Peggy Scott, the African American aspiring journalist in Julian Fellowes’s 2022 HBO series The Gilded Age, is a particularly striking example of late nineteenth-century newspaperwomen. As a Black woman, she stands out from the many white fictional journalists created during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. However, she also offers a contemporary retelling of a common story found in both fictional and nonfictional narratives of the period: the working woman’s search for a place of comfort and safety, a “home” within the male-created and male-dominated physical public sphere. Using fiction by Henry James and Elizabeth Jordan and nonfiction works by and about Ida B. Wells, Sui Sin Far, and others, this article argues that female journalist narratives written during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era stress the importance of a “homeplace” (a term coined in 1990 by bell hooks) within physical public spaces and the use of camaraderie in achieving it.Footnote 1 Female journalists in these works encounter the restriction of their physical, social, and discursive movement within traditionally masculine spaces yet they try to continue working and living with ease.
These works of fiction about white characters and nonfiction narratives of racially marginalized female journalists highlight the wide-reaching concern with the restrictions they encountered in the public sphere; socially restricted movement affects all of these figures because of their gender, while the nonfiction narratives also represent racialized dangers within white spaces. These dangers made creating a “homeplace” outside mainstream society a priority for women of color that is largely absent from white-focused works. Additionally, putting extant fiction alongside nonfiction narratives allows us to reconsider how we study the newspaperwoman. These narratives are primarily stories, rather than historical documents, meaning that they represent the figure of the female journalist and her physical movement.Footnote 2 This article shows what can be learned about social or cultural perceptions of the newspaperwoman’s position by exploring how she is depicted in narratives by herself and those around her.
In the contemporary The Gilded Age, for example, Peggy Scott enters two radically different newspaper spaces. Though she expects a prompt meeting with the Christian Advocate’s white, male editor, this aspiring Black writer is forced to wait in the office’s small front room while several white male would-be writers are attended and the staff, surprised by her race, develops a strategy to deal with her.Footnote 3 It is only when she is the last one in the room that she is allowed to be centered within this physical public space.Footnote 4 This does not mean, however, that she is made to feel at home in the editor’s office; she is still an outsider, an Other whose work he will publish if he can control the situation. The editor tells her to change the race of her story’s main character from Black to white and to conceal her own identity as the Advocate’s newest author. Peggy rejects the offer, refusing to hide her Blackness in print when she knows very well that it is impossible for her to do so in the rest of her life. This latter fact is fresh in her mind because, earlier in the episode, she and her father were forced to stop their conversation and wordlessly step aside for a white couple walking down the sidewalk of the wealthy and white neighborhood where Peggy lives. Their physical and discursive space is forcibly shifted to make way for dominating whiteness.
By refusing to compromise her identity, Peggy rejects her position within a white, male-dominated public space and finds a place within the New York Age and its offices instead. Under the editorship of the real T. Thomas Fortune, the Black-owned Age is less prestigious and economically stable than the well-established and mainstream Advocate, but it feels more welcoming, like a home away from home. When Peggy enters this one-room endeavor, she finds an exclusively male staff working in a space as equals, with Fortune even handling the large manual press at the center of the office. Peggy is still the only woman, but whereas the Advocate provided no real advocate in its office, Fortune becomes Peggy’s champion immediately by agreeing to publish her story with its original Black protagonist and even offering her a reporting assignment. Peggy has found a supportive and companionate homeplace in which she can thrive, where she does not have to cede to dominant social powers and figures, and from which she can report on whatever serious or frivolous subjects she likes.
The advent of Yellow Journalism in the United States (and its British New Journalism equivalent) brought “a lightness of tone, an emphasis on the personal and the ‘sensation,’ and reliance on gimmicks,” and an “emphasis on sensation stories, manipulated to bolster circulation and appeal to a mass audience that thrives on such exciting and dramatic fare.”Footnote 5 Women had long been part of journalism, but the field’s shifts and adjacent cultural movements accelerated women’s involvement at the end of the nineteenth century, though they remained a minority in the field.Footnote 6 Ishbel Ross describes women’s new position as being “launched reluctantly” by editors who suddenly saw female readers as an untapped market only interested in the private sphere, fashion, society, and so forth, that is “women’s topics” beyond the “serious” news or “masculine” features in the rest of the paper.Footnote 7 To fill this manufactured editorial gap, editors hired women to supplement their all-male staffs; this work, while limiting, allowed more women to join male journalists in an economically and socially precarious (but independent) life that embraced many of the ideals of the New Woman and other working women figures.Footnote 8 The New Woman was an enigmatic figure on both sides of the Atlantic, the cause of much fear and excitement surrounding women’s opportunities and (most importantly in this study) physical movement in the public sphere during a period of new opportunities and discursive scrutiny.Footnote 9
In his foundational work of human geography, Yi-Fu Tuan defines the physical world as made up of “undifferentiated space” that only “becomes place” when someone feels a connection to it and “endow[s] it with value.”Footnote 10 In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, spaces like the newsroom or city street were endowed by society with value as male-built and -dominated places that women were either encouraged to avoid or to which they were denied access entirely. In this way, Leslie Kern notes, “the metaphorical notion of ‘separate spheres’” was reinforced, subjugating women “through an actual, material geography of exclusion” throughout the physical public sphere.Footnote 11 While this exclusion was never total—women always moved beyond the private sphere, for both pleasure and work—the mainstream conception of separate spheres began to slowly change as more middle-class and educated white women entered “male spaces” in the public sphere for work, navigating a network of sites that held negative and restrictive gendered meaning as the societal goal of limiting women’s movement persisted.
This antagonistic relationship between women and physical space can best be described as “social gerrymandering.” In a political context, gerrymandering organizes citizens in physical districts built to dilute or overrepresent a certain group’s electoral power in order to prolong or increase the power of dominant political forces. Most commonly used in the United States to limit the effects of nonwhite voters and opposing political parties, district borders are drawn to advantage those drawing them; if a party holds the pen, their interests supersede equitable representation. It was in her study of Onieda County, New York, that Mary Ryan first described the nineteenth-century “social geography of gender” as “a clever piece of social machinery” that “function[ed] smoothly to meet social needs and guarantee social order,” even though socially prescribed positions were not accepted by everyone.Footnote 12 I go a step further by adopting Mary Schriber’s claim that the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere was gerrymandered,” applying a term with origins in American politics to describe the creation of imaginary geographic and social borders as a means of reinforcing the cultural conception of separate gendered spheres.Footnote 13 Just as a political machine “smoothly” increases its power and preferred social (or political) order through gerrymandering voters, a white heteropatriarchal system of power maintains control by imposing physical, social, and discursive restrictions on those who lack power as a result of their race, gender, and class. It is a “geography of exclusion” that, in part, upholds “male power and privilege” by creating supposedly rigid borders.Footnote 14
These boundaries, however, were neither permanent nor persistently successful in limiting women’s movement into “masculine” spaces; instead, women and their supporters crossed the borders to make a place for themselves in these spaces or pushed the borders into new shapes. Both practices, I argue, can be called “redistricting.” This is, of course, another established political term, and I use it in a similar way: the ideal solution to gerrymandering that creates more equitable representation or, in this social context, freer movement regardless of gender.Footnote 15 However, where political redistricting is a regular practice that may result in new gerrymanders, social redistricting is a less formal practice. Thus, a woman merely occupying a desk in the male-dominated newsroom is aiding in the space being reconceived as one not exclusive to men, “reshaping” the public sphere’s borders even as they face opposition from dominant forces bent on retaining the social gerrymander or redistricting women back out of the public. Thus, the often-unstated goal of real and fictional female journalists of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was to find a place within this antagonistic physical space that they could endow with a positive meaning and from which they could redistrict more of the public sphere through their economic, social, and literary agency. Their place-making endeavored to answer a question posed by Tuan and emphasized by their author: “What does it mean to be in command of space, to feel at home in it?”Footnote 16
While female journalists are not unique among women seeking work within the physical public sphere during this period, they stand out from others laboring in public—such as the shop employee, teacher, actor, or sex worker—because their mode of engaging with the lives of others puts them both in competition with and working alongside men. They pushed into spaces previously denied them and pursued stories and a redistricted “home” away from home, only to encounter renewed efforts to gerrymander parts of the physical world. “Geography,” Hortense Spillers explains, “is not a divine gift” but is rather a social invention that can restrict or free women’s movement.Footnote 17 As Nancy Fraser notes, the idea of separate spheres “rests on a class- and gender-,” and I would add race-, “-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public.”Footnote 18 In this way, middle- and upper-class white men served as self-appointed arbiters of place and the force against which marginalized groups had to push to develop their “home.”
These intersecting systems of oppression and opportunity cause women to interact with physical space in a variety of ways. Regardless of how they confronted biases, women did form something like what hooks calls the “homeplace,” a term that characterizes Black women’s creation of a place away from the mainstream “culture of white supremacy” and in which all Black people can “grow and develop, to nurture [their] spirits” through a command of the physical and social space they occupy.Footnote 19 It is a rejection of the white, male society (which antagonizes, commodifies, and criminalizes Black people and their bodies) in favor of a place built by and for themselves. Fraser describes something similar in how marginalized groups “have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics” or “subaltern counterpublics” in opposition to the mainstream.Footnote 20 A vision of home and place beyond mainstream public spaces can be applied to other women of color, immigrant women, and those working for non-English-language newspapers and periodicals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Furthermore, an understanding of all female journalists’ search for “home,” as well as narratives about this search (which often deploy the image of home) adds nuance to an account of these figures’ movement in the physical public sphere.
Male Assistance in the Narratives of White Women
Mary Schriber argues that efforts to “corral” white women into a separate private sphere during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era were directly informed by a fear of “threatening ethnic excess” or “undesirable pluralism” in physical public spaces, a belief in the racialized Other’s supposed danger.Footnote 21 Women of color and working-class white women were also included in the conception of “undesirable pluralism,” meaning their position in the physical public sphere was at best treated as a given, because they were perceived as working service roles within it, and at worst regarded as a threat to white and male supremacy that must be stopped. By creating this threat of ethnic evil, “American identity” became defined as white and middle-class, and mainstream forces worked to codify the white feminine identity as the ideal.Footnote 22 The implicitly and explicitly racist, xenophobic, and sexist roots of this practice are obvious in fiction that advocates for any woman’s gerrymander out of the physical public sphere. However, female journalist fiction that celebrates engagement in public spaces is just as concerned with the position of white women, their safety, and their disruption of white, bourgeois social norms. Each white female character is herself “an unwelcome ‘outsider’” who nevertheless finds (with the help of a supportive community) a place within the physical public sphere despite social gerrymandering meant to entrench masculine power structures.Footnote 23
For hooks, home-making is “a radically subversive political gesture,” a celebration of Black people’s humanity and belonging in the face of a white supremacist society.Footnote 24 The female journalist characters in the period’s fiction—all of them white, most of them writers for mainstream newspapers and magazines—are of course part of and benefit from institutionalized racism. Instead of seeking new spaces in which they can exist, these characters (and their historical counterparts) perform a much less subversive gesture of homemaking within the mainstream physical public sphere. For example, Ishbel Ross begins her study of the American newspaperwoman with the story of Sally Joy, a woman whose experience in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates this effort to redistrict or create a homeplace within the male-dominated newsroom: leaving “the plush security of her home in Vermont,” Joy secured a job at the Boston Post, where “it was only a matter of weeks until the men in the office were lining the floor with papers to keep her white satin ball gown from picking up the dust.” Ross insists, however, that Joy “did not need this newsprint carpet laid for her ambitious feet. It merely set the key for the befuddled dismay with which the normal newspaper man regard[ed] the unwelcome sight of a woman in the city room.”Footnote 25 Joy “could not persuade her colleagues that she was anything but a helpless female,” and the “indignation about having a ‘woman on the sheet’” made “the youth assigned to escort her to all functions beginning after seven o’clock … the butt of the staff.”Footnote 26 While confused and distressed by the presence of a woman, Joy’s exclusively male coworkers did not reject her presence through a gendered gerrymander, no matter how they felt about this “helpless female.” Instead, they made “their” physical and “masculine” public place somewhere that she could do her work, albeit through decidedly gendered accommodation. They tried to replicate “the plush security of her home in Vermont” by forming a relatively inclusive but still tradition-minded community because they recognized a mutual goal of remaining in the public sphere. Joy wanted “to be treated like a man,” but her male coworkers could only envision her remaining in the public, masculine newsroom by establishing a safe place for a woman within it, thus reinforcing something of the “separate spheres” myth.
Moving beyond the city room—a space that while public and male-dominated nevertheless offered “intellectual freedom” and “relative privacy”—and into the outside world remains a necessity for most reporters.Footnote 27 During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, such movement by women resulted in increased scrutiny that threatened their ability to continue working. This was especially the case with the “stunt girls” who performed daring, dangerous, and often scandalous acts for their articles. Pioneered by Nellie Bly with her New York World undercover exposé of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in 1887, Yellow Journalism thrived on the shock of “respectable” white women doing things and going places society dictated they should not. The disruption of gerrymandered physical spaces was the center of each story, and the fears generated by these acts only increased when American women went a step further, taking advantage of technological advancements to travel without a man by their side. As women moved in domestic and international public spaces (thus redistricting them), companionship and camaraderie were key to lessening undue attention and avoiding serious ramifications. International travel in particular brought new forms of “ethnic excess” because white women were leaving their homeland to explore the world. Doing so “reiterate[d] on a global scale the movement of women into public spaces at home” and further heightened the social need for “appropriate” movement and “appropriate” chaperones. Judith Adler suggests that “space and time” and “the traveler’s own body as it moves through both” are “the baseline elements of all travel performance,” meaning travel correspondents put their bodies on the line to bring “meaning” to their physical movement through their writing or “performance.”Footnote 28 Female journalists moving in the physical public sphere had to justify their position more than their male counterparts, and such justifications often came through stunt journalism and travel writing; both genres foregrounded the spectacle or performance of movement but had to be negotiated through a woman’s class or the presence of a chaperone, or a “performance” of respectability.
The best example of this balancing act in fiction is Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881, 1908).Footnote 29 Henrietta first made her career writing for the New York Interviewer before trying her hand at correspondence in Europe.Footnote 30 Her situation as a young, unmarried, middle-class white woman is socially and economically precarious, even more so than Isabel Archer’s, the novel’s protagonist and Henrietta’s fellow New Woman. Unlike Isabel, who has a wealthy aunt shuttling her around the Continent, if Henrietta is going to afford to travel, she must write about the rich people she meets. However, if she is to retain access to these upper-class social circles, she cannot push against their physical gerrymander too hard. Instead, she must temper her physical movement by accepting companionship and limiting her freedom to a performance of willing, gendered subservience in a world she wants to call “home.” Henrietta confronts gendered gerrymandering three times in the novel and is aided in each by a white man whom society allows to move freely in the physical public sphere. First, Isabel’s cousin “burst[s] into a fit of laughter” at the idea of Henrietta and Isabel traveling alone to London from the countryside.Footnote 31 He insists that he join them, ostensibly as a companion but really to give their movement an air of permissibility. Later, an American acquaintance offers to escort Henrietta on a train across Europe when she announces her intention of traveling alone. This man believes it “would be an insult to an unprotected woman” if he shirked “his duty to put himself out for her”—no matter how much he loathes the idea of being alone with her—and Henrietta plays the damsel in distress when she accepts the offer with an exaggerated “Well, Mr. Goodwood, I should hope so!”Footnote 32 Mr. Bantling, on the other hand, jumps at the chance to walk with Henrietta through London’s streets in search of a hansom. Even in this first meeting, the two relish the opportunity to move together within the physical public sphere, kicking off the pair’s frequent, extended international travel together that ultimately leads to their engagement.
