Blog Post #5 - Girl Reporters

 Most of the 19th century saw journalism as a specifically masculine profession; however in the 1880s and early 1900s, female journalists, also known as the "Girl Reporters," became a more common trend to see. 

These female reporters would go undercover and place themselves in dangerous situations to reveal and expose the urban institutional issues that flooded society. This was really the beginning of investigative journalism as a whole but because it was more common for women, it was referred to as stunt reporting.

Nellie Bly was one of the first stunt reporters to leave her mark in the journalism community, establishing a standard for those that followed. She and other "Girl Reporters" proved that you didn’t need a lot of training but rather a lot of bravery. In 1887, many editors refused to hire a female journalist so when Bly was offered the opportunity to produce an investigative piece, she took it. She had herself committed to the infamous insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. 

She lacked many qualifications with little formal education, no professional training as a journalist, and no credentials in any specialized field. Despite this, Bly became a national phenomenon during a formative moment in American mass culture. While Bly and her followers were often scorned by more traditional journalists, they were the first newspaper women to move from the women's pages to the front page.

Elizabeth Garver Jordan was an aspiring young female journalist. She was hired by editor of the New York World in 1889 to produce more emotive pieces. She is example of how women manipulated sympathy as a rhetorical strategy for positioning themselves in the newspaper world. Jordan had a gift for the dramatic, human interest stories favored by readers and writers alike in the late nineteenth century. She specialized in stories that blurred the lines between fiction and news, and it wasn't long before she began writing straight fiction, inspired by her news stories.

Victoria Earle Matthews was another "Girl Reporter" who worked for three New York newspapers. She went undercover to observe the abuse of young black women in employment agencies in the south. After writing her story, she took it a step further and decided to open up a settlement house for these women. Prior to some of these female journalists, women struggled to claim space for themselves in the industry. Female reporters and journalists like Bly, Jordan, Matthews and others helped women claim their spot on the front page of a paper. 

The “Girl Reporters” had an immense impact on American journalism. They brought the female voice into the newsroom through investigative journalism pieces, often supporting women’s rights. They were able to change the public perception of women’s abilities and steered away from stereotypical topics such as fashion and society news. They offered a new angle to womanhood that hadn’t been showcased in newspapers before – the brave, charming, independent, professional, ambitious female. 

Many argue the female reporter could access reality and produce a more realistic and “objective” form of journalism. While male colleagues were convinced "women were only capable of fluff or tear jerking stories,” female journalists like the “Girl Reporters” and “Sob Sisters” turned their emotional and sympathetic tendencies to a rhetorical asset.