Women Who Made the News

From the end of the 19th-century to the middle of the 20th-century, the press was the pre-eminent source of information in Canadian society. While the dominant voice of the Fifth Estate was undoubtedly male, a diverse and dispersed group of Canadian women sought and won access to this powerful domain. They were able to do this because they were talented, ambitious, persistent, and paradoxically, because they were women. The first newpaper women were employed to attract female subscribers and advertising revenue. Once hired, they found themselves confined to a narrow range of specialities that catered to conventionally defined women's interests - home-making, fashion, and high society - and most were patronized by their male peers. But these women journalists did more than simply deliver female consumers to advertisers. Some of them eventually made names for themselves as commercial reporters or political and even war correspondents. By making news about women for women, they created a distinctly female culture within the newspaper, chronicling the increasing participation of women in public affairs. This book is the story of the women who helped raise Canadian women's collective awareness of each other and of their achievements in the period leading up to World War II.