The Founding Women
The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my dissertation. Chapter one discusses the development of formal and informal education systems and stunt girl journalism during the nineteenth century. This section is based purely on archival research and discusses the founding of the WPCP and its links to stunt girl journalism and the nineteenth-century's new systems of education.
The Founding of the Pittsburgh Women’s Press Club
Nineteenth-century women’s press clubs walked this same tightrope, although they added the dual problem of providing women both a private space away from the male gaze for their interactions and publicity for their performance of respectable womanhood and their defiance of the norms that defined that same respectability. Women’s press clubs taught members about journalism professionalism, and they also engaged in public policy debates on a range of issues. The WPCP archives reveals early talks about slums, local political campaigns, efforts to regulate food and drug advertising, trends toward brevity in magazine writing. The club members valued both formal and informal education. Reese was the only woman to graduate in the University of Pittsburgh’s first class of journalism majors.[1] In 1941, Nannette Bregg [a.k.a., Mrs. Charles M. Bregg] said her club really did nothing. They “just” talked. Indeed, though, she quickly noted, club conversations really did teach its members a valuable lesson:
The Press Club is no place for a sensitive soul. In a group of that kind, where everyone is an individualist, and has an opinion of her own on every subject and a voice on every opinion, it is a real test of friendship to sit quietly by (quietly for the moment at least) while your opinion is being taken to pieces or batter about as quite frequently happens. So I think I can say in all safety that the greatest advantage in belonging to the Press Club is several advantages rolled into one: It demonstrates the art of friendship, it develops tolerance and broadens one’s own viewpoint at the same time that it teaches respect for the other person’s.[2]
Through their discussion, the Press Club forced its members and the broader public to see several viewpoints on many issues. This, in turn, was brought to their work as editors and reporters.
The beginnings of the WPCP are not well documented, and in fact, seem to have been lost to what Janey Coard Smith, the club’s youngest founding member and one-time president, called “cultivated forgetfulness,” in reference to her own spotty memory of the events at the beginning of the club’s life. In a letter to Mrs. Nan Bregg, one of the club’s early twentieth century presidents, Smith wrote:
If I remember rightly it was when Helen Gardener essayist and lecturer came as the latter to Pittsburgh that these women decided to give a dinner to her and afterward through her inspiration organized the Press club. You may recall that Helen Gardener before her death last year willed her brain to Columbia University, and after due examination it was agreed by the learned men of that institution that her brain equaled at least that of the average man, or something like that. At any rate she was a loveable, dynamic woman that always stirred people into action.[3]
A 1960 article entitled “Nellie’s Nieces,” claims that Emily Kellogg, a reporter at the temperance paper the Union Signal, inspired the group to form when she came for the national Press Convention, which was held in Pittsburgh in the winter of 1891. Most agree, though, that it was Reese who proposed the women meet, and so they gathered in the offices of the Commercial Gazette, a now-defunct paper that was nicknamed “The Old Lady.”[4] In 1896, the club was heralded as the only women’s press club extant in the state of Pennsylvania.[5] The club was accepted into the International League of Press Clubs on December 2, 1893, and five years later, it became a member of the General Federation of Women’s Club on June 8. That same year, the club received its legal articles of incorporation.
As listed in the original by-laws, the original seven WPCP members were Janey Mulhern Coard, Verginie D. Hyde, Bell McElhenny, Cara Reese, Kathleen Hussey Watson, Clara M. Walmer, and Carrie L. Wetherell. Coard, who later became Janey Coard Smith, recalled, “Oh, yes, I forgot to say that they needed me to round out the proper number of signers for the charter. Did I hesitate to affix my unillustrious name? Jamais de le vie! That was a big day in my life—probably none so big since.”[6] Throughout the years, various reports have muddled the names of those seven, sometimes including women who would not have been members, such as Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade, a.k.a., the sharp-tongued columnist Bessie Bramble, whose non de plume came to be associated with witty, pointed diatribes against school policies and leaders and divorce legislation.[7] Wade, incidentally, recommended Smith to the club, which, says Smith, is “an example of the benefit of influential connections,” which women could gain in the WPCP. Bessie Bramble began her career in Pittsburgh writing music reviews for the now-defunct Pittsburgh Leader. As was common at the time, she took on an alias for her columns; however, this alias also allowed her to continue her day job as a teacher, and later as first an assistant principal and then the principal of the Ralston School. While Jane Swisshelm holds the distinction of being Pittsburgh’s first woman journalist, Bramble took the prize for being the first woman to earn a paycheck for her work. She also joined the “men’s” Pittsburgh Press Club in 1892. In addition to the Leader, she also frequently wrote for the Dispatch and the Chronicle, and her oldest child, Charles Wilkinson was later employed at the Dispatch.[8]She firmly believed that women could and, more importantly, should do more than housework and home improvements. She advocated for women to run for their local school boards, and she said of the public woman: “The more [women] can and do know, the more attractive they become to men, and the more they dominate their affections.”[9] While she appears to have been a member of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, and one of the founders of the Women’s Club of Pittsburgh (the one that so scornfully eyed Reese for her work as a journalist but accepted her nonetheless), Bramble is not listed as one of the founders.
Throughout the latter half of the 1880s and the 1890s, women’s press clubs sprang up in areas as diverse as the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York.[10] As previously noted, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh claims status as the oldest women’s press club, but in the only book-length exploration of press clubs extant, Burt discovered a history that is traceable to 1881. While most of those clubs were short-lived, some, like the WPCP still survive. The Illinois Women’s Press Association, which first met in 1885 and was the seed organization for the National Federation of Women’s Press Clubs, holds the distinction of being the longest-lived, according to Burt’s work and the club’s Web site, which shows that the club is still actively giving student and professional awards and coupling with other women’s press organizations to support women journalists in Illinois.[11] The WPCP’s longevity and its adherence to a gender-segregation are notable, however. Several of the remaining women’s press clubs have voted either to fold or to become a gender-integrated organization. For example, the Women’s National Press Club in Washington, D.C., voted to accept men in 1971, the same year the National Press Club began accepting women, and many other “women’s” press clubs, [12] such as the Women’s Press Club of New York State, Inc. [13], and the Women’s Press Club of Indiana [14], accept both men and women today even though their names seem exclusive to women.
Nineteenth-century women’s press clubs were important places for female journalists to perform the femininity that marked them as respectable while at the same time subverting dominant opinions of women in a way that created new places for future newshens to break into the newsroom. Outside of Reese, who was the only woman to graduate in the University of Pittsburgh s Journalism program, most women were not educated as journalists, and they had to convince editors that they did not need babysitting. Helen S. Collins, who was president when Alexander Woolcott, a well-known writer for the New York Tribune, came to speak in 1934, said, “When I got out of school I wasn’t equipped to earn my living. I thought I’d like to work on a newspaper so I went to see a man on the Pittsburgh Press. He explained to me that they didn’t hire girl reporters as they could not be out on the street at night reporting fires, murders and police raids.” [15] However, she did get a job at the Gazette-Times as a society reporter, and her work on covering balls often kept her out at night traversing the streets by herself, which, she says, she did without fear.
There were many times in the [social] season when we were out at balls and had to come back to the office to write them up for the morning edition. I then walked down the boulevard to 6th Ave., down sixth to Liberty and from there to Duquesne Way back of Hornes to get the 2 a.m. to Ingomar, where I lived. I didn’t run but I wasn’t afraid because people didn’t hold up people in those days. [16]
While a simple search of any newspaper’s police blotter will belie Collins’ claim that people were not mugged in the late nineteenth century, her words show the tireless energy that newswomen put into their work. They gathered information until the early hours of the morning, and then had to race back to the office to type up the report. By the time they had typed the report, it was 2 a.m., and they still had to take public transportation home.
In terms of the respectable, domestic woman, the woman journalists were conscientious hostesses who threw a wide range of events proving their fitness at keeping proper formal etiquette. Their annual anniversary banquet was notable for both mixing formal hostessing etiquette and for including skits, readings and songs that were satirical and often poked fun of male/female relations, particularly the relationship between male journalists and female journalists. The 1895 event was hailed by one local paper as, “the most charming sociality ever tendered by a woman’s club in this city.” The article then goes on to describe the “blue parlors of the hotel,” which were decorated with “palms and ferns and fragile sprays of green,” and “bright, sweet-scented jonquils, peering through the green” bedecking the tables. The fanciful writer even adds of those same flowers that they “nodded their pretty heads with the rest of the company, when something unusually bright was said by the guests about the long table.” The women were praised for distributing “exquisite bits of water color,” which had been given to the club by local artist Conrad Altenberger, and then gave a box of Reymer’s Chocolates (a local chocolatier) to each guest at the end of the event. The meal consisted of several courses, which were all accompanied by the Tuxedo Mandolin quartet. The banquet featured only women guests, and those women were certain to praise their housebound sisters before the working women who were to later hold the floor.
Miss Janey Mulhern Coard, following her address of welcome, that carried greetings to the women whose labor in life lies in that dearest field, [emphasis mine] the home, and whose encouragement to those without the home has saved many from falling by the wayside through weariness; to the professional women, who are unlocking opportunities for those less strong to tread therein more easily; to the press women, whose hearts are made of courage, and whose eyes are brave.[17]
Even though the home is the “dearest” place, professional women are deemed stronger because they are blazing paths for those “less strong,” and the press woman is the penultimate worker of them all, with her heart “made of courage” and “brave” eyes. With this speech, Coard managed to nod briefly at the “respectable” women’s life, but quickly dismissed it as the path of women without the nerve to do anything else with their lives. Those homebound sisters encouraged women in the working world, but they were not trailblazers or visionaries like their working friends.
The dance between etiquette and defiance of protocol continued throughout the evening’s speeches. Bramble gave a response to Coard’s speech, which, was “interrupted many times by applause.” Among the many toasts given by women during the evening, Mrs. J.K. Wallace is of particular note because her discussion placed women journalists as almost the penultimate form of womanhood. If a woman’s primary place was as the keeper and shaper of morality within a community and as the inspiration of morality for the next generation, then the woman journalist’s job fulfilled that task perfectly, Wallace said. Her speech “stated that newspapers largely formed the minds of the little children who, when those who had written had passed from life, would bear the teachings to the future.” In other words, women journalists were taking on the more “acceptable” womanly roles of both mother and teacher through their works. A mythical toast by Mrs. Jane Grey Swisshelm (written by club member Caroline Wetherell), echoes these same themes in its verses:
“Your mission? Your sister help and uplift.
Turn her eyes to the stars; teach to steer; not to drift;
Till at last, by the might of your heaven-lent gift,
Safe she reaches the bay, through the rocks’ narrow rift.”
The poem could be speaking on many levels, in that it could be extolling the club members to guide other women into the profession of journalism or it could be encouraging women journalists to inspire other women with their writing to be “uplifted.” However, these verses also encourage women to take the helm, steering the ship with their “heaven-lent gift,” meaning that even though women journalists were taking on a traditional teaching role, they were still leading and guiding the paper-strewn ships through the “rocks’ narrow rift,” rather than just sitting in the passenger’s seat. Swisshelm’s ghost notes that women journalists were more than teachers and mentors. They were leaders.[18]
The women, however, were not the only ones declaring their own success at this affair. Even though his sex was excluded from the event, Times Managing Editor Morgan E. Gable sent a missive congratulating the women on their success and their ability to lead other women into newsrooms.
Though you have not sent me an invitation to your banquet, you will find that the Times will tomorrow say editorially that the time is not long past when a woman in a newspaper office was a curiosity. She was an individual whose presence was sometimes welcome, sometimes only tolerated, and often considered a nuisance for various reasons ungallant. Now every English daily in Pittsburgh has one or more women on its pay rolls employed on the reportorial force, with still others as contributors along special lines. They endure the same amount of toil and tribulation as the men, discharge their duties with energy, intelligence, tact and fidelity, and they have come to be not only welcome members of the staff, but necessary. There is this difference, too, with regard to newspaper women. They crowded out no man. They have made a distinct field of usefulness for themselves, which grows steadily as time rolls on. That is to say, they have come to stay.[19]
In his letter, Gable also walks the careful line between the need to approach women journalists as respectable women and as independent, professional women whose presence once, and still did, buck gender protocol. The women had come to be “not only welcome,” but “necessary,” because they had “made a distinct field of usefulness for themselves.” Gable is careful to note that women journalists were not over-stepping their gendered role by coming into newsrooms. The women were not there to overtake men and leave men without a place or a voice. Instead, women were creating their own field, and it was just as useful within the newsroom as the men’s, Gable notes. His careful inclusion of the statement, “They have crowded out no man,” was a defense of the women’s intentions. They were not in newsrooms to become men or to dominate men in the workplace. They were able to both journalists and women while maintaining their womanly attributes and respectability.
The 1896 affair featured speeches that showed the women journalists’ political bent and their own work for the municipal housekeeping movement. The club invited Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, then secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, to give a speech on “Equal Suffrage, the promoter of Happy Marriages.” This “bright” speech was followed by musical entertainment interspersed with speeches on a variety of topics, including “The Boy Reporter—What We Think of Him,” “The Blue Pencil-in Life” (The “blue pencil” refers to the editor’s sharp pencil, which was colored blue in the nineteenth century), “Our Sleeves—May They Always Have Space Rates,” “The Newspaper—as a Successor of the Sewing Circle, a Success,” “The Woes of an Infant Editor,” and “The Type of Womanhood—the Girl Reporter.”[20] While the text of these speeches has been lost to history, the titles give a good indication of the club women’s political stances. They saw their work on newspapers as a successor to sewing circles, previously a place where women could gather and discuss community affairs. The newspaper had become a place for women to discuss and influence public affairs. They reconciled the “girl reporter” with nineteenth-century womanhood, showing their own opinion that the two were not incompatible. In addition, the title of the keynote speech by Avery, shows the club member’s own belief in the suffrage movement and in the idea that the best homemakers were those whose influence expanded beyond the home. Only with a wider range of influence could a wife be happy, and thus men who wished happy marriages should allow the vote. With these speeches, the club also advertised its connections to famous women reporters with letters from Margherita Hamm and Eliza Archard Conner, who was an editor of the American Press Association, and a toast to the club’s own Bessie Bramble, who was hailed as “the woman reporter’s friend.”[21] Even while haling their own sex as leaders and conquerors of the newsroom, they were careful to present the perfect hostess face to their audience. Prior to the banquet, they present a tea for both men and woman newspaper reporters, and the affair was “brightened with flowers and plants,” and the guests were entertained with both music and literary readings. The group invited members of the Pittsburgh [men’s] Press Club and the Pittsburgh Women’s Club. During the banquet itself, women were presented with “dainty glass boutonniere holders containing a rose,” as favors, the tables were decorated with primroses and candelabras in old rose, the club’s color, and the entertainment was designed to feature a mix of musical entertainment and the previously mentioned toasts. Coverage of the 1900 banquet was scantier than the 1895 or 1896 affair (although this could be more a deficiency of the archive than of the papers’ coverage of the event), but previews praised it as “giv[ing] promise of being one of the handsomest and most successful entertainments ever given by the enterprising little club.”[22] Throughout its nine seasons, the club marked itself as one of the best hostesses in the city by gathering kudos for its annual banquet and other events. At the same time, it also used these perfectly appointed occasions to give speeches on women’s issues, which the women knew would be covered in the next day’s paper, thus bringing attention to the expansion of the woman’s sphere of influence.
The annual banquet was not the only area where the women pulled out their housemaking skills and trumpeted their journalistic talents at the same time. The women also hosted a highly successful series of speakers, most literary, to come and entertain their club. The WPCP was also aggressive about using as many avenues as it could to increase new opportunities for women in newsrooms across the city of Pittsburgh. At the club’s 50th anniversary, Smith recalled both the club’s aggressive fight to draw in the best speakers and a wide range of women who were affiliated with writing and publishing in the city. The former allowed the city at large to participate in conversations with the women. By hosting popular speakers and topics at their club throughout the season, the women showed they were more than able to engage in conversations with the day’s biggest names.
But it was certainly a grand old Club. Nary a literary celebrity came within hailing distance that we did not capture him or, preferably, her. And did we give a simple dinner or luncheon at a dollar and a half a plate? No, my dear. It was always a banquet at the leading hotel, with usually the Mayor of the city sitting beside the guest of honor, with outstanding editors and literati bidding for tickets at five and six dollars a plate.[23]
The detail they gave to their events created a quandary for people trying to label the women. Though they were “pugnacious,” they were also consummate hostesses whose public events drew top-name speakers and the biggest local celebrities. Through their first fifty years, the women hosted names ranging from Woolcott (who was, perhaps, the biggest coup for the club) to Winston Churchill’s niece, Claire Sheridan, and they accepted women from all walks of life, perhaps most notably stage star and renowned beauty Lillian Russell. The women proved their respectability by showing off that the mayor, the town’s leader of both law and morality, enjoyed their events enough to sit with each guest of honor. From their editors they demanded the acknowledgment of a high-priced ticket, showing that their events were grand enough to draw both money and pillars of society. The events were also so popular that they often overflowed the rooms in which they were held. Club lore recounted at the 1941 50th anniversary banquet noted that the Andrew Woolcott speech—which was a last-minute affair because Woolcott had sworn he would not be able to make it until clubwoman Mary Drayne volunteered that she and her husband would drive him on Cleveland immediately after his visit with the club if he stop in Pittsburgh for dinner on his way to Cleveland—drew 300 to 400 people and the women had to “forcibly” bar the doors against a “mob that we couldn’t care for.”[24]
At the same time as the clubs’ affairs allowed them to display their housekeeping skills, the club meetings and events showed that women were not only fit to speak about public affairs, but they were also eager and knowledgeable enough to do so. Early talk about the women’s press club declared that it would die a quick death due to the presswoman’s contentious (i.e., non-feminine) nature. However, the women used this prediction of their downfall to show the strength of their nature. In 1897, Mary Temple Bayard noted:
It was confidently expected that there would be bickering, squablings [sic], dissentions and tears; and rather than disappoint anyone, the organization has fulfilled its (the) prophecy, and takes some measure of pride in it. Made up of real newspaper women, true to their training, a fight is at any time preferable to stagnation and so when the rest of you leave off furnishing sensations it is a club boast that it has the talent within itself to get up something in that line.[25]
The WPCP founders were so assured that their members would be outspoken about public affairs that their original 1891 bylaws list the restriction that, “no member shall hold the floor beyond three minutes, except such privilege be accorded by motion, duly seconded and passed by the Club.”[26] To the press clubwomen, the ability to engage in learned argumentation about the day’s issue was a sign of talent and good journalistic training. According to Bayard, the newswomen were showing their journalism credentials with their ability to engage in public debates and educate themselves about the issues of the day. However, Bayard argued, the women’s ability to engage in debate should be a point of pride rather than shame. “If women journalists were not credited with being a little less than angelic than women in general and if any one had ever heard of an organization of consequence without friction, our shortcomings would be cause for greater shame (among the surviving members) than we now feel it to be, and point fingers intended to index the pugnacious proclivities of newspaper women could with better reason point at us.”[27] The argumentation, according to Bayard, not only made the women journalists people of “consequence,” but it kept them from “stagnation.” They were alive and constantly growing as journalists and people because of one another. Of Cara Reese, honorary clubmember Grayce D. Latus wrote, “She had a great sense of humor and did not take life too seriously. She often expressed advanced opinions just to see this reaction.”[28] Evidently this form of “education” was the one constant at the WPCP throughout its early years. A cartoon from February 1933 shows a privacy screen with a sign stating “Women’s Press Club-1891-1933: members only.” Behind that screen, women are ostensibly debating everything from Politics and movies to debt, war, travel, nudes, inhibitions, Japan, Technocracy, children, diets and symphonies.[29] This wide range of debate topics spoke to the women’s knowledge of the world and the necessity to see debate as entertainment and education if one were a clubwoman. In 1941, member Ruby Eiseman declared, “You sure do get a training in how to take it from the Press Club. Until you finally learn the trick of handing it back you have some rough going. But it is worth it. The girls nearly all have a keen sense of humor—not always gentle at that—but it is mostly FUN [emphasis Eiseman’s].”[30]
Even among the clubwomen, however, there was a sense of decorum that had to followed, however. One of the club’s most famous members, Gertrude Gordon, was rumored to have been blackballed “because of her flamboyant and sensational style of writing. She had a reputation of do-anything, go-anywhere for a story.”[31] In her history of the club, Ann Zurosky, herself a longtime club member and past president, wrote that Gordon was the first woman to earn a byline in the local newspapers.[32]
The formation of the Women’s Press Club roughly coincided with the publication of Mary Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible, which signaled the in-roads that women had made throughout the public sphere. Women were marching into the workplace as typists and shop girls, and they were taking on a moral voice in the temperance battle. Women were seeking to find their own voice in all issues on the public sphere, and Glenna Matthews, author of The Rise of Public Womanhood: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, notes that the late 1800s and early 1900s were the decades where women made some of the greatest gains in their ability to speak in the public sphere. She writes, “But on balance, the fact that a few public women of the period, most notably Emma Goldman and Ida B. Wells, began to speak publically about sex, without losing the ability to command an audience, represented an extraordinarily significant breakthrough for all women, the first indication that women might someday speak on the same range of public issues as men.”[33] The WPCP gave professional women journalists a place where they could speak on a range of public issues in a semi-public space. As women who worked for publications across the city, the seven founding women uncompromisingly battled their male counterparts for the “big” stories, proudly took on the role of “sob sisters”—those women who “covered sensational crimes with an emotional intensity that brought a tear to the eye”[34]—and joyfully battled one another for the biggest “scoop” in the city.
