By Taylor Jasmine | On June 10, 2024 | Updated November 10, 2025 | Comments (0)
It may be surprising to learn that a small but determined coterie of women published newspapers in the American colonies, before the states declared independence from Britain.
By the start of the American Revolution (1765), there were more than a dozen women printer-publishers operating on their own in the colonies. Most of them, called “widow-printers,” inherited their presses and newspapers after their husbands’ deaths.
Even so, it was rare for any woman to run a newspaper on her own. Not until much later could American women own property. They were property, though not to the extreme degree as their slaves and servants. Read More→
By Dana Rubin | On March 3, 2023 | Updated March 4, 2023 | Comments (0)
This portion of “Lynch Law in All its Phases,” Ida B. Wells’ 1892 speech given in Boston, is excerpted from Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women by Dana Rubin. Amplify Publishing Group, 2023.
From the publisher:
“This monumental collection of speeches charts the story of America as it unfolded through the decades, showing that at every critical juncture, women were speaking. It’s a long-needed corrective to the story we have always told ourselves about whose ideas and voices shaped the nation—a search for long-buried truths, a celebration, and an inspiration.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On October 28, 2022 | Updated March 3, 2026 | Comments (1)
Though Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange pioneered modern photojournalism in the first half of the 20th century, the field continues to be male dominated. As we learn more about them, along with the two other trailblazing American women photojournalists presented here (Jessie Tarbox Beals and Ruth Gruber), it’s worth musing on why this persists.
A photojournalist is a reporter with a camera. Some photojournalists (past and present) have only taken pictures, and a different reporter writes the text that goes with them. Others take photos as well as write articles. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On January 8, 2022 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who spent much of her career writing as Paris correspondent for The New Yorker.
Under the pen name Gênet, she authored the magazine’s “Letter from Paris” for almost fifty years.
She was a prominent member of the expatriate community that settled in Paris between two World Wars, and made her home there until 1975, after which she returned to New York. Portrait at right, Janet Flanner in 1940 (National Portrait Gallery).
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By Jasmin Darznik | On August 4, 2021 | Updated May 9, 2025 | Comments (5)
Jasmin Darznik, author of The Bohemians, a novel of Dorothea Lange’s early career (Ballantine Books, 2021), presents 10 fascinating facts about this trailblazing American documentary photographer of the early 20th century:
Though she is most known for her iconic Depression-era photograph “Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s photographs put a face to nearly every major historical event of the twentieth century, including World War II and the Japanese American internment camps.
Her photographs are infused with a deep and abiding dedication to documenting the lives of the have-nots in our country—those banished to the fringes by poverty, hardship, forced migration, and discrimination. She also dedicated herself to documenting environmental degradation, as in her series Death of a Valley. Read More→
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