Anne Royall, Pioneering Professional Journalist

Anne Newport Royall, Writer and Publisher (born 11 June 1769)

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of William and Mary Newport, Anne Newport Royall was a writer and editor, frequently credited as the "first American newspaperwoman." 

As her early biographer writes in The Life and Times of Anne Royall (1908), the Newport family, like many of their contemporaries, moved "west," first to Virginia and then into "the frontier Pennsylvania" in 1772: "the men and women who moved into this so-called 'western' wilderness sought neither gold, nor adventure, nor the establishment of any one form of religious faith. Their sole object was to secure that blessing most highly prized in all ages by the Anglo-Saxon heart—a private home."

The family of four was not wealthy. Anne herself later enumerated their meager possessions: 

Our cabin, or camp, rather, was very small—not more than eight or ten feet. This contained one bed, four wooden stools with legs stuck in them through augur holes, half a dozen tin cups and the like number of pewter plates, knives, forks and spoons, though my sister (very mischievous) broke one of the spoons and seriously damaged one of the plates, for which I was chastised. Besides these we had a tray and a frying-pan, a camp kettle and a pot; and our cabin was considered the best furnished on the frontier.

Like many of their neighbors, the Newport family found themselves under threat by displaced Native Americans. The family was forced to take refuge in a "fort," not so much a military stockade as a small settlement where several families lived--"if it could be called living," Anne would tartly write about life in such "pioneer forts."

After the early death of William Newport, Mary Newport remarried, her second husband a man named Butler, but he died in 1782 in an Indian raid. By 1785, in a terribly impoverished state, the widowed Mary Newport Butler moved her small family to Staunton, a small town in western Virginia, where she had relatives. She eventually took up a position as housekeeper for William Royall, a wealthy farmer in Sweet Springs, Virginia, who had been a major during the American Revolution.

William Royall seems to have recognized potential in the sixteen-year-old Anne--he undertook to have her educated, opened his library to her, and, in 1797, married the now twenty-eight-year-old woman.  

The couple lived together happily until William Royall's death in 1812; he left her the use of his estate in his will, but his family contested it, claiming the two were never legally married. Years of litigation followed, and although the will was upheld in 1817, that ruling was appealed, and in 1819 a jury annulled it.

Dispossessed of her husband's provision for her, Anne Newport Royall spent the next years traveling (primarily in Alabama) and writing, a collection of her observations about the state, later published by subscription as Letters from Alabama (1817-22). 

In 1824, she traveled to Washington, D.C., hoping to be granted a pension as a widow of a Revolutionary War soldier. (Her husband's family would, in 1848, claim her pension money.) There she met President John Quincy Adams, conducting what is sometimes claimed to be the first presidential interview by a woman. 

Adams also bought a subscription to support her publication of a new work, one that would recount her travel through New England. Leaving Washington, she traveled in New England. Her Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States was published in Hartford, Connecticut, under the pseudonym "A Traveller" in 1826. 

Her forthright critiques--she did not shy away from describing honestly what she saw and experienced--caused problems for her, with one critic deriding her as a "literary wildcat from the backwoods." Back in Washington, she suffered further indignities after she raised objections to a group of Presbyterians being allowed to meet in a publicly funded firehouse. A member of the congregation claimed Royall had cursed her and, once again, she found herself in court, where she was convicted of being a public nuisance, a "public brawler," and a "common scold"; she was fined ten dollars, her fine being paid by two local newspapermen.

Royall turned once again to traveling, publishing a novel, The Tennessean, in 1827, and then further selections of her travel writing: The Black Book, or, A Continuation of Travels in the United States, in 1828, and Mrs. Royall’s Pennsylvania, or, Travels Continued in the United States, in 1829. Her Letters from Alabama was finally published in 1830), and Mrs. Royall’s Southern Tour, or, Second Series of Black Books appeared in 1831.

Back in Washington in 1831, she also began publishing a weekly newspaper, Paul Pry, the first issue appearing on 3 December of that year. The newspaper included her own editorials, "excerpts from other papers, advertisements, letters to the editor–-and her lengthy replies." She was intent on exposing government corruption--and when postmasters refused to deliver her papers, she published their names, along with the names of subscribers who were late with their payments.

The title of her newspaper was later changed; under its new name, The Huntress, publication continued until 2 July 1854, just two months before her death, at age eighty-five, on 1 October. During those years, Royall continued to pursue cases of governmental corruption, fraud, incompetence, nepotism, and graft. She exposed corrupt practices that defrauded Native Americans, and while she opposed slavery, she also opposed the tactics of abolitionists. For good measure, although she disliked both alcohol and drunkenness, she also opposed temperance activists.

In assessing Anne Royall's longevity and her acquaintance, J. D. Thomas notes, 

 Her personal knowledge of the public men of her time is most remarkable. She met and talked with every person who filled the presidential chair, beginning with Washington and ending with Lincoln. It was probably on the occasion of his visit to Sweet Springs in 1797 that she saw General Washington. She chatted with John Adams in his own home when he was eighty-nine years of age. Lincoln she must have seen during his one term in Congress. She even met Lafayette on his visit to Boston in 1825. The great Frenchman gave her a letter in support of her pension claim.

