Women With Words: Heads and Tales, #2

By Jim Stovall

The women in this volume of the Heads and Tales series have a way with words. They are remarkable women, all with remarkable and sometimes extraordinary stories.

Jim Stovall, in this volume, brings us his unique journalistic and artistic vision of women who whose writings and lives were always notable, sometimes notorious, and occasionally astonishing. Some of these women, such as Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Eleanor Roosevelt, you will have heard of or read. Others will have receded – often unfairly – into the mists of history.

What you will find here about each of these women is something new – some part of their story that you had never known.

For instance:

Louisa May Alcott, famously the author of Little Women, was also A.M. Bernard, author of what was in her time known as the "blood and thunder" novel, the gothic sensationalism that many readers of her day craved. Such writing put food on her family's table.

Aphra Behn, possibly the first female writer in English to make her living as a writer, was not only a popular playwright but also a spy for King Charles I.

Anne Brontë, the least well known of the Brontë sisters, wrote the most shocking and forward-looking feminist novel of them all – a novel that sister Charlotte hardily disapproved of.

Rachel Harding Davis, mother of the famous journalist and early 20th century heart-throb Richard Harding Davis, supported her family by writing some of the first American realism stories – decades before her male counterparts in the realism school took up their pens.

And we haven't even gotten to page 25 yet.

There are many more such stories: the first female presidential candidate (far earlier than you might think); the first American detective novelist; the first voice from the White House that Americans heard after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the caricatures. These drawings by the author himself add insight and entertainment to this unique and powerful collection.

In addition to those women mentioned above, discover the stories of Helen Gurley Brown, Maxine Cheshire, Mary Mapes Dodge, Mary Anne Evans (George Elliot), Wanda Gág, Martha Gellhorn, Susan Glaspell, Anna Katherine Green, Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké (and their collaborator Theodore Weld), Fannie Lou Hamer, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Marguerite Higgins, Emma Lazarus, Caroline Norton, Helen Kirkpatrick, Anne Ratcliffe, Catherine Parr, Mary Seacole, Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (Nellie Bly), Ida Tarbell, Dorothy Thompson, Mercy Otis Warren, Victoria Woodhull, and Mary King Ward.

Read them all. You will be enlightened and delighted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jim Stovall
• Release date: Feb 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215125021

Jim Stovall

James Glen Stovall (Jim) is a retired professor of journalism who lives in East Tennessee. During his teaching career, he taught at the University of Alabama (1978-2003), Emory and Henry College (2003-2006) and the University of Tennessee (2006-2016). He is now working on a second career writing young adult fiction and mysteries. Jim is the author of the a selling writing textbook, Writing for the Mass Media, as well as other journalism texts such as Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How and Web Journalism. Other books include:  • Seeing Suffrage:The 1913 Washington Suffrage Parade, Its Pictures, and Its Effects on the American Political Landscape • Battlelines: Gettysburg: Civil War Sketch Artists and the First Draft of War In addition to writing, Jim likes to paint (watercolor), draw (pen and ink), play music (dulcimer and banjo), garden and piddle around in his woodworking shop. Jim grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and that is his favorite setting for his novels.

Book preview

Women With Words

Female Journalists and Writers

Heads and Tales

Volume 2

By

Jim Stovall

First Inning Press

2023

Copyright © 2023

By Jim Stovall

All rights reserved.

No part of this book, either words or images, may be reproduced in any form without the specific permission of the author.

Dedication

Sally and Leon

Francoise and Jefferson

Lila, Carole, Angela, and Chris

Tom and Charles

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Forward

Ed Caudill

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott lived a double-literary life

Aphra Behn

A writer and an agent for the king

Anne Brontë

A ground-breaking novel from the baby of the family

Helen Gurley Brown

Chief saleswoman of the sexual revolution

Maxine Cheshire

Nothing stood in the way of getting her story

Rebecca Harding Davis

The founding mother of American realism

Mary Mapes Dodge

The most influential female in America

Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot)

Struggling with gender in a male-dominated society

Wanda Gág

Pioneering a design for modern children’s books

Martha Gellhorn

The reporter who beat Hemingway to D-Day

Susan Glaspell

A reporter, a murder trial, and a feminist masterpiece

Anna Katherine Green

The largely unknown mother of detective fiction

Angelina Grimké, Sarah Grimké, and Theodore Weld

Telling the irrefutable truth about slavery

Fannie Lou Hamer

Sick and tired of being ‘sick and tired’

Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy

Everything is a lie including ‘and’ and ‘the’

Marguerite Higgins

Covering a world that is ‘no place for a woman’

Helen Kirkpatrick

Assignment No. 1: Get the impossible interview

Emma Lazarus

Two poetic lines that describe America

Caroline Norton

The voice of women who ‘didn’t exist’

Catherine Parr

Last wife of a king, first named female book author

Ann Radcliffe

Creating the ‘trash of the circulating libraries’

Eleanor Roosevelt

The first voice from the White House after Pearl Harbor

Edna St. Vincent Millay

A poet steps up for social and political causes

Mary Seacole

Bypassing authority and prejudice to give aid and comfort

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman - Nellie Bly

Pioneering modern investigative reporting

Ida Tarbell

The woman who brought the power of meticulous research to journalism

Dorothy Thompson

Provoking Hitler’s wrath – for good reason

Mary King Ward

An unusual death overwhelms an extraordinary life

Mercy Otis Warren

Making a revolution with her pen

Victoria Woodhull

Journalist – and the first female presidential candidate

Other books by Jim Stovall

Heads and Tales

Caricatures and Stories of the Famous, the Infamous, and the Just Plain Interesting