Even with his ulterior romantic motives, Bantling and the other men recognize that the physical public sphere has been gerrymandered by their society to keep women like Henrietta (not to mention women who are further socially marginalized) from moving too freely. These men support her movement by offering public companionship because they know what those around them expect. Henrietta’s access to the upper classes for her public letters is dependent on her acquiescing to expectations of how women in her position were to move. She welcomes her male chaperones (begrudgingly, in the case of the first two) because she is also aware of the part everyone plays in the “separate spheres” social charade. As even Sally Joy’s experience shows, having a chaperone is a female journalist’s easiest way to fight against a social gerrymander and to make the whole world her homeplace of comfort and professional success. James embraces this idea, and his depiction of Henrietta repeatedly hitting the same wall mocks the assumption that this working woman who is perfectly capable of traveling alone must acquiesce to restrictive social forces. Supportive male companions offer a way to game the system so that her travel can be relatively free, even as it appears restricted and protected by masculine power and presence.Footnote 33
Camaraderie in the Fictional Narratives of Elizabeth Jordan
While patriarchal forces could be a great help in offering women freedom of movement, they also redistricted physical spaces through tweaking an existent gerrymander, rather than breaking it entirely. Camaraderie among white women fighting a gendered, gerrymandered society brought about a truer, deeper form of support. As Leslie Kern notes, “[f]riendships with other women” in particular “shape the ways that women engage with the city itself.”Footnote 34 Journalist and fiction writer Elizabeth Jordan’s Tales of the City Room (1898) depicts the limited usefulness of male assistance, the unique ways newspaperwomen could support each other during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the dangers they could face when pursuing a sense of home and belonging within antagonistic spaces without that support. Tales is a collection of ten interconnected short stories, each featuring at least one female journalist, most of whom work at the same New York newspaper. However, none appear more frequently than Jordan’s stand-in, Ruth Herrick, whom Jordan uses to tell fictionalized versions of her own journalistic experiences traveling across the city and country. While Jordan was friendly with other women in her professional and personal lives, Ruth is the center of a group of female journalists, helping them redistrict the public sphere for their work and pleasure.Footnote 35 In this way, Jordan manipulates her memories to show both a realistic version of what women experience trying to find a place within the masculine public sphere and an idealized version of what strong camaraderie between newspaperwomen can mean for their shared and individual success.
In “At the Close of the Second Day,” Ruth comes to the rescue of Virginia, the newspaperwoman protagonist, but not before that woman receives companionship from a mysterious man. Destitute after her freelance opportunities have dried up, Virginia decides that the only solution is to drown herself. On her way to the river, she walks the streets of Manhattan alone and passes a woman “clad in a shabby black gown” (a specter of the poverty Virginia can look forward to, if she does not die), who “was looking at her sympathetically.”Footnote 36 The woman sees Virginia’s pain, but her own position means she cannot offer the young woman tangible assistance, only an understanding glance. This woman notices Virginia when, weak from hunger, the latter “staggered a trifle and … was now standing still” on the sidewalk, thus making a spectacle: a young, well-dressed white woman stopping the flow of pedestrian traffic. Virginia catches the attention of a young “erect military figure” in “an immaculate silk hat” who saw something in her face which “looked very much as [he] felt.”Footnote 37 Sensing a similar loneliness and possessing the ability to do something about it, her new gentleman friend tries to shield Virginia from judgment and gerrymandering by escorting her to dinner. To the onlooker, he plays his new role so well that there is little amiss about the pair. Even when they get physically close, the man (who is never named) carefully couches their actions in respectability: “holding a glass to her lips” as “the waiter stood by with water,” Virginia’s escort announces, “It’s the heat …She’s a little overcome by it. She has been out in the sun too long.”Footnote 38 Like Henrietta’s male companions in The Portrait of a Lady, by treating their intimacy as normal, Virginia’s “escort” opens the physical public world to her once again, helping her find a place of comfort for the first time since leaving her apartment.
In the restaurant, the man puts Virginia “in a cosey [sic] corner by the window, where the summer breeze blew upon her, laden with the perfume of the mignonette that blossomed on the window-sill. She was glad to see her favorite flower here. It seemed a happy omen, a home sanction on a course erratic but blameless.”Footnote 39 Used with relative frequency at the turn of the century, “home sanction” often referred to approval by or in a home (as in education) or in a colonial context (as in Britain giving “home rule” powers to India). Virginia sees her favorite flower in the public sphere as the universe approving of her decision to eat with this male stranger, returning some kind of “home rule” to this white woman’s life controlled by capitalism and gendered expectations. Her actions may be “erratic,” but the flowers make her feel that she is not to blame for either what has come before (which is the fault of the economy) or for the “conventionally” wrong decision she made out of desperation.Footnote 40 The window of flowers also mirrors the story’s beginning when Virginia looks out from her “little room,” that “had come to seem like home,” toward a neighbor’s “riot of blooming sweet peas, scarlet geraniums, and sturdy vines,” with buzzing bees adding “the final touch to the homely charm of the place.”Footnote 41 Virginia’s modest apartment and the garden it overlooks provided a place of comfort and safety within the traditionally feminine private sphere where she could “grow and develop, to nurture [her] spirits.”Footnote 42 She is forced to leave this safe place and venture into the physical public sphere, a place once open to her but which now grows more and more antagonistic. It is only when the male stranger takes the lead that Virginia’s spirits are temporarily nurtured again, the flowers reminding her of the comfort she had before in both her home and in public. The problem, of course, is that Virginia is sitting by a restaurant’s open window where the wind can envelop her with the flowers’ scent but which can also allow passersby to look at her and eavesdrop on her conversation. Even with the man by her side, she is still not safe from public scrutiny.
