
Out on Assignment
Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space
Alice Fahs(Author)
The University of North Carolina Press
Published on 17. November 2011
Book
Hardback
376 pages
978-0-8078-3496-1 (ISBN)
Description
Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Using extraordinary archival research, Alice Fahs unearths a richly networked community of female journalists drawn by the hundreds to major cities--especially New York--from all parts of the United States. Newspaper women were part of a wave of women seeking new, independent, urban lives, but they struggled to obtain the newspaper work of their dreams. Although some female journalists embraced more adventurous reporting, including stunt work and undercover assignments, many were relegated to the women's page. However, these intrepid female journalists made the women's page their own. Fahs reveals how their writings--including celebrity interviews, witty sketches of urban life, celebrations of being ""bachelor girls,"" advice columns, and a campaign in support of suffrage--had far-reaching implications for the creation of new, modern public spaces for American women at the turn of the century. As observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work, Fahs argues, to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively. | Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Fahs argues that, as observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8078-3496-1 (9780807834961)
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E-Book
11/2011
The University of North Carolina Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Alice Fahs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Her previous books include The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865.