"mob Sisters": Women Reporting on Crime in Prohibition-era Chicago
Open Access
- Author:
- Kaszuba, Beth Fantaskey
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 07, 2013
- Committee Members:
- James Ford Risley, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
James Ford Risley, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Ann Marie Major, Committee Member
Russell Frank, Committee Member
Marie Hardin, Committee Member - Keywords:
- mob sister
sob sister
Chicago Tribune
crime
journalism - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the work of five women who were employed by the Chicago Tribune as general assignment reporters during the 1920s, and whose unique way of covering the city’s epidemic of crime – with sarcastic humor, a cynical viewpoint and slang-infused prose – merits the creation of a new “category” of female reporter, dubbed here the “mob sister.” Histories of American media generally place women reporters who worked at newspapers prior to World War II into narrowly proscribed roles, leading to a widespread assumption that women were only allowed to cover topics such as fashion, society, and news of interest to homemakers. In addition, most histories tell us that those women who did make the front pages worked either as “stunt girls,” performing daring feats and then writing about their exploits to shock or titillate readers, or as “sob sisters,” covering trials in maudlin prose intended to bring readers to tears. However, a significant number of women broke those barriers during the Prohibition era, especially in Chicago, where the Tribune, in particular, gave women journalists wide latitude to pursue beats traditionally considered more suitable for men in that period. The female Tribune journalists whose work is examined in this dissertation are Genevieve Forbes Herrick, whose byline was a fixture on the paper’s front page throughout the Roaring Twenties; Maurine Watkins, who drew upon her work as a crime reporter to write the enduring social satire Chicago; Kathleen McLaughlin, a confidante of mobsters whose crime reportage in Chicago earned her a coveted spot in The New York Times’s once exclusively male newsroom; Leola Allard, who covered Chicago’s juvenile and domestic courts, reporting on crimes ranging from spousal abuse to kidnapping; and Maureen McKernan, whose clear- thinking, no-nonsense coverage of crime for the Tribune began to move closer to the modern ideal of objective, factual reporting. This dissertation also explores factors that allowed for the emergence of the mob sisters, including the explosion of gangland crime – and murders by women – in Chicago during Prohibition; the increasing professionalization of journalism during the 1920s; a female-friendly culture at the Tribune; and the intersections of crime, celebrity and entertainment during the Jazz Age, all of which helped to create a window of opportunity for these women to not only cover crime, but to develop a new acerbic, witty, anti-sob-sister voice that reflected the changing attitudes of a city whose residents were concerned – yet proud of and even amused by – the chaos around them.