However, she risks further attention when the gentleman suggests “a pleasant drive through Central Park and around Claremont” after dinner.Footnote 43 Such a carriage ride would keep Virginia under his protection, but it would also keep her in view of the world without her control. Virginia is uncomfortable with this idea and feels, somewhat sadly, that their relationship’s “warrant had lapsed.” She makes her escape: “the next moment the pedestrians of Eleventh Street were confronted by the spectacle of a young lady, perfectly dressed, running like a deer along that quiet thoroughfare through the gathering darkness.”Footnote 44 Because of her harried state, even her clothes cannot help Virginia blend in; she may be in control of her movement, but she is more of a spectacle than if she had kept her chaperone. By being out alone as night approaches and drawing attention to herself, Virginia embodies the worst ideas of what the New Woman could be: a supposedly respectable woman disrupting gerrymandered spaces and ideals with her “manic” or “vulgar” modernity.
Luckily for her, Virginia all but runs into Ruth Herrick. Ever the symbol of independent movement, Ruth walks confidently through the darkening streets alone after her solo travel beyond the city, not caring what onlookers may think. She takes Virginia to her own apartment and puts the young woman in “a big chair near a window overlooking the ivy-colored Moorish court,” yet another space of floral comfort, but Ruth’s apartment is not described in any more of the same “home” language as Virginia’s or the restaurant.Footnote 45 Unlike the temporary home-like safety offered by the unnamed man, Ruth escorting Virginia through the streets, giving her a place to stay, and promising to put in a good word at her own paper provide a lasting camaraderie that will keep Virginia in the physical public sphere for some time.
The protagonist of “Miss Van Dyke’s Best Story” has her time in the physical public sphere cut short because she lacks a Ruth Herrick in her life, and the camaraderie she receives from male coworkers is deeply rooted in traditional gender roles. Notably, this is the only story in Tales to not feature Ruth or any of her coworkers: Van Dyke does not work for their newspaper and is not part of their supportive social circle. She only has male friends, and this leads to her downfall. Among the first things the narrator says about Van Dyke is that her male coworkers “waste a great deal of their time at her desk telling her about their wives or sweethearts and their personal affairs,” seeking “motherly advice” and sisterly comfort.Footnote 46 Her desk is a familial and feminine place in the masculine newsroom; it is rhetorically but not physically set off from the men’s desks. While it is a welcoming place for them, the men would never do as Ruth Herrick’s protégé does in “Mrs. Ogilvie’s Local Color,” which opens with the titular character “leaning on Miss Herrick’s desk in the city room.”Footnote 47 These women are not alone in this “masculine” space. They make it a comfortable place for women to work to such a degree that they take up physical space in others’ “homeplaces” in ways Van Dyke’s male coworkers would not dare.
Through her work covering traditionally feminine topics and her personal relationships with male coworkers, Van Dyke has crafted a place filled by “the middle-class virtues that the office was supposed to exude,” even happily accepting offers by the men to escort her home, as Sally Joy does when she works late.Footnote 48 Fearing her genteel copy will fall out of favor with the new editor who demands more sensationalist Yellow Journalism, Van Dyke offers to “do the Tenderloin” on election night, “to describe its celebration of Tammany’s victory from a woman’s point of view.”Footnote 49 She is joined by a male chaperone on the assignment but she “vividly and strongly” writes about this seedy part of Manhattan’s celebrations alone.Footnote 50 Van Dyke’s trip is not meant to redistrict the Tenderloin, to make her presence there appropriate to her society; instead, Van Dyke tells a sensationalist story, playing into the fact that this “dangerous” and “corrupt” place is (in her and wider society’s eyes, correctly) gerrymandered to keep her out. This “best story” is a shock to Van Dyke’s coworkers and readers because it is stunt journalism written by a respectable, traditional white woman from the hub of New York vice.
Her coworkers—including the only other woman named in the story, Masters—however, see the article as proof that Van Dyke has hidden a “masculine” self under a traditionally “feminine” exterior and immediately treat her differently. First, Van Dyke is forced to walk “alone through the gray streets” after finishing her article because “it had been taken for granted that a young woman who had done an election night special” could get home on her own, implying that she now has the “right” to the public world but ignoring the insistence that she have a chaperone for that very assignment just hours before.Footnote 51 Despite these efforts, Van Dyke, the image of traditional white femininity in the office, is lumped in with those from the Tenderloin, people racially, ethnically, and economically marginalized by her community; she is now one of the masses “allowed” in the physical public sphere without question.