The club members drew attention and more women by creating notably lax membership rules in the 1890s. The primary requirement for active membership was that a woman had to be paid for her work, even if it was just a dollar per year of her age, as 15-year-old Smith was paid for her first two articles for the Chronicle Telegraph.[35]However, for associate membership, women who were affiliated with men whose work was journalism (i.e., wives of editors and publishers) were recruited to join the club’s ranks. These women then used their influence upon their husbands to influence hiring decisions in the newsrooms, leading to an influx of women in Pittsburgh newsrooms.
Several of the papers did not at that time approve of women writers on the staff, so we cunningly conceived of inviting into the fold, as associate members, wives of outstanding editors. Many of these were marvelous women in more ways than one, and ere long every paper had two or three women in editorial rooms. Those associate members were very helpful, inspiring, several of them later developing into writers. [36]
As Smith noted, the club association had positive reciprocal effects on both active and associate members. Active membership grew because associate members were rallying newsrooms to open spaces for new women journalists. Associate members learned the craft of writing from the active members, which, in turn, lead to some of them becoming wage-earning writers themselves. This shows the clubs’ work as an informal education structure for more than just the women journalists. The journalists taught writing to women whose husbands were involved in the news business; those wives then, in turn, kept their husbands educated about the work of women journalists. The wives also became writers themselves, making themselves the next generation of women journalists to need the WPCP’s support system. The club organically grew in this way.
Just as the organization of Sorosis forced the male press club to extend tickets to women journalists for the Dickens’ event, the organization of the Pittsburgh Women’s Press Club pushed male editors and journalists to begin accepting their female counterparts into their ranks. The simple show of solidarity gave the women strength to speak in the newsroom and gave them new ways to reach out to the local journalism community. Where the municipal housekeeping movement was encouraging women to become journalists, women journalists were organizing in their own ways but with similar goals to the municipal housekeeping movement. The women of the early WCPC demonstrated that women could still maintain their “womanly dignity,” even as they were venturing further into the public sphere. By organizing, the women created a united front that showed they were the rule for womanhood, not the exception. The women used the image of woman as homemaker to expand their role in newsrooms. They were uniquely suited to covering their beats, they argued, and even as the club itself faltered throughout the uncertainty of World Wars I and II, the women continued using the tools of womanhood to undermine the very image of womanhood that would keep them out various newspaper offices.
Notes:
1. Mrs. Charles M. Bregg [a.k.a., Nan Bregg, I use the formal title here because it was her usage on air.], WWSW, 29 January 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
2. Ibid.
3. Janey Coard Smith to Ms. Nan Bregg, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
4. George Swetnam, “Nellies Nieces,” Pittsburgh Press, 27 March 1960, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
5. Mary Temple Bayard, “Contributions from the Members of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh,” in “The American Youth,” WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
6. Janey Coard Smith to Mrs. Nannette Bregg, N.D., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
7. Patricia Lowry, “Bessie Bramble: A Force for Change,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 March 2007. Available from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07063/766082-51.stm.
8. Thomas Cushing, “A Genealogical and Biographical History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania,” excerpt from History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, by Dr. Thomas Cushing, Chicago, 1889, retitled by Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, Co., 1975, 343.
9. “Sampler of Bessie Bramble’s Writing,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 March 2007. Available from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07063/766137-51.stm.
10. Elizabeth V. Burt, ed., Women’s Press Organizations 1881-1999 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), table of contents.
11. For more on the Illinois Women’s Press Association, see their web site at www.iwpa.org.
12. The National Press Club, “History,” 2001, accessed 2 June 2011, http://press.org/about/history.
13. The Women’s Press Club of New York State, Inc., “About us,” 2009, accessed 2 June 2011, http://www.womenspressclubnys.com/about_us.
14. Women’s Press Club of Indiana, “About WPCI,” May 2011, accessed 2 June 2011, http://www.womenspressclubnys.com/about_us.
15. Helen S. Collins, Response on the occasion of being presented an honorary lifetime membership to the Women’s Press Club by President Mary Ellen McBride, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
16. Ibid.
17. First line “The Banquet of the Woman’s Press Club…” 1895, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
18. Untitled article under “The Event a Brilliant Success—Many Well-Known Writers Present—Womans Enlarged Sphere,” 1895, N.P., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
19. Morgan E. Gable to the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh. N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
20. “The Clubs,” Pittsburgh Bulletin, 15 Feb. 1896, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
21. Ibid.
22. First line: “The annual dinner of the Women’s Press club…,” 1900, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
23. Janey Coard Smith to Nanette Bregg, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
24. Ruby Eiseman, "Woman’s Club of the Air,” WCAE, broadcast 28 Jan. 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
25. Bayard, “Contributions.”
26. Constitution and by-laws of the Woman’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, PA, Pittsburgh: Press of Percy F. Smith, 1891, WPCP, MSS #131, Box 1, Folder 1 Women’s Press Club-Charter and By-Laws, December 1893-October 14, 1988.
27. Mary Temple Bayard, “Contributions from the members of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh,” The American Youth, n.p., n.d., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
28. Ann Zurosky, The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh 1891-1991: The First 100 Years, Pittsburgh, PA: The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, 1991.
29. Drawing by Ed Rafferty, February 1933, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
30. Ruby Eiseman, “Woman’s Club of the Air,” WCAE, transcript, 28 January 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
31. Zurosky, The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh.
32. Nineteenth-century newspapers did not use bylines, and they were not common in Pittsburgh papers until the early twentieth Century. This makes it difficult to trace the career of any one member of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, for, even though the women make oblique references to articles they may have written, and there are some places where it can be assumed they wrote, such as the club and society columns, it is not clearly stated what the women actually wrote. Zurosky notes some of the more salacious titles from after bylines became more popular, including “Why Flirts Don’t Marry,” written by Ruby Eiseman under her pen name Beatrice Fairfax (pg. 19).
33. Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148.
