THEY ARE WOMEN, HEAR THEM ROAR: FEMALE SPORTSWRITERS OF THE ROARING TWENTIES
Open Access
- Author:
- Kaszuba, David
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- October 28, 2003
- Committee Members:
- James Ford Risley, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Patrick Robert Parsons, Committee Member
Russell Frank, Committee Member
Adam W Rome, Committee Member - Keywords:
- women sportswriters
female sportswriters
women and sports journalism
women and sports media - Abstract:
- Contrary to the impression conveyed by many scholars and members of the popular press, women’s participation in the field of sports journalism is not a new or relatively recent phenomenon. Rather, the widespread emergence of female sports reporters can be traced to the 1920s, when gender-based notions about employment and physicality changed substantially. Those changes, together with a growing leisure class that demanded expanded newspaper coverage of athletic heroes, allowed as many as thirty-five female journalists to make inroads as sports reporters at major metropolitan newspapers during the 1920s. Among these reporters were the New York Herald Tribune’s Margaret Goss, one of several newspaperwomen whose writing focused on female athletes; the Minneapolis Tribune’s Lorena Hickok, whose coverage of a male sports team distinguished her from virtually all of her female sports writing peers; and the New York Telegram’s Jane Dixon, whose reports on boxing and other sports from a so-called “woman’s angle” were representative of the way most women cracked the male-dominated field of sports journalism. While the careers of these three women exemplify the different types of sports reporting practiced by female journalists of the period, they also highlight the overall mood and tensions of the era. In particular, their writing illustrates the ways in which female sports journalists simultaneously accepted and challenged social and professional norms of the period. Goss, for example, earned a regularly appearing column in the sports section – a ground-breaking accomplishment for any female sportswriter at the time – but was restricted to covering female athletes. Hickok and Dixon, in contrast, were able to cover male athletes but were limited in other ways: Hickok’s stories were typically confined to the news pages rather than being allowed in the sports section, whereas Dixon was steadily instructed to tailor her stories to the supposedly unique and superficial interests of female sports fans. In sum, the work of these three women sheds light on the opportunities and obstacles that female sportswriters faced in the 1920s – and in the process provides a lens for understanding the wider gender and equality issues that underlay women’s lives during the Jazz Age.