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In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped, undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum. She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse. Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a developing professional identity - that of the American newspaperwoman.The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newspaperwomen used sympathetic rhetoric to depict madness and crime while striving to establish their credentials as professional writers. Working against critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers. They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets, and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space within a male-dominated workplace.As the periodical market burgeoned, these pioneering, courageous women exemplified how narrative sympathy opened female space within the "hard news" city room of America's largest news- papers. Sympathy, Madness, and Crime offers a new chapter in the unfolding histories of nineteenth-century periodical culture, women's professional authorship, and the narrative construction of American penal and psychiatric institutions.

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Histoire

USA

United States of America

Media studies

History of the Americas

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	20 octobre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631012327
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A DVANCE P RAISE FOR S YMPATHY , M ADNESS, AND C RIME
“ Sympathy, Madness, and Crime is a lively and well-researched contribution to the expanding body of work on women’s involvement in the nineteenth-century press. Roggenkamp’s focus on how newspaperwomen deployed sympathy as a professional strategy in their coverage of crime and insanity significantly expands our sense of nineteenth-century women’s writing.”
—Sari Edelstein , author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing
“Karen Roggenkamp tells the tale of nineteenth-century newspaperwomen with wit and zeal—animating their derring-do and unveiling their strategies for feminizing newspaper work. Enjoyable to read and highly teachable, Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores the stories of four women who claimed controversial roles in the public sphere by insisting that journalism was consistent with womanly sensibilities. From sentiment to sensation writing, Roggenkamp argues, newspaperwomen used the rhetoric of emotional expertise to defend their professional qualifications. With fascinating anecdotes and sharp insights, Roggen-kamp brings their achievements to life.”
—Catherine Keyser , author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture
“Karen Roggenkamp’s Sympathy, Madness, and Crime is a highly engaging and enormously important contribution to the fields of periodical studies and American literature. Her comparative analysis of Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Elizabeth Jordan, and Nellie Bly shows that there still remains much to say about women’s unique role in nineteenth-century journalism, especially their ‘power of sympathy’ to influence progressive reforms and the innovative genres they helped spawn. Roggenkamp’s emphasis on the role of New York in their writing is also novel and insightful.”
—Mark Noonan , Professor of English, New York City College of Technology, and author of Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893 (The Kent State University Press, 2010)
S YMPATHY , M ADNESS, AND C RIME
K AREN R OGGENKAMP
Sympathy, Madness, and Crime
How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business
The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio
© 2016 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Chapter 6 was originally published in a different form in American Literary Realism , vol. 40, no. 1 © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2016008083
ISBN 978-1-60635-287-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roggenkamp, Karen, 1969- author.
Title: Sympathy, madness, and crime : how four nineteenth-century journalists made the newspaper women’s business / Karen Roggenkamp.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008083 (print) | LCCN 2016014950 (ebook) | ISBN 9781606352878 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781631012327 (ePub) | ISBN 9781631012334 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Women journalists--United States--History--19th century. | Women in journalism--United States--History--19th century. | Journalism--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century. | Newspaper publishing--United States--History--19th century. | Press--United States--History--19th century.
Classification: LCC PN4888.W66 R64 2016 (print) | LCC PN4888.W66 (ebook) | DDC 071/.3082--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008083
20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
This one is for Mason and Trevor
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Sympathy and the American Newspaper Woman
1 Representing Institutions: Asylums and Prisons in American Periodicals
2 Scenes of Sympathy: Margaret Fuller’s New-York Tribune Reportage
3 Entering Unceremoniously: Fanny Fern, Sympathy, and Tales of Confinement
4 Making a Spectacle of Herself: Nellie Bly, Stunt Reporting, and Marketed Sympathy
5 Sympathy and Sensation: Elizabeth Jordan, Lizzie Borden, and the Female Reporter in the Late Nineteenth Century