34. Marion Marzolf, Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Hastings House, 1977), 32. Marzolf relates that the term “sob sisters” was coined by a male reporter to describe four women—Dorothy Dix, Winfred Black Bonfils, Ada Patterson, and Nixola Greeley-Smith. These four women were given front-row seats at the 1907 Harry K. Thaw murder trial and they were told to “give a sympathetic and emotional report of this sensational trial with its beautiful young heroine, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, ‘the girl in the red velvet swing.’” This term soon came to describe a group of women reporters whose journalism was meant to tug on the reader’s emotional strings rather than his or her analytical strings.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
Nineteenth-century women’s press clubs walked this same tightrope, although they added the dual problem of providing women both a private space away from the male gaze for their interactions and publicity for their performance of respectable womanhood and their defiance of the norms that defined that same respectability. Women’s press clubs taught members about journalism professionalism, and they also engaged in public policy debates on a range of issues. The WPCP archives reveals early talks about slums, local political campaigns, efforts to regulate food and drug advertising, trends toward brevity in magazine writing. The club members valued both formal and informal education. Reese was the only woman to graduate in the University of Pittsburgh’s first class of journalism majors.[1] In 1941, Nannette Bregg [a.k.a., Mrs. Charles M. Bregg] said her club really did nothing. They “just” talked. Indeed, though, she quickly noted, club conversations really did teach its members a valuable lesson:
The Press Club is no place for a sensitive soul. In a group of that kind, where everyone is an individualist, and has an opinion of her own on every subject and a voice on every opinion, it is a real test of friendship to sit quietly by (quietly for the moment at least) while your opinion is being taken to pieces or batter about as quite frequently happens. So I think I can say in all safety that the greatest advantage in belonging to the Press Club is several advantages rolled into one: It demonstrates the art of friendship, it develops tolerance and broadens one’s own viewpoint at the same time that it teaches respect for the other person’s.[2]
Through their discussion, the Press Club forced its members and the broader public to see several viewpoints on many issues. This, in turn, was brought to their work as editors and reporters.
The beginnings of the WPCP are not well documented, and in fact, seem to have been lost to what Janey Coard Smith, the club’s youngest founding member and one-time president, called “cultivated forgetfulness,” in reference to her own spotty memory of the events at the beginning of the club’s life. In a letter to Mrs. Nan Bregg, one of the club’s early twentieth century presidents, Smith wrote:
If I remember rightly it was when Helen Gardener essayist and lecturer came as the latter to Pittsburgh that these women decided to give a dinner to her and afterward through her inspiration organized the Press club. You may recall that Helen Gardener before her death last year willed her brain to Columbia University, and after due examination it was agreed by the learned men of that institution that her brain equaled at least that of the average man, or something like that. At any rate she was a loveable, dynamic woman that always stirred people into action.[3]
A 1960 article entitled “Nellie’s Nieces,” claims that Emily Kellogg, a reporter at the temperance paper the Union Signal, inspired the group to form when she came for the national Press Convention, which was held in Pittsburgh in the winter of 1891. Most agree, though, that it was Reese who proposed the women meet, and so they gathered in the offices of the Commercial Gazette, a now-defunct paper that was nicknamed “The Old Lady.”[4] In 1896, the club was heralded as the only women’s press club extant in the state of Pennsylvania.[5] The club was accepted into the International League of Press Clubs on December 2, 1893, and five years later, it became a member of the General Federation of Women’s Club on June 8. That same year, the club received its legal articles of incorporation.
As listed in the original by-laws, the original seven WPCP members were Janey Mulhern Coard, Verginie D. Hyde, Bell McElhenny, Cara Reese, Kathleen Hussey Watson, Clara M. Walmer, and Carrie L. Wetherell. Coard, who later became Janey Coard Smith, recalled, “Oh, yes, I forgot to say that they needed me to round out the proper number of signers for the charter. Did I hesitate to affix my unillustrious name? Jamais de le vie! That was a big day in my life—probably none so big since.”[6] Throughout the years, various reports have muddled the names of those seven, sometimes including women who would not have been members, such as Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade, a.k.a., the sharp-tongued columnist Bessie Bramble, whose non de plume came to be associated with witty, pointed diatribes against school policies and leaders and divorce legislation.[7] Wade, incidentally, recommended Smith to the club, which, says Smith, is “an example of the benefit of influential connections,” which women could gain in the WPCP. Bessie Bramble began her career in Pittsburgh writing music reviews for the now-defunct Pittsburgh Leader. As was common at the time, she took on an alias for her columns; however, this alias also allowed her to continue her day job as a teacher, and later as first an assistant principal and then the principal of the Ralston School. While Jane Swisshelm holds the distinction of being Pittsburgh’s first woman journalist, Bramble took the prize for being the first woman to earn a paycheck for her work. She also joined the “men’s” Pittsburgh Press Club in 1892. In addition to the Leader, she also frequently wrote for the Dispatch and the Chronicle, and her oldest child, Charles Wilkinson was later employed at the Dispatch.[8]She firmly believed that women could and, more importantly, should do more than housework and home improvements. She advocated for women to run for their local school boards, and she said of the public woman: “The more [women] can and do know, the more attractive they become to men, and the more they dominate their affections.”[9] While she appears to have been a member of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, and one of the founders of the Women’s Club of Pittsburgh (the one that so scornfully eyed Reese for her work as a journalist but accepted her nonetheless), Bramble is not listed as one of the founders.
Throughout the latter half of the 1880s and the 1890s, women’s press clubs sprang up in areas as diverse as the Pacific Northwest, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York.[10] As previously noted, the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh claims status as the oldest women’s press club, but in the only book-length exploration of press clubs extant, Burt discovered a history that is traceable to 1881. While most of those clubs were short-lived, some, like the WPCP still survive. The Illinois Women’s Press Association, which first met in 1885 and was the seed organization for the National Federation of Women’s Press Clubs, holds the distinction of being the longest-lived, according to Burt’s work and the club’s Web site, which shows that the club is still actively giving student and professional awards and coupling with other women’s press organizations to support women journalists in Illinois.[11] The WPCP’s longevity and its adherence to a gender-segregation are notable, however. Several of the remaining women’s press clubs have voted either to fold or to become a gender-integrated organization. For example, the Women’s National Press Club in Washington, D.C., voted to accept men in 1971, the same year the National Press Club began accepting women, and many other “women’s” press clubs, [12] such as the Women’s Press Club of New York State, Inc. [13], and the Women’s Press Club of Indiana [14], accept both men and women today even though their names seem exclusive to women.
Nineteenth-century women’s press clubs were important places for female journalists to perform the femininity that marked them as respectable while at the same time subverting dominant opinions of women in a way that created new places for future newshens to break into the newsroom. Outside of Reese, who was the only woman to graduate in the University of Pittsburgh s Journalism program, most women were not educated as journalists, and they had to convince editors that they did not need babysitting. Helen S. Collins, who was president when Alexander Woolcott, a well-known writer for the New York Tribune, came to speak in 1934, said, “When I got out of school I wasn’t equipped to earn my living. I thought I’d like to work on a newspaper so I went to see a man on the Pittsburgh Press. He explained to me that they didn’t hire girl reporters as they could not be out on the street at night reporting fires, murders and police raids.” [15] However, she did get a job at the Gazette-Times as a society reporter, and her work on covering balls often kept her out at night traversing the streets by herself, which, she says, she did without fear.
