“Pealing, the clock of Time
Has struck the Woman’s hour;
We hear it on our knees,”
wrote Miss Phelps for the graduates of Smith College ten years ago. That the summons has indeed been reverently heard and faithfully obeyed, those who have followed the work of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ can testify. The deed, and not the word, engages the energy of the college woman of to-day; but as these institutions grow into the life of our land, that life will be everywhere enriched; and the word must follow in happy time. Individual genius for literature is sure sooner or later to appear within the constantly widening circle of those fairly equipped for its exercise. It would be idle to expect that the cases in which native power and an adequate preparation go hand in hand, will be frequent; since they are infrequent among men. The desirable thing was, that this rare development should be made a possibility among women. It is possible to-day; some golden morrow will make it a reality.
VI.
WOMAN IN JOURNALISM.
BY
SUSAN E. DICKINSON.
The pioneer woman in American journalism was Mrs. Margaret Craper, of the Massachusetts Gazette and News Letter, in the years of the Revolutionary War. After her to the year 1837 must be referred the first entrance of any American woman into the field of active journalism. At that time Mrs. Ann S. Stephens accepted the duties of editorial writer and literary critic in the columns of the New York Evening Express. Her connection with that paper continued for thirty years, but after 1857 it was limited to the editorial pages by the press of exacting duties elsewhere. In the last named year Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet succeeded her as literary editor of the Express, sustaining well the reputation which Mrs. Stephens had gained for it of a just and high standard of criticism. But in the intervening twenty years other women had followed Mrs. Stephens’s lead, and made their mark in journalism with a freshness, a vigor, and a brilliance unsurpassed by any of the numerous later comers. During the thirties Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale and the once famous Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, availed themselves of the opportunities offered for special writing by New York and Philadelphia papers. In 1841 Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, one of the most widely known authors of the day, made her appearance in the arena of New York journalism as editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Mrs. Child had already demonstrated her editorial ability in the establishment and conduct, for eight years, of the Juvenile Miscellany, the pioneer children’s magazine of America. For two years Mrs. Child conducted the Standard alone; then, for six years more, in conjunction with her husband. But her best work during these years was done in 1842–’3–’4 as special New York correspondent for the Boston Courier, then edited by Joseph T. Buckingham. These weekly letters of hers, original, sparkling, thoughtful, vigorous, depicting the social, literary, musical, and dramatic life of the metropolis, were afterwards republished in two volumes, which hold a wonderful fascination still, when read after the lapse of more than a generation.
It was while Mrs. Child’s letters were forming one of the greatest attractions of the Boston Courier, in 1843, that Miss Cornelia Wells Walter took charge of the editorial columns of the Boston Transcript, doing her work as ably and faithfully as any of her masculine fellow journalists. And in the next year, 1844, Margaret Fuller, who in 1840 had founded, and for two years edited, that famous quarterly, the Dial, came from Boston to New York at the request of Horace Greeley to fill the position of literary editor of the Tribune. Here she set the standard of criticism at high-water mark, and made its literary notices famed for a discrimination, sincerity, justness, and fearlessness of judgment and utterance which contributed largely to the influence of the paper. In the summer of 1846, when she sailed for Europe, its review columns had in her hands attained a reputation which in after years the scholarly editing of Dr. Ripley did but sustain.
In the same year that saw the beginning of Mrs. Child’s brilliant letters from New York, the readers of the Louisville Journal greeted the advent of another woman, Mrs. Jane G. Swisshelm, in letters and editorial contributions bearing the strong stamp of an earnest, aggressive, deeply thoughtful but vivacious mind, intense in its sympathies, ready to do battle against every form of wrong-doing, and gifted with a bright humor which winged the shafts she sent abroad with unfailing vigor. It was but a little while until she became also special correspondent for the Spirit of Liberty, issued at Pittsburgh. She speedily proved herself a worthy compeer of her Eastern sisters in the journalistic field. In 1848 she removed to Pittsburgh and established there the Saturday Visitor, a paper which grew rapidly into wide circulation and influence.