Category: articles

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Nellie Bly and the incognito ‘stunt girl’ reporters

A close up of the young Nellie Bly. She is wearing a high collar dress and has a short fringe. Text next to it reads "Nellie Bly goes around the world 25 January 1890"
Bly is wearing a travelling outfit of a dress with a long skirt and tight bodice. Over it is a floor length check coat. She has a bag in one hand a is raising her cap with the other.
Nellie Bly in her travelling clothes

On 25 January 1890, American journalist Nellie Bly stepped off a train in New York and into a huge crowd that was waiting for her. She had just become the first person to travel around the world in less than eighty days. Not only had she done it, she had beaten her rival, Elizabeth Bisland, by four days.

The 1890 race around the world reveals that Bly, perhaps the most famous newswoman then writing, was not unique. From 1887 through to the middle of the 1890s, the ‘stunt girls’ made front page news. They wrote it, and they became it.

So in this post we’re looking at the rise and fall of stunt journalism, and the women involved in it.

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A brief history of Ms.

The front cover of Ms Magazine from 1972. It shows a giatn Wonder Woman walking down an American street. The text reads 'A brief history of Ms - how women's titles have changed over the centuries.

It’s over 50 years since the first standalone newsstand edition of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine was published (1 July 1972). And yet women still have conversations about boring life admin in which they must answer the question “Miss or Mrs?” with “It’s Ms, actually.” So here’s a brief history of the title, for when someone assumes you’re using it to indicate you’re divorced (yes, that really still happens).

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Charlotte E Ray and 143 years of progress

A modern illustration of how Charlotte E Ray might have looked when she graduated. She is a Black woman with a mortar board on a piled up hairdo. Text reads Charlotte E Ray becomes a lawyer 23 April 1872.

The first African-American woman to be Attorney General of the USA, Loretta Lynch, was appointed on 23 April 2015 in Washington DC. The very same day, 143 years earlier in 1872, Charlotte E Ray became the first African-American woman admitted to practice law in the USA.

Sometimes history throws up these little co-incidences. This one gives us the opportunity to look at two very different law careers available to a Black woman in the USA.

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Eight famous women singers

Camilla Williams wearing a fur and holding flowers. She is a black woman with dark hair in a wave. Text reads "Camilla Williams debuts at the New York City Opera - May 1946".

On 15 May 1946, Camilla Williams made her debut as Cio-Cio San in the New York City Opera’s production of ‘Madame Butterfly’. She was the first black woman to sign a contract with a major US opera company. This month, we take a quick look at eight of the most iconic female singers in opera history.

First up, it’s worth noting that opera was hugely popular from the 1700s to the 1960s. These famous women singers were as popular in their time as Beyonce or Lizzo now. It’s also worth noting that opera singers were seen as disreputable and scandalous in the 1700s, and this social attitude continued into the 1800s. As ever, powerful, financially independent women using their voices had to be cast out in some way.

This month we’re focussing on female popular singers from the 1830 onwards. Maybe we’ll visit the Covent Garden of the 1700s another time…

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Sixty years of Silent Spring

Rachel Carson standing in front of a bookcase in 1962. Overlaid is the cover of her book Silent Spring

Olga Owens Huckins watched the birds falling lifeless all around her property in Massachusetts in January 1958. It was just after the area had been sprayed with DDT from a plane. She wrote to the Boston Herald and sent a copy of her letter to her friend Rachel Carson. Carson was a marine biologist and a best-selling nature writer who was already very concerned about the use of man-made chemicals, especially pesticides, on the natural world.

Carson already had three best-selling non-fiction books: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. She added her friend’s letter to the evidence she was building for her next book.

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Our work elsewhere…non-violent protest

Mags has written about the parallels between the Mansion House protest and early suffragette tactics for the New Statesman.

Read the article here.

The key source for the suffragettes parts is Rise Up, Women by Diane Atkinson (Bloomsbury, 2018). Mags has been reading it steadily for months, and marking events that could become #OnThisDay facts for our social media.

photo of paperback of Rise Up Women showing page markers
Mags’ copy of Rise Up, Women with page markers. Yes, it is going to take a while to add them all to the datafiles…

She also considered including the Greenham Peace Camp, where again women using non-violent protest were violently treated.

“I didn’t include them in the end. The missiles left Greenham not because of the protests but the wider glasnost and thawing of the Cold War. I also wanted to use the statues in Parliament Square to support my point that people once seen as threatening to those in power become celebrated. The Greenham women are not as far along that journey of acceptance.”

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Illustrated Women fanzine for #WHM2019

Since we started compiling our database of things women achieved on this day in history, we have discovered many, many women we had not known about. Moira has written about one of them, Althea Gibson, for this year’s Illustrated Women in History Women’s History Month fanzine.

The site and zine are produced by Julie Gough, who is attempting to illustrate one women a week to learn more about women in history and celebrate their accomplishments. ‘zines, and women’s use of them to get their messages out, is something we’re big fans of so we are delighted to contribute a biog of Althea.

You can find out more about who the zine features this month over at Julie’s website, or click straight to her etsy shop to buy a copy!

We may well come back to Althea here: probably around the time the English media gets excitable about Wimbledon!