There were many times in the [social] season when we were out at balls and had to come back to the office to write them up for the morning edition. I then walked down the boulevard to 6th Ave., down sixth to Liberty and from there to Duquesne Way back of Hornes to get the 2 a.m. to Ingomar, where I lived. I didn’t run but I wasn’t afraid because people didn’t hold up people in those days. [16]
While a simple search of any newspaper’s police blotter will belie Collins’ claim that people were not mugged in the late nineteenth century, her words show the tireless energy that newswomen put into their work. They gathered information until the early hours of the morning, and then had to race back to the office to type up the report. By the time they had typed the report, it was 2 a.m., and they still had to take public transportation home.
In terms of the respectable, domestic woman, the woman journalists were conscientious hostesses who threw a wide range of events proving their fitness at keeping proper formal etiquette. Their annual anniversary banquet was notable for both mixing formal hostessing etiquette and for including skits, readings and songs that were satirical and often poked fun of male/female relations, particularly the relationship between male journalists and female journalists. The 1895 event was hailed by one local paper as, “the most charming sociality ever tendered by a woman’s club in this city.” The article then goes on to describe the “blue parlors of the hotel,” which were decorated with “palms and ferns and fragile sprays of green,” and “bright, sweet-scented jonquils, peering through the green” bedecking the tables. The fanciful writer even adds of those same flowers that they “nodded their pretty heads with the rest of the company, when something unusually bright was said by the guests about the long table.” The women were praised for distributing “exquisite bits of water color,” which had been given to the club by local artist Conrad Altenberger, and then gave a box of Reymer’s Chocolates (a local chocolatier) to each guest at the end of the event. The meal consisted of several courses, which were all accompanied by the Tuxedo Mandolin quartet. The banquet featured only women guests, and those women were certain to praise their housebound sisters before the working women who were to later hold the floor.
Miss Janey Mulhern Coard, following her address of welcome, that carried greetings to the women whose labor in life lies in that dearest field, [emphasis mine] the home, and whose encouragement to those without the home has saved many from falling by the wayside through weariness; to the professional women, who are unlocking opportunities for those less strong to tread therein more easily; to the press women, whose hearts are made of courage, and whose eyes are brave.[17]
Even though the home is the “dearest” place, professional women are deemed stronger because they are blazing paths for those “less strong,” and the press woman is the penultimate worker of them all, with her heart “made of courage” and “brave” eyes. With this speech, Coard managed to nod briefly at the “respectable” women’s life, but quickly dismissed it as the path of women without the nerve to do anything else with their lives. Those homebound sisters encouraged women in the working world, but they were not trailblazers or visionaries like their working friends.
The dance between etiquette and defiance of protocol continued throughout the evening’s speeches. Bramble gave a response to Coard’s speech, which, was “interrupted many times by applause.” Among the many toasts given by women during the evening, Mrs. J.K. Wallace is of particular note because her discussion placed women journalists as almost the penultimate form of womanhood. If a woman’s primary place was as the keeper and shaper of morality within a community and as the inspiration of morality for the next generation, then the woman journalist’s job fulfilled that task perfectly, Wallace said. Her speech “stated that newspapers largely formed the minds of the little children who, when those who had written had passed from life, would bear the teachings to the future.” In other words, women journalists were taking on the more “acceptable” womanly roles of both mother and teacher through their works. A mythical toast by Mrs. Jane Grey Swisshelm (written by club member Caroline Wetherell), echoes these same themes in its verses:
“Your mission? Your sister help and uplift.
Turn her eyes to the stars; teach to steer; not to drift;
Till at last, by the might of your heaven-lent gift,
Safe she reaches the bay, through the rocks’ narrow rift.”
The poem could be speaking on many levels, in that it could be extolling the club members to guide other women into the profession of journalism or it could be encouraging women journalists to inspire other women with their writing to be “uplifted.” However, these verses also encourage women to take the helm, steering the ship with their “heaven-lent gift,” meaning that even though women journalists were taking on a traditional teaching role, they were still leading and guiding the paper-strewn ships through the “rocks’ narrow rift,” rather than just sitting in the passenger’s seat. Swisshelm’s ghost notes that women journalists were more than teachers and mentors. They were leaders.[18]
The women, however, were not the only ones declaring their own success at this affair. Even though his sex was excluded from the event, Times Managing Editor Morgan E. Gable sent a missive congratulating the women on their success and their ability to lead other women into newsrooms.
Though you have not sent me an invitation to your banquet, you will find that the Times will tomorrow say editorially that the time is not long past when a woman in a newspaper office was a curiosity. She was an individual whose presence was sometimes welcome, sometimes only tolerated, and often considered a nuisance for various reasons ungallant. Now every English daily in Pittsburgh has one or more women on its pay rolls employed on the reportorial force, with still others as contributors along special lines. They endure the same amount of toil and tribulation as the men, discharge their duties with energy, intelligence, tact and fidelity, and they have come to be not only welcome members of the staff, but necessary. There is this difference, too, with regard to newspaper women. They crowded out no man. They have made a distinct field of usefulness for themselves, which grows steadily as time rolls on. That is to say, they have come to stay.[19]
In his letter, Gable also walks the careful line between the need to approach women journalists as respectable women and as independent, professional women whose presence once, and still did, buck gender protocol. The women had come to be “not only welcome,” but “necessary,” because they had “made a distinct field of usefulness for themselves.” Gable is careful to note that women journalists were not over-stepping their gendered role by coming into newsrooms. The women were not there to overtake men and leave men without a place or a voice. Instead, women were creating their own field, and it was just as useful within the newsroom as the men’s, Gable notes. His careful inclusion of the statement, “They have crowded out no man,” was a defense of the women’s intentions. They were not in newsrooms to become men or to dominate men in the workplace. They were able to both journalists and women while maintaining their womanly attributes and respectability.
The 1896 affair featured speeches that showed the women journalists’ political bent and their own work for the municipal housekeeping movement. The club invited Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery, then secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, to give a speech on “Equal Suffrage, the promoter of Happy Marriages.” This “bright” speech was followed by musical entertainment interspersed with speeches on a variety of topics, including “The Boy Reporter—What We Think of Him,” “The Blue Pencil-in Life” (The “blue pencil” refers to the editor’s sharp pencil, which was colored blue in the nineteenth century), “Our Sleeves—May They Always Have Space Rates,” “The Newspaper—as a Successor of the Sewing Circle, a Success,” “The Woes of an Infant Editor,” and “The Type of Womanhood—the Girl Reporter.”[20] While the text of these speeches has been lost to history, the titles give a good indication of the club women’s political stances. They saw their work on newspapers as a successor to sewing circles, previously a place where women could gather and discuss community affairs. The newspaper had become a place for women to discuss and influence public affairs. They reconciled the “girl reporter” with nineteenth-century womanhood, showing their own opinion that the two were not incompatible. In addition, the title of the keynote speech by Avery, shows the club member’s own belief in the suffrage movement and in the idea that the best homemakers were those whose influence expanded beyond the home. Only with a wider range of influence could a wife be happy, and thus men who wished happy marriages should allow the vote. With these speeches, the club also advertised its connections to famous women reporters with letters from Margherita Hamm and Eliza Archard Conner, who was an editor of the American Press Association, and a toast to the club’s own Bessie Bramble, who was hailed as “the woman reporter’s friend.”[21] Even while haling their own sex as leaders and conquerors of the newsroom, they were careful to present the perfect hostess face to their audience. Prior to the banquet, they present a tea for both men and woman newspaper reporters, and the affair was “brightened with flowers and plants,” and the guests were entertained with both music and literary readings. The group invited members of the Pittsburgh [men’s] Press Club and the Pittsburgh Women’s Club. During the banquet itself, women were presented with “dainty glass boutonniere holders containing a rose,” as favors, the tables were decorated with primroses and candelabras in old rose, the club’s color, and the entertainment was designed to feature a mix of musical entertainment and the previously mentioned toasts. Coverage of the 1900 banquet was scantier than the 1895 or 1896 affair (although this could be more a deficiency of the archive than of the papers’ coverage of the event), but previews praised it as “giv[ing] promise of being one of the handsomest and most successful entertainments ever given by the enterprising little club.”[22] Throughout its nine seasons, the club marked itself as one of the best hostesses in the city by gathering kudos for its annual banquet and other events. At the same time, it also used these perfectly appointed occasions to give speeches on women’s issues, which the women knew would be covered in the next day’s paper, thus bringing attention to the expansion of the woman’s sphere of influence.