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the incalculable assistance of so many people and institutions, and to them I offer my profound thanks. Susan Louise Stewart, Edward Griffin, Donald Ross, J. D. Isip, and Cynthia Patterson experienced the indignity of suffering through early drafts of this book, and their suggestions yielded significant alterations to the manuscript. Jean Lee Cole and Mark Noonan, along with the anonymous reviewers for Kent State University Press, offered untold assistance with their detailed remarks and suggestions. And Joyce Harrison, acquiring editor at Kent State University Press, stood by me even though it all took far, far longer than it should have. Rest assured: I would have had it finished sooner if it hadn’t been for those four meddling kids and their dog!
I also wish to thank Jacob Pichnarcik and the Interlibrary Loan department at Texas A&M University–Commerce for their incomparable efforts in acquiring the materials I required, even when they were not easily obtained—not to mention loaning me an ancient but serviceable microfilm reader when I was unable to work on campus. A Faculty Development Leave from Texas A&M University–Commerce supported the composition of this manuscript; that uninterrupted research time provided a vital boost for the progress of this book. More generally, I am eternally grateful for where I have landed professionally, because my colleagues in the Department of Literature and Language make work a pleasure and my students provide energy and hope.
Finally, my family members, including, of course, those “four meddling kids,” receive more than a lion’s share of my love and gratitude. You expressed (relative) patience whenever I grew overexcited about nineteenth-century periodical culture, and that forbearance is priceless in just about any context.
Introduction
Sympathy and the American Newspaper Woman
On September 3, 1859, the front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described a surprise attack on the female editor of a Cleveland paper called the Spy , complete with an engraving that vividly represented the chaos in the news office (see fig. 1 ). 1 The anonymous “editress” had written and printed a paper “which contained some very ‘spicy’ articles,” one of which so offended a male reader that he visited the paper’s office and commenced “smashing things inanimate.” Not to be intimidated, the editress, “being a woman of spirit, declared war” and “undertook to give it him wholesale.” “The fun grew fast and furious,” the article wryly accounts, until the man forced the woman to the ground and “went so far as to beat her with his fists” before “throwing the type out of the window” and “retir[ing], covered with glory and ink.” The editress of the paper, however, “recovered in time to issue the paper as usual.” Glory and ink, indeed!
This attack exemplifies, if rather dramatically, the outright hostility women might face if they dared enter the cutthroat world of the nineteenth-century newspaper marketplace, especially when such acts appeared to violate powerful ideologies about proper gender roles. From the beginning of the American republic, newspaper publishers envisioned men as their ideal readers and directed their publications toward “only literate citizens, who were most likely to be white and male.” 2 Women, though, certainly read newspapers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, even more directly, they played active, productive roles in the industry from the colonial period forward. 3 Under British rule, local printers sometimes worked alongside their wives and daughters to ensure that the business would survive the printer’s death—or, on occasion, his arrest for publishing illegal materials. As Isaiah Thomas, America’s first press historian, observed, it was “quite a common thing for widows … to take up and carry on the husband’s trade, and not uncommon for them to set up businesses of their own.” 4 Although many of their names are lost to time, some female printers of note survive in historical accounts, including Elizabeth Timothy, who operated and edited the South Carolina Gazette for seven years after her husband died in 1738 and whose business acumen Benjamin Franklin praised; Sarah and Mary Katherine Goddard, a mother-and-daughter team that ran the Providence Gazette and Country Journal , which Sarah Goddard’s son William owned; Clementina Rind, editor of the Virginia Gazette , which published Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary of the Rights of British America; Anna Zenger, who published the New York Weekly Journal while her husband, Peter, was on trial for libel in 1733; and Anne Franklin, who assumed responsibility for newspapers her husband and son left her and enjoyed a printing career for twenty-three years. Indeed, America’s very first printer was the widow of Joseph Glover, who died while crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1638 with the first press for Harvard College, leaving the business of installation and operation to his capable wife.

Figure 1. Attack upon an Editress in Cleveland, Ohio , dramatically portrays male prejudice against a professional newspaper woman. ( Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper , September 3, 1859; author’s collection)
While these early examples show women’s skills in professional printing, those women who desired what we would now characterize as reporting roles did not, in general, benefit as the periodical marketplace grew in the nineteenth century. The numbers of newspaper titles exploded as the century progressed, but the numbers of women involved in the profession remained miniscule until the 1880s and 1890s. Between 1810 and 1825, the number of newspapers expanded from some four hundred t