(The persistent Royall finally got her pension when she was eighty years old, but it was--successfully--claimed by her deceased husband's relentless family.)

While I am always bitching about the Encyclopedia Britannica for its failure to include women, there is a brief article there on Anne Royall. So, yay?

For an excellent essay by Cynthia Earman, "Uncommon Scold," click here.

Sarah Harvey Porter's 1908 biography of Anne Royall is available in full by clicking here. Elizabeth J. Clapp's recent A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America is also available.

Many of her works are available online--the Internet Archive offers full texts for most of her works, while Letters from Alabama, for example, is at Google Books, 

Harriet Martineau: "A Great Lion in London"

Harriet Martineau (died 27 June 1876)

Born on June 12 1802, Harriet Martineau was the daughter of Thomas Martineau and Elizabeth Rankin. Martineau's father was a manufacturer of textiles (the "Norwich staples" of "bombazine and camlet") and an importer of wine, her mother the daughter of a wholesale grocer and sugar refiner, based in Newcastle. Nothing about this family background marked Harriet Martineau out for the remarkable career she would make for herself--except for her family's progressive views on education. 

Harriet Martineau, 1834,
portrait by Richard Evans

Harriet Martineau was provided with the same education as her brothers, at least until the brothers went off to continue their education at the university level.

In 1823, Martineau would publish "On Female Education" in the Unitarian journal Monthly Repository describing this essential injustice--an article her brother James, studying to become a minister, praised.

And once he learned his sister was the author, he encouraged her to do more than point out the injustice: "Now, dear, leave it to the other women to make skirts and darn stockings, and you devote yourself to this." 

Martineau did indeed devote herself to "this"--and to much more. Although tempted by a marriage her father arranged, she ultimately rejected a domestic life. She continued to write for the Monthly Repository on a number of subjects before relocating to London.

There she wrote devotional works before turning her attention to topics much less "suitable" for women--she wrote on politics and economics, publishing Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833–34), and Illustrations of Taxation (1834). It was in 1834 that Charles Darwin, in Galapagos, received a letter from his sister noting that Martineau had become "a great Lion in London."

Martineau traveled to America in 1836 and published two works after that trip, Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). In both she was highly critical of the way that the supposed democratic society operated. The chapter on women in Society in America--"Political Non-Existence of Women"--is particularly noteworthy: "One of the fundamental principles announced in the Declaration of Independence is, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. How can the political condition of women be reconciled with this?"

In America, Martineau met with a number of important American abolitionists, and in addition to the two books on her trip, her 1839 essay in the Westminster Review, "The Martyr Age in the United States," focused on the abolitionist movement in the United States.

In her long writing career, Martineau published novels, children's stories, histories, an autobiographical account of illness and invalidism (Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid), books on education (Household Education, 1848) and gardening, and on philosophy (Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, 1851), all the while continuing regular journalistic work (she contributed some 1600 articles just to the Daily News). She also traveled to the Middle East, publishing Eastern Life Past and Present (1848) and, a little closer to home, A Complete Guide to the English Lakes in 1855.

Although she suffered a number of disabilities and illnesses throughout her life, Martineau lived a relatively long and full life, dying in 1876 at the age of seventy-four.

Martineau is remembered today as a social activist and reformer, an economics and history writer, a journalist, and a feminist. In her now-classic anthology The Feminist Papers (1973), second-wave feminist and sociologist Alice S. Rossi had this to say about Harriet Martineau:

Crusty, garrulous, a prodigious writer, a forerunner of the discipline of sociology not yet born, Harriet Martineau stands as an early ardent defender of women's rights, the first woman sociologist, and a sympathetic observer of the social condition of women in a society that proclaimed freedom and justice for all but did not grant it to more than half its population.

You can read Martineau's "Political Non-Existence of Women" (in the first volume of Society in America) by clicking here. Another section, "Woman" (in the second volume of Society in America) is available here ("If a test of civilisation be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power. . . . Tried by this test, the American civilisation appears to be of a lower order than might have been expected . . . . ")

Society in America and many other works by Martineau are available through Google Books; many are also accessible at Project Gutenberg or through a free Kindle download. Martineau also wrote an autobiography, published posthumously, but you may enjoy Deborah Anna Logan's The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau's "Somewhat Remarkable" Life.

Bonus trivia: according to Christopher Wilson's article in The Telegraph, "The Benefits of a Feminist in the Family," Kate Middleton is a descendant of Harriet Martineau: "Harriet Martineau's father was Kate's great, great, great, great, great grandfather." Why so backwards, Mr. Wilson? Instead of focusing on Martineau's father for this genealogical link, why couldn't you put it in these terms:  "Kate Middleton's great great great great great grandmother Elizabeth Rankin Martineau"? 