After Van Dyke’s article is a success, Masters decides to make her coworker “feel at home.”Footnote 52 In short order, Van Dyke’s desk is filled with “bottles, glasses, cigarette stumps, and other reminders of her recent experience” that she quickly throws away with distress.Footnote 53 Her movement into the “dangerous” city has brought a change in what had once been a homeplace (both the office and her desk) where she felt safe and, importantly, feminine. Through Masters’s interpretation of “at home,” Van Dyke has become one of the boys, treated “with a good-natured camaraderie, in which, however, the deference of the old days was wholly lacking.”Footnote 54 Her coworkers deny her the support offered to Virginia by the gentleman and Ruth. Instead, they embrace a “masculine” companionship that she does not want. What was once the “home-like, efficient, and clean” embodiment of “middle-class virtues” is now a desk (and by extension, a job and a position in the physical public sphere) that is no longer comfortable nor really “hers” because her coworkers suddenly view her as neither “middle-class” nor feminine.Footnote 55 They have invaded and redistricted her space within the physical public sphere without Van Dyke’s permission; she has not mapped her desk as open to the company of certain others, as Ruth and Mrs. Ogilvie did, and she is unable to defend its borders from redecoration. The city room desk is surrounded by real and imagined borders, and if they are disrespected, men may be able to exert dominance once again and redistrict or gerrymander a woman into a social sphere she hoped to reject.
Van Dyke’s uncharacteristic movement cost her control and happiness in a feminine place within the masculine office space: she feels “chained here” with no chance of escape because economic precarity forces her to keep doing a job that brings her pain.Footnote 56 When a male friend, Matthews, proposes marriage as a means of escaping her economic and physical discomfort, Van Dyke sees it as her only way out without become destitute. Matthews is described during his proposal as a “stalwart form” literally between Van Dyke “and the desks near hers” like “a human bulwark between her and the world,” rather than a chaperone to keep her within it.Footnote 57 In moving from the abstract “home” of the public sphere to the literal gerrymandered and feminine private sphere—the narrator offers the reminder that “a woman’s place is in a home!”—Van Dyke accepts an inversion of Virginia’s home sanction: a sanctioned way to return home without shame for giving up her small homeplace in the public sphere.Footnote 58
It would be fair to read this ending as Jordan advocating for a return to gendered, gerrymandered “normalcy.” However, Monica Petrilli offers a more nuanced and more convincing interpretation: “Perhaps Miss Van Dyke would not have given up so easily if she had received support from her female colleagues,” or from, I would add, any of the men.Footnote 59 Van Dyke’s retreat to the private sphere occurs because the newsroom’s physical public space has become too hostile for one woman to handle alone; her desk has been desecrated, her movement on the streets is unchaperoned, and she is entirely without female companionship (something most of the women in Jordan’s collection have in abundance). The one male friend who still sees something “feminine” in her wants to help, but he sees quitting, rather than joining forces to redistrict the physical public sphere, as the answer to her hostile work environment. With Matthews not supporting her pursuits in the public sphere, it is no surprise that Van Dyke accepts his suggestion of separate spheres discourse and chooses the literal home. With this cautionary tale as her collection’s conclusion, Jordan argues that the white working woman is doomed to retreat to the physical private sphere if she is forced to go it alone, offering the inverse of both her previous stories and the limited camaraderie seen in James and others.
The Nonfiction Narratives of Marginalized Women
There are no known extant examples of American fiction about female journalists working for nonwhite, non-English language, or immigrant newspapers and periodicals written during this period. This does not mean, however, that such fiction did not exist, merely that, as Frances Smith Foster writes of “devalued groups” and their writing, “so much has already been lost, gone astray, or been stolen that complete restoration is impossible.”Footnote 60 While fictional depictions of “devalued” female journalists (the Peggy Scotts of the nineteenth century) are missing, scholars of these women can draw on nonfiction narratives to understand the social position of these women within the physical and discursive public spheres. I use these texts primarily not as historical documents but instead as narratives that, like fiction about female journalists, reveal a set of attitudes and tropes about female journalists and their attempts to redistrict public space. When white women’s fiction is compared with nonfiction centering marginalized women’s experiences, a distinct divide is revealed between what can be redistricted and what can be called a success in the fight against gendered (and racialized) gerrymandering. Specifically, the latter narratives depict an inability to redistrict white spaces, something the contemporary The Gilded Age also shows. Instead, when they represent success, marginalized women’s narratives embody hooks’s vision of homeplace: building a place or counter public beyond the white mainstream in service of a particular subaltern or marginalized group.Footnote 61 Where white newspaperwomen in fiction are shown making inroads within the gerrymandered and masculine physical public sphere, the true stories of other women highlight both the continued racist gerrymander of physical space and the turn toward other spaces and communities where these women can find a place to call their own.
In her posthumously published autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1970), Ida B. Wells devotes chapter after chapter to describing her influence in Black Memphis journalism, particularly her role in the aftermath of the lynching of three prominent Black men that led to, among other things, the burning of her newspaper’s office by a white, male mob and her international fame for exposing anti-Black violence. Even though hostile forces ultimately failed to publicly silence Wells, they nevertheless easily acted with impunity and made her ability to continue working within Memphis untenable. Rather than sink into a racial and gendered gerrymander, Wells moved to New York, a more supportive physical public place, and continued her work dismantling racist systems.
