Brooke Kroeger

How Women Changed American Journalism

Undaunted

Linda Steiner

Carolyn Kitch

Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage

Front Pages, Front Lines

A portrait of the pioneer of investigative journalism recounts her daring exploits--such as feigning insanity in order to get herself committed to a lunatic asylum so she could expose its horrid conditions. 17,500 first printing.

Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist

Nellie Bly

In the first half of the twentieth century, Fannie Hurst was known as much for the startling particulars of her extraordinary life as for writing stories that penetrated the human heart. Hers is the story of a Jewish girl from the Middle West turned dynamic celebrity author, the kid down the street who spoke her dreams out loud and then managed to fulfill every one of them. Her name was constant newspaper fodder. It appeared in reviews of her twenty-six books; in reports of her travels, her lifestyle (including the marriage she curiously chose to hide from her friends as well as the public), her diet, and her provocative public statements; and in her obituary, which was front-page news, even in The New York Times. With stories and novels such as "Humoresque," Back Street, and Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst reigned as the leading "sob sister" of American fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Her name on the cover of a magazine was enough to sell out an issue. She wrote of immigrants and shopgirls, love, drama, and trauma, and in no time the title "World's Highest-Paid Short-Story Writer" attached itself to her name. Hollywood fattened her bank account, making her works into films thirty-one times in forty years. Fannie Hurst lent her prominence and pen to the day's significant socialist, liberal, humanitarian, and feminist causes. She became a forceful supporter for the rights of African Americans, and was an early friend and literary advocate of Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West. As a pioneering crusader for women's advancement--she mounted the soapbox years before it was fashionable--she promoted economic self-sufficiency, equal opportunity, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whosefrequent guest she was at the White House. Her life seems to have intersected with everyone of significance in her era, in science, the arts, the media, Hollywood, academia, and politics. In examining the life of this great, celebrated, and yet now nearly forgotten woman, Brooke Kroeger also explores the curious backslide in the progress of women in general from the Depression to the mid-1960s. This is a carefully drawn, extensively researched, and entertaining portrait of one of the most successful, glamorous, and forward-thinking women of the twentieth century.

The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst

Fannie

Suffragists recognized that the media played an essential role in the women's suffrage movement and the public's understanding of it. From parades to going to jail for voting, activists played to the mass media of their day. They also created an energetic niche media of suffragist journalism and publications. This collection offers new research on media issues related to the women's suffrage movement. Contributors incorporate media theory, historiography, and innovative approaches to social movements while discussing the vexed relationship between the media and debates over suffrage. Aiming to correct past oversights, the essays explore overlooked topics such as coverage by African American and Mormon-oriented media, media portrayals of black women in the movement, suffragist rhetorical strategies, elites within the movement, suffrage as part of broader campaigns for social transformation, and the influence views of white masculinity had on press coverage. Contributors: Maurine H. Beasley, Sherilyn Cox Bennion, Jinx C. Broussard, Teri Finneman, Kathy Roberts Forde, Linda M. Grasso, Carolyn Kitch, Brooke Kroeger, Linda J. Lumsden, Jane Marcellus, Jane Rhodes, Linda Steiner, and Robin Sundaramoorthy

The story of how and why a group of prominent and influential men in New York City and beyond came together to help women gain the right to vote. The Suffragents is the untold story of how some of New York’s most powerful men formed the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which grew between 1909 and 1917 from 150 founding members into a force of thousands across thirty-five states. Brooke Kroeger explores the formation of the League and the men who instigated it to involve themselves with the suffrage campaign, what they did at the behest of the movement’s female leadership, and why. She details the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s strategic decision to accept their organized help and then to deploy these influential new allies as suffrage foot soldiers, a role they accepted with uncommon grace. Led by such luminaries as Oswald Garrison Villard, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, members of the League worked the streets, the stage, the press, and the legislative and executive branches of government. In the process, they helped convince waffling politicians, a dismissive public, and a largely hostile press to support the women’s demand. Together, they swayed the course of history. “The Suffragents is proof that the clatter of dishes that America’s power brokers were hearing as they sat in their smoking parlors back in the early twentieth century meant more than clean china and emptied ashtrays. Someone was cooking up plans. The book reveals the careful, never-before-told story of how women carefully calculated and planned their own liberation, directing the prominent power brokers in America into action. With smooth efficiency and the touch of a novelist, Brooke Kroeger shows how the suffragist movement, engineered by women from top to bottom, cleverly stitched in the involvement of men from all walks of professional and political life, directed by women who used neither gun nor blade to direct the men, but the weapons of intelligence, cleverness, and when necessary, subterfuge. The collaboration in this balance of power between prominent men who invested in the movement, and the women who directed them, has everything to teach us today.” — James McBride, author of The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother and The Good Lord Bird “Not all the suffragists who risked ridicule to march down Fifth Avenue in the big parades touting votes for women wore dresses. Brooke Kroeger meticulously documents the largely unsung role of men who publicly supported their wives, mothers, sisters, or lovers in the final dramatic decade of women’s seventy-year battle for the ballot.” — Linda J. Lumsden, author of Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland and Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly “Women ‘need’ men to get the rights they deserve: after all, men had to vote to let women vote. Brooke Kroeger gives us the first history of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, the ‘Gentleman’s Auxiliary’ of the women’s movement. Eschewing the spotlight, they supported gender equality, as we all should, because it’s quite simply the right thing to do. With this gift, Kroeger gives us back a bit of our history.” — Michael S. Kimmel, coeditor of Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776–1990: A Documentary History

How Women Used Men to Get the Vote

The Suffragents

Despite the many social changes of the last half-century, many Americans still "pass": black for white, gay for straight, and now in many new ways as well. We tend to think of passing in negative terms--as deceitful, cowardly, a betrayal of one's self. But this compassionate book reveals that many passers today are people of good heart and purpose whose decision to pass is an attempt to bypass injustice, and to be more truly themselves. Passing tells the poignant, complicated life stories of a black man who passed as a white Jew; a white woman who passed for black; a working class Puerto Rican who passes for privileged; a gay, Conservative Jewish seminarian and a lesbian naval officer who passed for straight; and a respected poet who radically shifts persona to write about rock'n'roll. The stories, interwoven with others from history, literature, and contemporary life, explore the many forms passing still takes in our culture; the social realities which make it an option; and its logistical, emotional, and moral consequences. We learn that there are still too many institutions, environments, and social situations that force honorable people to twist their lives into painful, deceit-ridden contortions for reasons that do not hold. Passing is an intellectually absorbing exploration of a phenomenon that has long intrigued scholars, inspired novelists, and made hits of movies like The Crying Game and Boys Don't Cry.

When People Can't Be Who They Are

Passing

In her provocative book, Brooke Kroeger argues for a reconsideration of the place of oft-maligned journalistic practices. While it may seem paradoxical, much of the valuable journalism in the past century and a half has emerged from undercover investigations that employed subterfuge or deception to expose wrong. Kroeger asserts that undercover work is not a separate world, but rather it embodies a central discipline of good reporting—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public’s attention. Together with a companion website that gathers some of the best investigative work of the past century, Undercover Reporting serves as a rallying call for an endangered aspect of the journalistic endeavor.

Brooke Kroeger

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