Kill the Quarterback

Murder Most Criminous

The Cases of William Roughead, Father of True Crime Literature (Volume 1) (with Ed Caudill)

Battlelines: Gettysburg:

Civil War Sketch Artists and the First Draft of War

Seeing Suffrage:

The 1913 Washington Suffrage Parade, Its Pictures, and Its Effects on the American Political Landscape

Point Spread

Preface

Prelude

1. Help!

2. What Goes On

3. I’ve Just Seen a Face

About the author

Wherein I reveal all

Introduction

The most visible thread that stitches the chapters in this book together is that all of the subjects are female. They are all journalists or writers, with one or two exceptions that we could, if so inclined, quibble about. Many of these women were prominent in their day but have been largely forgotten, and I suspect that you, the dear reader, have never heard of quite a few of them. I had not come across many of them until I started a weekly newsletter a few years ago that focused mostly on writers and literature.

And that’s another thread that ties them together. I found them to be, without exception, interesting characters. What they did was not only interesting and but important, and how they got into a position of doing that was also interesting — and sometimes fascinating and even unbelievable.

These women need at least the nod of recognition from those of us who consider ourselves literate and at least half well-read. Each has proved that she was adept at handling the language. Each had an audience for her work that was substantial and loyal. Unfortunately, too many of these women have been forgotten or obscured – or overshadowed by their male counterparts – and we no longer hear enough about them.

That is why this book has been put together. Most of the chapters in this book have appeared in my weekly newsletter or on my website, jprof.com. Because of my interest in drawing caricatures of almost anyone whom I write about, I have included caricatures of these women. My hope is that you will understand that I am not in any way demeaning these fine writers by depicting them in caricature form. Rather, the caricature is a way of honoring them and recognizing that the work they have done is equal both in artistic form and in importance to that of their male contemporaries.

The efforts to produce this volume have not been mine alone, although the responsibility for the accuracy of the information is solely with me. My friend Ed Caudill has always, and not always wisely, encouraged me in all my efforts and generously consented to writing the Forward for this book. My friends in the reference department of the Blount County Public Library seem to be on 24-hour duty. Tom Gillem, Jim Doncaster, and Bill Gathergood did yeoman work in their proofreading and together did their best to correct and clarify my wayward prose. My art group of Marty Komorny, Cathy Madden, Frank Story, and Chipper Edwards has been an unstinting source of support. This only begins the list of those who should be named. You know who you are. Thanks to you all.

Finally, let me pay homage to one of the best and shortest words in the English language: fun. This book has required a lot of hours, a lot of writing, and a lot of hard work. But the word I would use to sum up all that effort is fun.

There’s another three-letter word I would use for the emotion I feel when I look over the whole of this book: joy. The fact that these women existed, followed their calling, and left a record of their lives brings me an immense amount of joy.

So, fun and joy. I hope the reader of this book can experience both of these along with its humble author.

Jim Stovall

Maryville, Tennessee

Forward

Ed Caudill

Here is evidence of women’s accomplishments over the last few centuries based on the appearance, in a single volume, of both caricature and acclaim.  In order to mix those two things, one needs individuals whose accomplishments don’t wither before the good-natured lampoon or whose egos — or their defenders, given that most of them are dead — withstand the exaggerations inherent in the art.  Also, the figures themselves need to be strong ones.  In all the cases that appear here, we see Sisyphean effort on the subjects’ parts.  However, Sisyphus only had to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain.  These women took on the mountain itself, usually the entrenched, unyielding male-dominated social-political-economic order of the day.

The women here range from some grossly under-appreciated individuals, such as Mary Mapes Dodge and her huge impact on children’s literature, to better known ones, such as Ida Tarbell and Eleanor Roosevelt. Before reading this, I had no idea that it was Eleanor from whom the first words emanated from the White House about the attack on Pearl Harbor.  It was a nationwide radio address. Ida Tarbell, to remind all, was a critical cog in the trust-busting machine at the turn of the century as she took on the likes of John Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Not a job for a reticent soul.  And who has heard of Aphra Behn, and as though it were not enough that a woman of the mid-1600s made her own way by writing, but that her work would venture into the risqué?  Women did not do that sort of thing at the time.  She did. 

Some favorites of my twisted psyche: Everyone knows of Louisa May Alcott and Little Women, which she deemed moral pap, and admittedly wrote for the money.  It was kids’ stuff. In her other life she was the author of blood-and-thunder sensational novels, written of course under a pseudonym, A.M Barnard, probably because no respectable women would write such scandalous stuff.  But it was what she really wanted to do.  And she did, in books such as A Long Fatal Love Chase.  I’ve yet to read it, but the title is suggestive.

Speaking of audacity, it is news to many of us that the first female candidate for president was in 1872, Victoria Woodhull.  She and her sister had started a newspaper, and she made plenty of money on Wall Street. Real brass.

Between those first and last entries in this volume, persist, as these women would have, and you’ll find out about the mother of our modern detective genre.  We’ve all heard of Edgar Allen Poe as the father of the genre.  But Anna Katharine Green took the idea further with complex plots, bodies in unlikely places such as libraries, clues sprinkled about (think Arthur Conan Doyle, who came along about a decade later), and even a coroner’s inquest. Her 1878 novel, The Leavenworth Case, was a bestseller.  Any aficionado of such tales is indebted to her for, if nothing else, her impact of such writers such as Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Reinhart, and Dorothy Sayers.

It would be a poorer literary world without the contributions of the individuals in this volume, too often unacknowledged or anonymous.

The scope of effort involved in writing and assembling this volume, like many of its subjects, is easily under-appreciated.  Consider:

Where did he find this person