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.

About the Author

Jean Marie Lutes is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University.

Reviews

Ambitious and provocative.... For historians, Lutes's well-written, acutely observed book provides a theoretically sophisticated provocation to further study.

-- Patricia A. Schechter * American Historical Review *

In the sensational press of a century or more ago, women did not rise by quietly doing their chores. The way to get ahead was to make oneself the story, often by assuming an undercover role and emerging to report the dangers, bodily and otherwise, that one had faced.... Jean Marie Lutes, once a reporter herself, finds scholarly diversion in reconsidering the roles sex and body played in the work of the stunt girls and the sob sisters. She also contemplates such fictional journalists as Henry James's Henrietta Stackpole, who became James's symbol of the evils of the popular press.

* Columbia Journalism Review *

Lutes puts her academic expertise and knowledge of the newspaper profession-she's a former staff writer for the Miami Herald-to superb use in this fascinating, clearly enunciated examination of the historical and cultural role of the American woman journalist during the decades bridging the 19th and 20th centuries.... Lutes reclaims the female reporter's pioneering and transformative position, first historically (e.g., Nellie Bly's exposing social ills; Ida B. Wells's fight against lynching), then as conjured in fiction by Henry James and such former newspaper women as Willa Cather and Edna Ferber.... Especially in consideration of today's body-conscious media culture-whether in front of, behind, or via hidden camera-Lutes's work is a revelation.

* Library Journal *

Lutes supports her arguments with... evidence from journalism archives as well as from pamphlets, popular novels, and other ephemera.... Her carefully considered close readings and rhetorical analyses that distinguish this project. Writing in clear, journalistic prose herself, Lutes identifies a particularly female literary tradition among these varied writers.... She focuses on the American fascination with and disdain for the female journalist, and, finally, the attempts of the journalist-turned-author to reconcile the performativity and sentimentality of female authorship with a modernist aesthetic.... Exploring a diverse array of authors across a fifty-year period, Lutes organizes her work around a unifying thesis that makes this book an important contribution to the fields of journalism, history, literary studies, and popular culture.

-- Verna Kale * Journal of Popular Culture *

This study's major contributions lie in its sharp refocusing of the nexus of journalism and literature in order to illuminate the contributions of women in both fields.... While Front-Page Girls is partly a recovery project, bringing to scholarly attention forgotten literary texts and episodes in media history, it is also a much-needed supplement to the longstanding discussion on the intersections of fiction and journalism.

* American Literature *

As Jean Marie Lutes uncovers stories of girl stunt reporters, the first African American newswomen, and sob sisters-writers who specialized in wringing tears from the reader-it becomes very clear that it would be hard for a young journalist today to have an experience like these women... thankfully. The history begins with tales of the girl student reporters who would feign madness to report from the inside of a New York City asylum or spend days in cigarette factories following young girls forced to work under sweatshop conditions.

* Bust *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801474125
Author Jean Marie Lutes
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm