TakingTheir Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism

Abstract

Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism, 2d ed. Maurine H. Beasley and Sheila J. Gibbons. State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2003. 317 pp. $40 pbk. This latest edition of Beasley and Gibbons' history of women in journalism is a welcome arrival for those of us who seek to include women's history in our study of journalism and the media. Though the standard texts used in the classroom today have expanded incrementally in recent years to include the experiences and contributions of women journalists, these are still only a fraction of the materials typically devoted to great men and the publications and journalistic institutions dominated by them. Beasley and Gibbons' history, first published in 1977 as Women in Media: A Documentary Source Book by the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press and then in 1993 by American University Press as Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women and Journalism, has long been one of the few texts to provide a comprehensive historical view of women in journalism. Taking Their Place uses the development of journalism from colonial times to the present to provide the context for the experience of women journalists and the contributions they have made to both the profession and society. The individual experiences of the women profiled in the book often become representative of what women of their period were experiencing and are then linked to some of the broader social changes of that period. When Jane Swisshelm founded the antislavery Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter in 1848, for example, she was representative of many of the middle class women of the period who entered public life through reform. When White House wire reporter Helen Thomas describes her challenge of the male-only Washington Press Club for women's admittance during the 1960s and 1970s, she is also describing the exclusionary gender policies and practices that had defined journalism for more than 150 years. This text, then, provides a window into the lives of women journalists in particular and women in general as well as the larger society throughout American history. Taking Their Place is not only interpretive, it also provides the reader with significant examples of the women's journalistic writings. Following the oral historian's caveat that the subject must speak for herself in her own words, Beasley and Gibbons have built this book around more than sixty primary documents, ranging from colonial printer Elizabeth Timothy's plea to advertisers to submit their notices in time to sports reporter Christine Brennan's account of her experience covering the Washington Redskins. …

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