The annual banquet was not the only area where the women pulled out their housemaking skills and trumpeted their journalistic talents at the same time. The women also hosted a highly successful series of speakers, most literary, to come and entertain their club. The WPCP was also aggressive about using as many avenues as it could to increase new opportunities for women in newsrooms across the city of Pittsburgh. At the club’s 50th anniversary, Smith recalled both the club’s aggressive fight to draw in the best speakers and a wide range of women who were affiliated with writing and publishing in the city. The former allowed the city at large to participate in conversations with the women. By hosting popular speakers and topics at their club throughout the season, the women showed they were more than able to engage in conversations with the day’s biggest names.
But it was certainly a grand old Club. Nary a literary celebrity came within hailing distance that we did not capture him or, preferably, her. And did we give a simple dinner or luncheon at a dollar and a half a plate? No, my dear. It was always a banquet at the leading hotel, with usually the Mayor of the city sitting beside the guest of honor, with outstanding editors and literati bidding for tickets at five and six dollars a plate.[23]
The detail they gave to their events created a quandary for people trying to label the women. Though they were “pugnacious,” they were also consummate hostesses whose public events drew top-name speakers and the biggest local celebrities. Through their first fifty years, the women hosted names ranging from Woolcott (who was, perhaps, the biggest coup for the club) to Winston Churchill’s niece, Claire Sheridan, and they accepted women from all walks of life, perhaps most notably stage star and renowned beauty Lillian Russell. The women proved their respectability by showing off that the mayor, the town’s leader of both law and morality, enjoyed their events enough to sit with each guest of honor. From their editors they demanded the acknowledgment of a high-priced ticket, showing that their events were grand enough to draw both money and pillars of society. The events were also so popular that they often overflowed the rooms in which they were held. Club lore recounted at the 1941 50th anniversary banquet noted that the Andrew Woolcott speech—which was a last-minute affair because Woolcott had sworn he would not be able to make it until clubwoman Mary Drayne volunteered that she and her husband would drive him on Cleveland immediately after his visit with the club if he stop in Pittsburgh for dinner on his way to Cleveland—drew 300 to 400 people and the women had to “forcibly” bar the doors against a “mob that we couldn’t care for.”[24]
At the same time as the clubs’ affairs allowed them to display their housekeeping skills, the club meetings and events showed that women were not only fit to speak about public affairs, but they were also eager and knowledgeable enough to do so. Early talk about the women’s press club declared that it would die a quick death due to the presswoman’s contentious (i.e., non-feminine) nature. However, the women used this prediction of their downfall to show the strength of their nature. In 1897, Mary Temple Bayard noted:
It was confidently expected that there would be bickering, squablings [sic], dissentions and tears; and rather than disappoint anyone, the organization has fulfilled its (the) prophecy, and takes some measure of pride in it. Made up of real newspaper women, true to their training, a fight is at any time preferable to stagnation and so when the rest of you leave off furnishing sensations it is a club boast that it has the talent within itself to get up something in that line.[25]
The WPCP founders were so assured that their members would be outspoken about public affairs that their original 1891 bylaws list the restriction that, “no member shall hold the floor beyond three minutes, except such privilege be accorded by motion, duly seconded and passed by the Club.”[26] To the press clubwomen, the ability to engage in learned argumentation about the day’s issue was a sign of talent and good journalistic training. According to Bayard, the newswomen were showing their journalism credentials with their ability to engage in public debates and educate themselves about the issues of the day. However, Bayard argued, the women’s ability to engage in debate should be a point of pride rather than shame. “If women journalists were not credited with being a little less than angelic than women in general and if any one had ever heard of an organization of consequence without friction, our shortcomings would be cause for greater shame (among the surviving members) than we now feel it to be, and point fingers intended to index the pugnacious proclivities of newspaper women could with better reason point at us.”[27] The argumentation, according to Bayard, not only made the women journalists people of “consequence,” but it kept them from “stagnation.” They were alive and constantly growing as journalists and people because of one another. Of Cara Reese, honorary clubmember Grayce D. Latus wrote, “She had a great sense of humor and did not take life too seriously. She often expressed advanced opinions just to see this reaction.”[28] Evidently this form of “education” was the one constant at the WPCP throughout its early years. A cartoon from February 1933 shows a privacy screen with a sign stating “Women’s Press Club-1891-1933: members only.” Behind that screen, women are ostensibly debating everything from Politics and movies to debt, war, travel, nudes, inhibitions, Japan, Technocracy, children, diets and symphonies.[29] This wide range of debate topics spoke to the women’s knowledge of the world and the necessity to see debate as entertainment and education if one were a clubwoman. In 1941, member Ruby Eiseman declared, “You sure do get a training in how to take it from the Press Club. Until you finally learn the trick of handing it back you have some rough going. But it is worth it. The girls nearly all have a keen sense of humor—not always gentle at that—but it is mostly FUN [emphasis Eiseman’s].”[30]
Even among the clubwomen, however, there was a sense of decorum that had to followed, however. One of the club’s most famous members, Gertrude Gordon, was rumored to have been blackballed “because of her flamboyant and sensational style of writing. She had a reputation of do-anything, go-anywhere for a story.”[31] In her history of the club, Ann Zurosky, herself a longtime club member and past president, wrote that Gordon was the first woman to earn a byline in the local newspapers.[32]
The formation of the Women’s Press Club roughly coincided with the publication of Mary Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible, which signaled the in-roads that women had made throughout the public sphere. Women were marching into the workplace as typists and shop girls, and they were taking on a moral voice in the temperance battle. Women were seeking to find their own voice in all issues on the public sphere, and Glenna Matthews, author of The Rise of Public Womanhood: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, notes that the late 1800s and early 1900s were the decades where women made some of the greatest gains in their ability to speak in the public sphere. She writes, “But on balance, the fact that a few public women of the period, most notably Emma Goldman and Ida B. Wells, began to speak publically about sex, without losing the ability to command an audience, represented an extraordinarily significant breakthrough for all women, the first indication that women might someday speak on the same range of public issues as men.”[33] The WPCP gave professional women journalists a place where they could speak on a range of public issues in a semi-public space. As women who worked for publications across the city, the seven founding women uncompromisingly battled their male counterparts for the “big” stories, proudly took on the role of “sob sisters”—those women who “covered sensational crimes with an emotional intensity that brought a tear to the eye”[34]—and joyfully battled one another for the biggest “scoop” in the city.
