If you ask the average American to name a female reporter, most will be hard-pressed to name anyone besides Dear Abby or Ann Landers. These two "Agony Aunts" were sisters and today their daughters and others write their columns. Few Americans can name a woman...
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If you ask the average American to name a female reporter, most will be hard-pressed to name anyone besides Dear Abby or Ann Landers. These two "Agony Aunts" were sisters and today their daughters and others write their columns. Few Americans can name a woman journalist.
The history of discrimination against women journalists goes back to colonial America. Then came Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman who wrote under the pen name of Nellie Bly. She showed that a woman journalist could do serious muckraking. Her example inspired Dorothy Thompson who was born July 9,1893 in Lancaster, New York.
Peter Kurth has written an excellent biography of this pioneering woman journalist, tracing her life from her childhood in western New York, her journalism career, and marriages and divorces. After divorcing her first husband Josef Bard, she married author Sinclair Lewis in 1928. She divorced Lewis in 1942.
In 1920, she traveled to Europe and wrote free-lance pieces for several U.S. newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor. In 1924, the Philadelphia Public Ledger appointed her their Berlin bureau chief, which made Thompson the first woman to head a major overseas news bureau.
She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany (in 1934), and began a crusade against dictatorship and other forms of fascism. Concerning our current U.S. president, she predicted:
"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce'. But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!' "
If you ask the average American to name a female reporter, most will be hard-pressed to name anyone besides Dear Abby or Ann Landers. These two "Agony Aunts" were sisters and today their daughters and others write their columns. Few Americans can name a woman journalist.
The history of discrimination against women journalists goes back to colonial America. Then came Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman who wrote under the pen name of Nellie Bly. She showed that a woman journalist could do serious muckraking. Her example inspired Dorothy Thompson who was born July 9,1893 in Lancaster, New York.
Peter Kurth has written an excellent biography of this pioneering woman journalist, tracing her life from her childhood in western New York, her journalism career, and marriages and divorces. After divorcing her first husband Josef Bard, she married author Sinclair Lewis in 1928. She divorced Lewis in 1942.
In 1920, she traveled to Europe and wrote free-lance pieces for several U.S. newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor. In 1924, the Philadelphia Public Ledger appointed her their Berlin bureau chief, which made Thompson the first woman to head a major overseas news bureau.
She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany (in 1934), and began a crusade against dictatorship and other forms of fascism. Concerning our current U.S. president, she predicted:
"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce'. But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!' "