This was not, however, Wells’s first direct encounter with the hand of mainstream society’s gerrymander. Despite arguably being the inciting incident that “marked the beginning of her journalism career,” Wells describes her fight against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company, from inciting incident to final verdict, in a mere three pages.Footnote 62 When the conductor insists she move from the ladies’ car to the smoker, Wells refuses and bites his hand when he tries to remove her before, she writes, “I braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back … He went forward and got the baggage-man and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out. They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car,” who “continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand.”Footnote 63 In this brief retelling, Wells focuses on her sense of physical un-belonging: her briefly successful attempt to keep her physical position; the eventual domination of white, masculine forces; and the veneration of the latter’s “bravery” by those around them.
This is unsurprising for two reasons. First, while she initially won her lawsuit, the Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately ruled against her, meaning this “crusade for justice” was a failure. Second, Wells’s attempt to physically fight back is a manifestation of African Americans’ daily attempts to redistrict public spaces for their use, something her readers would recognize and celebrate. Wells was forcefully gerrymandered out of the train’s physical public space, while the white people “allowed” in it celebrated her ejection. In female journalist fiction of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, a white newspaperwoman may be kicked out of or refused entry into a male space, but she would never experience such literal manhandling, let alone a white crowd cheering her removal. As Jean Lutes explains, Wells’s experience on the train emblematizes the unique gerrymandering affecting women beyond the white bourgeois: They were only accepted as nonthreatening forces within the physical public sphere if they served as laborers.Footnote 64 Any movement alongside middle- or upper-class white women (or as equals to white men) was seen as a serious threat to the social status quo.
Jovita Idar posed just such a threat and faced both physical and professional dangers as a direct result. In 1914, Idar worked for El Progreso, a Spanish-language newspaper in Laredo, Texas. The El Progreso office served as an important physical space for Idar, a homeplace built by and for the Spanish-speaking population and in which she and other writers could exert authority. By showing its strength, however, the office was exposed as the physical embodiment of the newspaper’s threat to the white or Anglo status quo. When an editorial (not written by Idar) criticized President Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican border policies, white Texas Rangers attempted to shut the paper down by destroying its office. As Idar’s brother, Aquilino Idar, later recalled,
But it so happened that my sister was standing at the door [of the office] … and says, “Where are you going?” [A Ranger] says, “Want to go inside. Would you please step aside?” And my sister says, “No, you have to come through this door, and I’m standing here, and you cannot … come in here because it’s against the law. If a woman stands at the door, you can’t go in.”Footnote 65
Unlike Wells, Idar was spared physical attack as she fought against white, masculine forces, but when she was not at the doorway the next morning, the Rangers took the opportunity to destroy El Progreso’s operation. Idar’s experience echoes Wells’s newspaper office being burned down in retaliation for her multipronged response to the lynchings. In both cases, destroying the office was meant to destroy the activism occurring within it; however, neither incident stopped the women from continuing their crusades.
The retelling by Idar’s brother highlights both the danger of dominant forces retaliating against the homeplaces of marginalized communities and the power of gendered and racial expectations. Although Idar is the Chicana representative of the paper that the Anglo Rangers wanted to stop publishing, cultural and legal expectations that women be respected saved her from physical mistreatment. Aquilino Idar celebrates his sister’s success in remembering the law and delaying El Progresso’s destruction, using the legal tools of the state against those representing it to temporarily gerrymander the Rangers out of her homeplace.
With racist antagonism gerrymandering people of color out of spaces endowed with a “value” of whiteness, physical and discursive homeplaces separate from mainstream publications developed so that marginalized voices were prioritized; moving beyond these homeplaces or gerrymandering white forces out of them carried significant risks. Afifa Karam voiced such concerns in editorials for the Arabic-language al-Hoda when she wrote about “women’s work outside the home and in particular the role of women peddlers,” arguing that men should join these women in their work if the former were so concerned with women’s reputation and physical safety beyond the domestic private sphere.Footnote 66 Karam was herself not a peddler, but as a writer and member of the Arabic-speaking American upper classes, she still understood the importance of both social position and free movement, just like Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady. The greatest difference, however, is that Middle Eastern women peddlers were at even greater risk of ruin or physical attack if they entered the wrong white public space on their own.
It was this concern about entering the wrong space, Lutes argues, that dissuaded most nonwhite newspaperwomen from engaging in stunt journalism; one notable exception is Victoria Earle Matthews, an African American journalist who entered segregated spaces by passing for white to report on the discrimination she faced.Footnote 67 To pass for the purpose of writing about the experience is a risk; to pass for the purpose of working in mainstream spaces was even riskier. Edith Eaton chose the latter route, sometimes hiding her maternal Chinese ancestry in certain white spaces and jobs, but also regularly writing under the Americanized Cantonese name Sui Sin Far to advocate for her fellow immigrants. Professional and physical opportunities were fairly plentiful because she could be at home in both mainstream and marginalized physical spaces; but at times, Eaton was comfortable in neither, experiencing social gerrymandering at every turn, an issue central to her mixed-race identity and her short memoir, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909). Her journalism and fiction, particularly as Sui Sin Far, embraced racial liminality—belonging simultaneously in both and neither space—to bridge the gap between communities and advocate for the rights of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in mainstream outlets.