The club members drew attention and more women by creating notably lax membership rules in the 1890s. The primary requirement for active membership was that a woman had to be paid for her work, even if it was just a dollar per year of her age, as 15-year-old Smith was paid for her first two articles for the Chronicle Telegraph.[35]However, for associate membership, women who were affiliated with men whose work was journalism (i.e., wives of editors and publishers) were recruited to join the club’s ranks. These women then used their influence upon their husbands to influence hiring decisions in the newsrooms, leading to an influx of women in Pittsburgh newsrooms.
Several of the papers did not at that time approve of women writers on the staff, so we cunningly conceived of inviting into the fold, as associate members, wives of outstanding editors. Many of these were marvelous women in more ways than one, and ere long every paper had two or three women in editorial rooms. Those associate members were very helpful, inspiring, several of them later developing into writers. [36]
As Smith noted, the club association had positive reciprocal effects on both active and associate members. Active membership grew because associate members were rallying newsrooms to open spaces for new women journalists. Associate members learned the craft of writing from the active members, which, in turn, lead to some of them becoming wage-earning writers themselves. This shows the clubs’ work as an informal education structure for more than just the women journalists. The journalists taught writing to women whose husbands were involved in the news business; those wives then, in turn, kept their husbands educated about the work of women journalists. The wives also became writers themselves, making themselves the next generation of women journalists to need the WPCP’s support system. The club organically grew in this way.
Just as the organization of Sorosis forced the male press club to extend tickets to women journalists for the Dickens’ event, the organization of the Pittsburgh Women’s Press Club pushed male editors and journalists to begin accepting their female counterparts into their ranks. The simple show of solidarity gave the women strength to speak in the newsroom and gave them new ways to reach out to the local journalism community. Where the municipal housekeeping movement was encouraging women to become journalists, women journalists were organizing in their own ways but with similar goals to the municipal housekeeping movement. The women of the early WCPC demonstrated that women could still maintain their “womanly dignity,” even as they were venturing further into the public sphere. By organizing, the women created a united front that showed they were the rule for womanhood, not the exception. The women used the image of woman as homemaker to expand their role in newsrooms. They were uniquely suited to covering their beats, they argued, and even as the club itself faltered throughout the uncertainty of World Wars I and II, the women continued using the tools of womanhood to undermine the very image of womanhood that would keep them out various newspaper offices.
Notes:
1. Mrs. Charles M. Bregg [a.k.a., Nan Bregg, I use the formal title here because it was her usage on air.], WWSW, 29 January 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
2. Ibid.
3. Janey Coard Smith to Ms. Nan Bregg, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
4. George Swetnam, “Nellies Nieces,” Pittsburgh Press, 27 March 1960, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
5. Mary Temple Bayard, “Contributions from the Members of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh,” in “The American Youth,” WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
6. Janey Coard Smith to Mrs. Nannette Bregg, N.D., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
7. Patricia Lowry, “Bessie Bramble: A Force for Change,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 March 2007. Available from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07063/766082-51.stm.
8. Thomas Cushing, “A Genealogical and Biographical History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania,” excerpt from History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, by Dr. Thomas Cushing, Chicago, 1889, retitled by Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing, Co., 1975, 343.
9. “Sampler of Bessie Bramble’s Writing,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 March 2007. Available from http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07063/766137-51.stm.
10. Elizabeth V. Burt, ed., Women’s Press Organizations 1881-1999 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), table of contents.
11. For more on the Illinois Women’s Press Association, see their web site at www.iwpa.org.
12. The National Press Club, “History,” 2001, accessed 2 June 2011, http://press.org/about/history.
13. The Women’s Press Club of New York State, Inc., “About us,” 2009, accessed 2 June 2011, http://www.womenspressclubnys.com/about_us.
14. Women’s Press Club of Indiana, “About WPCI,” May 2011, accessed 2 June 2011, http://www.womenspressclubnys.com/about_us.
15. Helen S. Collins, Response on the occasion of being presented an honorary lifetime membership to the Women’s Press Club by President Mary Ellen McBride, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
16. Ibid.
17. First line “The Banquet of the Woman’s Press Club…” 1895, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
18. Untitled article under “The Event a Brilliant Success—Many Well-Known Writers Present—Womans Enlarged Sphere,” 1895, N.P., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
19. Morgan E. Gable to the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh. N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
20. “The Clubs,” Pittsburgh Bulletin, 15 Feb. 1896, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
21. Ibid.
22. First line: “The annual dinner of the Women’s Press club…,” 1900, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
23. Janey Coard Smith to Nanette Bregg, N.D. WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
24. Ruby Eiseman, "Woman’s Club of the Air,” WCAE, broadcast 28 Jan. 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
25. Bayard, “Contributions.”
26. Constitution and by-laws of the Woman’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, PA, Pittsburgh: Press of Percy F. Smith, 1891, WPCP, MSS #131, Box 1, Folder 1 Women’s Press Club-Charter and By-Laws, December 1893-October 14, 1988.
27. Mary Temple Bayard, “Contributions from the members of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh,” The American Youth, n.p., n.d., WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
28. Ann Zurosky, The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh 1891-1991: The First 100 Years, Pittsburgh, PA: The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, 1991.
29. Drawing by Ed Rafferty, February 1933, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
30. Ruby Eiseman, “Woman’s Club of the Air,” WCAE, transcript, 28 January 1941, WPCP, MSS 131, Box 1, Folder 2, History 1896-1954.
31. Zurosky, The Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh.
32. Nineteenth-century newspapers did not use bylines, and they were not common in Pittsburgh papers until the early twentieth Century. This makes it difficult to trace the career of any one member of the Women’s Press Club of Pittsburgh, for, even though the women make oblique references to articles they may have written, and there are some places where it can be assumed they wrote, such as the club and society columns, it is not clearly stated what the women actually wrote. Zurosky notes some of the more salacious titles from after bylines became more popular, including “Why Flirts Don’t Marry,” written by Ruby Eiseman under her pen name Beatrice Fairfax (pg. 19).
33. Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148.
34. Marion Marzolf, Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Hastings House, 1977), 32. Marzolf relates that the term “sob sisters” was coined by a male reporter to describe four women—Dorothy Dix, Winfred Black Bonfils, Ada Patterson, and Nixola Greeley-Smith. These four women were given front-row seats at the 1907 Harry K. Thaw murder trial and they were told to “give a sympathetic and emotional report of this sensational trial with its beautiful young heroine, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, ‘the girl in the red velvet swing.’” This term soon came to describe a group of women reporters whose journalism was meant to tug on the reader’s emotional strings rather than his or her analytical strings.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.