Public Spaces / Private Lives: Fictionalizing the Female Journalist, 1880-1946

Abstract

Through feminist geography, public sphere theory, and journalism history, this project argues that British and American authors articulated their anxiety and excitement surrounding changes in the culture of publicity and of women’s position in the public sphere through the figure of the fictional newspaperwoman. The female journalist was uniquely positioned at a liminal space between the public and private spheres to embody disparate complications and social conversations about gender, privacy, movement, and journalism: as a middle-class white woman, she made more inroads than many women before through her work, and as a journalist for mainstream papers, she wrote primarily about the private sphere for public audiences.

This project examines dozens of novels, short stories, films, and plays across a 60-year period to argue that there are three ways in which the newspaperwoman figure embodied contradictory feelings about the position of women and the culture of publicity: first, her search for a “home” within and her “gerrymandering” out of physical public spaces; second, her battle between journalistic ethics as she wrote about the private sphere for a growing public audience; and lastly, her private life as imagined by authors to guarantee her gerrymandering into the private sphere through marriage or to highlight how homosocial relationships help achieve personal and professional success in a heteropatriarchal society. Fiction about these white, largely middle-class women was written in response to their movement from the periphery into physical, discursive, and social public spaces previously denied to them. The first monograph of its kind, this project brings authorial intent to the foreground in its study of the female journalist figure and the fiction she inspired and exposes the subgenre’s inherently contradictory perceptions of women’s position in society and journalism’s role in the exposure of the private sphere that can also be found in fiction today.