Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [79]
Most of you perusing this little pamphlet have in all probability given many of your youthful Saturdays to the movies. In the films you have seen, there have been women who find work as reporters and go on to break the big story. Fairy dust, ladies, fairy dust. Let’s set the record straight up top…. The majority of reporters are men, many with military records and other distinguished accomplishments to back them up…. But there is a place for the modern woman, if she is well educated, properly bred…but if you imagine in your dreams that’ll be you covering the presidential press conference, take a good deep breath and remember that you are a Susie. “Susie?” Didn’t I mention Susie? All the gang call the new female recruits “Susie” until they do something outstanding and earn themselves another nickname.
It goes on to describe a life so grueling one might be reading a publication of the U.S. military. Yet by 1934, the Labor Department estimated that there were 15,000 “girl reporters” (compared with a total of only 7,105 in 1920), including several hundred editors across the country. Although most of these young women found themselves on the casserole-and-sweater beats, they kept at it, and by 1950, there were 28,595 female journalists.
Within a few years, the existence of so many reporters would inspire a rush of “girl-reporter” movies as well as the birth of comic-strip perennial Brenda Starr. But at the time, books and movie serials featured reporter like snoops, detectives with blond hair, nice manners, and remarkable powers of deduction. Nancy Drew, who debuted in 1930, drove a blue coupe and with her two girl pals, Bess and George, solved community mysteries. Detective Judy Bolton went to work in 1932, and that same year Joan Blondell, best known for playing sardonic chorines with a past, became Miss Pinkerton, a nurse who investigates a murder on the large estate where she lives and works.
These fantasies tried to pull struggling women into small mysteries and story lines more captivating than those of their own lives. But plenty of women were out there having real-life wild adventures of their own.
ON THE ROAD, FEMALE EDITION
There were always a few women reporters who published more than their recipes. Many of these writers had been encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who held a weekly woman-only press conference, inviting prominent journalists including Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press; Genevieve Forbes Herrick of the Chicago Tribune; Marjorie C. Driscoll from the Los Angeles Examiner; Grace Robinson, the New York Daily News; Elenore Kellogg, the New York World; Ruth Finney of Scripps-Howard, and Emma Bugbee from the New York Herald Tribune. Over time, the First Lady had come to view women as a class apart, a group having its own distinct, neglected problems, and she believed reporters might best bring these postsuffrage issues into public debate. Even those not within the inner circle got the message. Freelance writer Grace Hutchins makes the perfect example.
During the mid-thirties, Hutchins spent two years traveling the country in search of the Forgotten Woman. She found a great one: Miss Bertha Thompson, aka Boxcar Bertha, the famed lifelong female hobo. At age thirty or thirty-two—she wasn’t quite sure—Bertha told Hutchins her life story. How her family had hit the road in desperation years earlier. How she’d learned to read and spell by sounding out the words painted on the sides of passing freight cars. Her mother taught her the rest of what she needed to know, a body of knowledge that might be entitled “Don’t Count on Men.”
At the time Hutchins met her, Bertha had established a chain of female “transient bureaus