Secondary Source
“Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil”: Women Journalists and Cultural Leadership of the Women’s Movement in Australia and the United States
Diane Kirkby. Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History. Vol. 104, May 2013, pp. 81-100.
Era: Post-Suffrage Era | Media: Academic Paper
An abstract and information on how to access this 2013 article are available from JSTOR, which local and academic libraries are likely to have as a resource. You can check WorldCat to see if there’s one near you. The following is the article’s abstract:
Journalism has been crucial to progressive political movements, and the work of journalists has
provided the cultural leadership necessary for recruiting members and advancing the cause.
This cultural leadership is explored through the journalism of three women who in Australia
and the United States, wrote for a labour and socialist readership and also edited a periodical.
Combining paid work and activism, journalism gave them an occupation that was an example
to other women, and a vehicle for publicising women’s rights. Exercising leadership through
print media was important in expanding women’s economic citizenship and their political
engagement. Through their words and personal example over a century, these three women
journalists – Alice Henry, Jennie Scott Griffiths and Delia Elliott – provided the leadership
that helped construct women in the twentieth century as active political subjects.
For more on women journalists and suffrage, see Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality and “A New Generation,” in Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence.