Women in American Political History – serie

This book presents the story of Ruby A. Black, a feminist who broke new ground for women in Washington journalism in the 1920s and 1930s as a correspondent for a Puerto Rican newspaper and the first biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt. It offers access to the secret correspondence that shows how Black used her friendship with Roosevelt to advance the political career of Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected governor. The book describes Black’s effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to become both a well-regarded journalist and a political operative in the nation’s capital, a feat particularly difficult for a woman. It contends Black’s closeness to Roosevelt proved both a help and a hindrance to Black’s stature as a journalist.

This book includes the relatively unknown stories of six important women who laid the foundation for improving women’s equality in the U.S. While they largely worked behind the scenes, they made a significant impact. In the group are two female political operatives who worked behind the scenes along with four female journalists who also occasionally worked within government to advance women’s rights during the 1950s through the 1970s. Much of it centers on Washington, D.C., as well as the more unlikely cities of Madison, Wisconsin and Miami, Florida. It includes the story of a women’s page journalist who published an official government report in her newspaper section when the White House refused to release it. This book documents the stories of women who organized to help gain employment for other women and also worked to raise the stature of homemakers. Numerous other issues for women were also addressed. The fight for equality became more visible in the 1960s although the foundation had been laid as early as the 1950s, fueled by the post-World War II era. Change was initiated by a mix of women in government and women in the news media – at times going back and forth in those positions. These particular women were chosen because of their interactions with each other as they rallied around a common cause and because their names were overshadowed by other women’s liberation leaders. It is not meant to be an exhaustive story of the fight for women’s rights but rather an addition to the great memoirs and scholarship that already exist.

Recent history suggests the United States is within reach of its first woman president. This book examines the media experiences of women political pioneers who helped pave the way to the breaking of the glass ceiling. It analyzes newspaper treatment of four pioneering politicians between the 1870s and 2000s and explores how media discourse of women politicians has and hasn’t changed over 150 years. The women featured are Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress; Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to receive a presidential nomination at a major party’s convention; and Sarah Palin, the first Republican woman vice presidential candidate. The social, political, and journalistic cultures of each woman’s era are also explored to provide context for the women’s media coverage. The findings illustrate that the press has used a variety of discursive strategies to delegitimize the candidacies of women politicians throughout history, which might have contributed to negative voter attitudes toward women in politics. Gendered stereotypes, gendered news frames, and double binds utilized in news coverage served to protect a male-dominated status quo. Yet a significant finding in Palin’s coverage indicates that gender bias in news coverage is increasingly facing criticism, suggesting the tide may finally be turning in favor of more equalized discourse.

Known most prominently as a daring anti-lynching crusader, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) worked tirelessly throughout her life as a political advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and members of the working class. Despite her significance, until the 1970s Wells-Barnett’s life, career, and legacy were relegated to the footnotes of history. Beginning with the posthumously published autobiography edited and released by her daughter Alfreda in 1970, a handful of biographers and historians—most notably, Patricia Schechter, Paula Giddings, Mia Bay, Gail Bederman, and Jinx Broussard—have begun to place the life of Wells-Barnett within the context of the social, cultural, and political milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This edited volume seeks to extend the discussions that they have cultivated over the last five decades and to provide insight into the communication strategies that the political advocate turned to throughout the course of her life as a social justice crusader. In particular, scholars such as Schechter, Broussard, and many more will weigh in on the full range of communication techniques—from lecture circuits and public relations campaigns to investigative and advocacy journalism—that Wells-Barnett employed to combat racism and sexism and to promote social equity; her dual career as a journalist and political agitator; her advocacy efforts on an international, national, and local level; her own failed political ambitions; her role as a bridge and interloper in key social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century; her legacy in American culture; and her potential to serve as a prism through which to educate others on how to address lingering forms of oppression in the twenty-first century.

This book explores women’s campaign strategies when they ran for state and national office in California from their first opportunity after state suffrage in 1911 to the advent of modern feminism in 1970. Although only 18 won, nearly 500 women ran on the primary ballots, changing the political landscape for both men and women while struggling against a collective forgetfulness about their work. Mostly white and middle-class until the 1960s, the women discussed in this book are notable for their campaign innovations which became increasingly complex, even if not consciously connected to a usable past. They re-gendered politics as political “firsts,” pursued high hopes for organizational support from their women’s clubs, accommodated to opportunities created through incumbency and issue politics, and explored both separatist and integrationists politics with their parties. In bringing these campaigns to light, this study explores the history of California women legislators and the ways in which women on the ballots sought to transcend gendered barriers, supporting women’s equality while also recognizing the political value of connections to men in power. Organized in a loose chronology with the state’s governors, this study shows the persistent nature of women’s candidacies despite a recurring historical amnesia that complicated their progress. Remembering this history deepens our understanding of women running for office today and solidifies their credibility in a long history of women politicians.

Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by steady declines in both news revenue and circulation, and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett.Pete Smith argues that the experiences of the women journalists reflect broader social, political, legal, and cultural struggles and changes in both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women who aspired to such a position, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments.

Set against the changing and turbulent politics of California from the 1930s through the 1950s,Campaigns Inc.: Leone Baxter, Clem Whitaker, and the Invention of Political Consulting examines the life and work of Leone Baxter and her husband Clem Whitaker. During this era, Baxter and Whitaker invented and refined the field of campaign consulting, a form of public relations practice that manages reputation, image, and communication during a political campaign. This book details their work and the development of their successful political consulting firm Campaigns Inc. They worked for mainly conservative and Republican clients, and it was through this work that Campaigns Inc. set the standard for how campaigns would be structured and run through the next century. The book begins with an overview of Baxter and Whitaker's core philosophy of communication, campaigns, and politics. Cayce Myers details their early work in California's Central Valley and their first big campaign against Democratic nominee Upton Sinclair who ran for California Governor in 1934. The book then examines Baxter and Whitaker's campaign for the successful 1942 Gubernatorial candidacy of Earl Warren. The Warren campaign served as a template for building a campaign around a candidate and not a party. Following that election, Baxter and Whitaker's work transformed to focus on defeating compulsory health insurance reforms. They successfully defeated healthcare reform initiatives by California Governor Earl Warren and later President Harry Truman by shaping public sentiment against the specter of "socialized medicine."