Margaret Fuller: American Journalist, Transcendentalist, Feminist

Sarah Margaret Fuller (born 23 May 1810)

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Margaret Fuller was given a rigorous education by her father, a politician and lawyer. Unlike many men of his time, Timothy Fuller trained his daughter as he would a son--though Fuller would later blame her father's demands and expectations for her "nervous affections," the nightmares, sleepwalking, migraines, and depression that plagued her throughout her life.

An 1846 daguerrotype of
Margaret Fuller

After her father was elected to the U.S. Congress, Fuller attended a series of schools to continue her education, including the Port School in Cambridgeport (1819), the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies (1821-22), and the School for Young Ladies in Groton (1824-26), but at the age of sixteen she returned home to continue her education on her own in a course of study she outlined for herself--she read widely, focused on teaching herself modern languages, and continued the study of the classics her father had begun.

Two crucial events occurred in 1835: Fuller's father died, and she made the acquaintance of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The family's dire financial circumstances after Timothy Fuller's death led to Margaret Fuller's first career, as a teacher. She took up a position at Bronson Alcott's Temple School, Boston (1836-37), then at the Green Street School, in Providence, Rhode Island (1837-39). 

Back in Boston, Fuller then launched a series of "conversations" for women at the noted educator Elizabeth Peabody's West Street bookshop. These conversations were by subscription--the first of them was held on 6 November 1839, the last in 1844. These were a series of discussions, organized and conducted by Fuller, on literature, education, religion, and art, all of which aimed at improving women's lives and allowing them a greater participation in the exchange of ideas, opinions, and views. They also raised the "great questions" facing women: What are we born to do? What are we capable of doing? In Boston she joined the Transcendentalist movement, which included among its notable members Elizabeth Peabody and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Fuller also began her career in journalism, editing the Transcendentalist literary and philosophical journal, The Dial, from 1840 to 1842. In 1843, The Dial published her essay "The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women," one of the first great feminist texts by an American writer.

In 1844, she moved to New York to write for Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune. She also produced a travel diary, Summer on the Lake, recording her travels in the Great Lakes and Wisconsin territories.

Expanding on "The Great Lawsuit," she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, now her most well known work, in 1845. In this extraordinary extended essay, Fuller urges women to educate themselves in order to gain a measure of independence outside the domestic sphere. She also argues for women's equality, analyzes the institution of marriage, and advocates for a reform of property laws.

In 1846, Fuller left the United States for Europe, traveling as a foreign correspondent for Greeley. While in Europe and writing for the Tribune, she met Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, and George Sand.

In Italy, Fuller reported on the revolution, met and married Angelo d'Ossoli, and had a child. She died in a shipwreck on returning to the U.S., just off the coast of Fire Island, New York.  

For Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay on Fuller, which includes a heartbreaking account of Fuller's death at sea, click here. The occasion of Thurman's essay is the publication of two biographies of Fuller, John Matteson's The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, and Megan Marshall's Margaret Fuller: An American Life.

There are many printed editions of Fuller's work available, but I've linked here to online editions available via the American Transcendentalism website.

(If you're interested, there is a wonderful biography, also by Megan Marshall, of Elizabeth Peabody and her sisters: The Peabody Sisters: The Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.)

Update, 20 May 2020: The American Transcendentalism website is now archived--I've updated the links here so that they are still working, but if you should have a problem, that's why. 

Nellie Bly, a Groundbreaking Investigative Journalist

Elizabeth Jane Cochran ("Nellie Bly"), investigative reporter (died 27 January 1922)

Over the course of my long teaching career, I had many women students in my classes who were preparing themselves for a career in journalism. Few of them knew about any of their predecessors--not Nancy Dickerson or Nancy Maynard, much less Ida B. Wells or Margaret Fuller. Even fewer had ever heard the name of Nellie Bly.

Nellie Bly,
c. 1890

Born in 1864, Elizabeth Jane Cochrane first wrote for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Her series of articles on the plight of female factory workers led her to New York--and an undercover investigative assignment in a "woman's lunatic asylum" for the New York World. She published a book recounting this harrowing experience, Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887).

Bly's next and most famous exploit was also undertaken for the tabloid, her seventy-two-day around-the-world trip inspired by Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. She left New York on 14 November 1889 and landed in San Francisco on 21 January 1890. She published Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890) shortly after her return.

She retired from journalism when she married in 1895. After the death of her husband, in 1904, Bly returned to reporting, covering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 and covering World War I while on the Eastern Front.

For a brief essay on Bly from the National Women's History Museum, click here. There are many biographies, but you might start with Sue Macy's Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly (with a foreward by Linda Ellerbee, herself a noteworthy model of journalistic accomplishment).

There is also a PBS documentary, Around the World in 72 Days, filmed as part of the American Experience series. This used to be freely available for viewing at the PBS website, but now you seem to need a subscription to view it--the video is posted on YouTube, however (probably illegally), although you should be able to find it there  if you are persistent).