played out in media forms worldwide during this period through the notion of 'intimate geographies'. Women's participation in media continues to be a key challenge to notions of the public sphere and the book concludes that profound changes initiated in the broadcast era are unfinished in the age of digital media. Lloyd therefore provides rich and valuable evidence of the dynamic relationship between media texts, producers and audiences that is relevant to contemporary debates about a growing gender 'apartheid' in a mediated culture.

Jan Whitt tells the stories of women who have been overlooked in journalism history, offering an important corrective to scholarship that narrowly focuses on the deeds of men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. She explores the lives of women reporters who achieved significant historical recognition, such as Ida Tarbell and Ida Wells-Barnett, as well as literary authors such as Joan Didion, Susan Orlean, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty, whose work blends influences from both journalism and literature. This study shows how numerous women broadened the editorial scope of newspapers and journals, transformed women's professional roles, used journalism as a training ground for major literary works, and led breakthroughs in lesbian and alternative presses.

Literary and popular culture has often focused its attention on women readers, particularly since early Victorian times. In Reading Women, an esteemed group of new and established scholars provide a close study of the evolution of the woman reader by examining a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media, including Antebellum scientific treatises, Victorian paintings, and Oprah Winfrey's televised book club, as well as the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Zora Neale Hurston. Attending especially to what, how, and why women read, Reading Women brings together a rich array of subjects that sheds light on the defining role the woman reader has played in the formation, not only of literary history, but of British and American culture. The contributors break new ground by focusing on the impact representations of women readers have had on understandings of literacy and certain reading practices, the development of books and print culture, and the categorization of texts into high and low cultural forms.

American women novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries registered a call for a new sexual freedom, Dale Bauer contends. By creating a lexicon of "sex expression," many authors explored sexuality as part of a discourse about women's needs rather than confining it to the realm of sentiments, where it had been relegated (if broached at all) by earlier writers. This new rhetoric of sexuality enabled critical conversations about who had sex, when in life they had it, and how it signified. Whether liberating or repressive, sexuality became a potential force for female agency in these women's novels, Bauer explains, insofar as these novelists seized the power of rhetoric to establish their intellectual authority. Thus, Bauer argues, they helped transform the traditional ideal of sexual purity into a new goal of sexual pleasure, defining in their fiction what intimacy between equals might become. Analyzing the work of canonical as well as popular writers--including Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Julia Peterkin, and Fannie Hurst, among others--Bauer demonstrates that the new sexualization of American culture was both material and rhetorical.

Containing nearly three dozen original essays penned by the nation's leading newspaper journalists, editors, and executives, this book advances current discussions regarding women in journalism. Surveying the past quarter century, the book's contributors highlight the unprecedented influence American women have had on the news industry, especially newspapers, and look ahead to the future for women in news. Acclaimed anthropologist and author Helen E. Fisher adds her perspective in examining the role of women across millennia and how the talents of women are changing social and economic life in this global age. Prominent female voices in journalism provide critical perspectives on the challenges women face in today's news organizations, such as connecting with diverse audiences, educating readers about international issues and cultures, maintaining credibility, negotiating media consolidation and corporate pressures, and overcoming the persistent barriers to professional advancement. A powerful and complex assessment of how women are transforming the news industry, The Edge of Change explores how the news industry might implement further reforms aimed at creating a more inclusive journalistic community. Contributors are Catalina Camia, Kathleen Carroll, Pamela J. Creedon, Paula Lynn Ellis, Helen E. Fisher, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Ellen Goodman, Sharon Grigsby, Carol Guzy, Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton, Cathy Henkel, Pamela J. Johnson, Jane Kirtley, Jan Leach, Caroline Little, Wanda S. Lloyd, Arlene Notoro Morgan, June O. Nicholson, Geneva Overholser, Marty Petty, Deb Price, Donna M. Reed, Sandra Mims Rowe, Peggy Simpson, Margaret Sullivan, Julia Wallace, and Keven Ann Willey.

Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood explores when, how, and why women were accepted as filmmakers in the 1910s and why, by the 1920s, those opportunities had disappeared. In looking at the early film industry as an industry--a place of work--Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but untangles the complicated relationship among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations. In the early 1910s, the film industry followed a theatrical model, fostering an egalitarian work culture in which everyone--male and female--helped behind the scenes in a variety of jobs. In this culture women thrived in powerful, creative roles, especially as writers, directors, and producers. By the end of that decade, however, mushrooming star salaries and skyrocketing movie budgets prompted the creation of the studio system. As the movie industry remade itself in the image of a modern American business, the masculinization of filmmaking took root. Mahar's study integrates feminist methodologies of examining the gendering of work with thorough historical scholarship of American industry and business culture. Tracing the transformation of the film industry into a legitimate "big business" of the 1920s, and explaining the fate of the female filmmaker during the silent era, Mahar demonstrates how industrial growth and change can unexpectedly open--and close--opportunities for women.

Essays examine the work of Beattie, Paley, Dillard, Redmon, Ozick, Tyler, Walker, Kingston, Morrison and Piercy, and explain how they have transformed literary traditions.

During a time when female reporters were almost always relegated to the society and women's pages of the newspapers, a few hundred notable women broke barriers and wrote their way onto the front pages of metropolitan newspapers. Front-Page Women Journalists, 1920-1950 takes a look at the lives and careers of women who worked successfully in this male-dominated profession.   Kathleen A. Cairns examines the roles women played in early-twentieth-century newspaper journalism and the influence they had on future generations of newspaperwomen through the examples of Agness Underwood, Charlotta Bass, and Ruth Finney. Each of these front-page women faced her own challenges, whether in regard to class, race, or gender. To get to the newsroom, and to stay there, they had to craft subtle, clever, and exhausting strategies. They had to be tough but compassionate, deferential yet independent, tenacious but also gracious. Most important, they could never openly challenge larger cultural assumptions about gender or suggest that they sought to advance the status of all women as well as themselves. In spite of these challenges, front-page women played a significant role in reshaping public perceptions about women's roles.   The public nature of journalism gave these women a large audience and a prominent stage on which to act out new professional identities. Their audience witnessed them traipsing through war zones, debating politics, and gaining scoops on high-profile criminal cases. The women viewed themselves as path-breakers, although they rarely openly acknowledged it. Between the lines, however, they suggested that they understood how important their success was to future generations of women. They quietly mentored other young female reporters, paved the way for the eventual admission of women into the all-male press clubs, and opened up more career opportunities for women.