Throughout “Leaves” in particular, Eaton documents serious threats of physical harm, social ruin, and general prejudice directed at the Chinese by white Americans and Canadians. These include the physical abuse she and her siblings received from white children, an acquaintance who hides her own mixed-race identity from her white fiancé because she fears desertion, and a white employer and others who use racist and derisive language toward a group of Chinese men. In this final anecdote, Eaton defiantly reveals her own Chinese heritage to the others, putting herself at the center of racist discourse to defend the men. While her boss apologizes for his “pure prejudice,” Eaton recognizes that “every person in the place will hear about” her being Chinese “the next day,” meaning the town will quickly redistrict their community to keep her out, a woman they had thought to be white.Footnote 68 Conversely, revealing her identity meant editors assumed she could move easily within Chinatowns and expand their reach, despite her barely speaking her “mother tongue” and those living in these communities reading her physically as white.Footnote 69 Her physical appearance meant Eaton was not seen immediately as a “threat” of “ethnic excess” to be feared by white society, but it also meant she passed so successfully that Chinese communities did see her as a white threat.Footnote 70 She could navigate white publishing spaces and advocate for the racially gerrymandered in ways other newspaperwomen of color could not, but that project entailed finding a way to navigate physical Chinese homeplaces first.
Aleski Huhta characterizes “migrant media” as “a forum for debates on and contestation of migrant visibility in the host society,” or the subaltern making themselves known to one another and to the dominant culture in their own words and language.Footnote 71 If extended to other marginalized or nonmainstream presses, a journalistic culture appears that created discursive and physical homeplaces in which oppressed communities developed a sense of self. As the narratives above show, the threat of gerrymandering was greater for marginalized women, but there was a chance to develop homeplace within the nonmainstream newsroom. Despite Lutes arguing that positive discourse surrounding African American newspaperwomen meant “that being a journalist was easier for black women than white women,” it is clear that, in addition to racist threats of gerrymandering, gendered threats like those white newspaperwomen faced could still come from within marginalized journalistic places.Footnote 72 During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the complicated specter of gendered movement and positionality permeated the entire social game of gerrymandering and redistricting physical (and discursive) homeplaces. Within and beyond their own communities, marginalized women encountered patriarchal and white supremacist forces.
For some women, there was only one answer: feminine community. Social clubs were beneficial, but as Noliwe Rooks explains, the creation of women’s magazines “allowed African American women to find work … to define personal, as well as group, identities; [and] to create a sense of unity by establishing a communication network.”Footnote 73 Thus, the women’s magazine was itself a version of Huhta’s “migrant media,” an opportunity for marginalized communities to make their voices heard and to foster a sense of power within discursive and physical spaces. As seen in female journalist fiction, developing such support systems both large and small, in print and in person, was central to sustained participation in the public sphere. Wells found support (much of it from men) as a writer, activist, and editor that helped her continue traveling the world and shining a light on lynching in the United States; Eaton’s and Karam’s editors opened masculine writing spaces to them to advocate for causes they were passionate about. On the other hand, while Idar had the support of her family and community, her physical gerrymandering ultimately failed because she was just one woman against a powerful masculine force. Support and camaraderie, in all its forms, helped marginalized women speak to their communities and push against dominant society from a physical and discursive place of relative safety.
Conclusion
According to Ishbel Ross, the belief “that a woman can do everything a man can do on paper” is “absurd,” not because women could not do “masculine” things but because society did not allow them to: “She can’t get into the Lotus Club in New York, or cross the Harvard Club threshold. She is denied the chummy barroom confidence of the politician.”Footnote 74 Like her anecdote about Sally Joy, Ross focuses here on newspaperwomen’s physical movement as proof that even the best redistricting faced barriers that could not be moved. Some gendered gerrymandering, she argues, was simply too powerful and there are too many physical spaces built by men to uphold “male power and privilege” for women to redistrict.Footnote 75 This problem is intensified when female journalists have to be conscious that their movement is also gerrymandered by white “power and privilege” bestowed upon public places. Trying to redistrict (white-)male-exclusive and -dominated public places was inherently “a threat to a settled [white] patriarchal order,” and female journalists—Sally Joy, The Gilded Age’s Peggy Scott, and the other fictional and historical women—embodied this threat when they moved beyond gerrymandered spaces in search of a sense of comfort, meaning, and “home” within or in opposition to historically restricted spaces.Footnote 76 The ability for marginalized women to redistrict mainstream spaces was even more fraught, as Ida B. Wells and Jovita Idar illustrate all too well. However, they, too, used their journalistic positions to advocate for and embody attempts at social, physical, and discursive redistricting.
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s fictional and personal narratives of female journalists offer a unique opportunity to explore the push against social gerrymandering and the question of a “woman’s place.” Individually and as a corpus, these works achieve two functions: they depict newspaperwomen’s search for a homeplace (whether in mainstream or marginalized sites) in order to be “in command of space” as a historical phenomenon; and they show how authors and newspaperwomen themselves depicted this search, offering scholars a social or literary approach to studying these works and their position in cultural discourse.Footnote 77 In each of these works, the absence or presence of supportive community is central to thriving in the physical public sphere because a woman fighting physical and social gerrymandering on her own, they argue, will fall victim to a hierarchy built to subjugate her through gender, race, and class. While these communities take many forms across female journalist narratives, they share common goals: to fight gerrymandering forces that questioned women’s position in the physical public sphere and to redistrict public spaces to be open to the presence of working women.
