Setting the record straight: women literary journalists writing against the mainstream.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20289783

Women, when their stories are told in the mainstream press, are often constrained to preconceived notions of gender roles, described as fallen, sensationalized as cold-blooded killers or hapless victims, flattened into archetypes to conform to cultural master narratives, or stereotyped as microcosmic representations of a larger demographic. But the mainstream press is not the last word. In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, as the media in America began to codify around the ideal of objectivity in reporting that we are familiar with today, a new genre was born, a hybrid of the older sentimental story model and the new fact-based reporting. By combining the subjectivity of the story model with the factual rigor of the ideal of objectivity, literary journalism is well suited to tell the stories behind the headlines and to offer correctives to often over-simplified narratives. There at the beginning of the literary journalisms genesis and continuing through today, women literary journalists have proven particularly adept at offering a much needed to corrective to, first, sensational reporting, and then to so-called objective journalism. Some of the best and most persuasive examples of literary journalism over the course of its nearly 200-year history were written by Catherine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Zora Neale Hurston, and Joan Didion, among others, who work against reductive, objectified representations of women to set the record straight, to tell the stories of actual women whose full character comes alive on the page. While a few of these women have, by some scholars, been recognized as writers of literary journalism, their work is widely underrepresented in contemporary discussions of the genre. And, while their styles differ, and in some cases, challenge the notion of what has come to constitute literary journalism, they are unified in their effort to narrow the gap between the subjectivities of author, reader, and subject. This dissertation is an effort both to recover the writing of the earliest women literary journalists, and to show the ways in which the styles they employed and concerns that preoccupied them namely working against the objectification and caricaturing of women continue to animate the work of women writers who followed into the twentieth century and through to today.