The portrayal of women
journalists
‘We agreed that women were a
nuisance in an office, anyway’
Early Pioneers
• The entry of women into journalism in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was
similar to other white collar professions: a few
determined, pioneering women found their way
into newsrooms but they faced multiple
obstacles:
• A lack of educational opportunities
• The prevailing view that the woman’s place was
in the home
• Fierce resistance from a largely male workforce
But there were plenty of women hacks
• Periodical and magazine journalism relied heavily
on women contributors from the mid nineteenth
century onwards
• Two thirds of the contributors to the esteemed
Chambers Edinburgh Journal were female.
• Women also regularly worked under a male
pseudonym. Even Mrs Pearl Craigie, the first
President of the Society of Women Journalists,
founded in 1894, wrote under the pseudonym of
John Oliver Hobbes
Numbers
• According to Census figures for England and Wales, in 1861 around
145 females and 1,525 males described themselves as journalists
• By 1901, the number of women journalists had risen to 1,249,
around 9 per cent of the total
• By 1931, that figure had risen further to 3,213, around 17 per cent.
• The ratio of women to men then plateau-ed for three decades.
Reasons for this include the introduction of a Marriage Bar at the
BBC in 1932 and in newspaper organisations the assumption that
once married a woman would leave journalism because the
unsociable hours were contrary to the demands of a wife and
mother
• During this period the National Union of Journalists pursued
discriminatory policies including suppressing female wages and
imposing limits on the number of women accepted onto training
schemes
Later C20 (handout)
• By 1964 a tiny number of newspaper front
page bylines (3 per cent) were by women. This
gradually increased to 1994 when nearly a
third of front page newspaper bylines were by
women.
• Progress in newspapers has now stalled and
reversed with only 13 per cent of front page
stories by women in 2009
Fictional portrayals
• The difficulty of asserting oneself in an overwhelmingly
male preserve, and, once inside fighting the almost
impossible struggle against being pigeon-holed into the
features departments is a constant feature of fiction
portraying woman journalists from Ella Hepworth
Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), to,
Monica Dickens’s bitter account of life on a provincial
newspaper, My Turn to Make the Tea (1951). Other
portrayals tend to depict female reporters either as
drunkards (Stamboul Train), little more than whores
who will do anything to get to the top of Fleet Street
(Julie Burchill’s Ambition or A N Wilson’s My Name is
Legion) or as irresponsible liars (Rita Skeeter).
The Story of a Modern Woman (1894)
• In The Story of a Modern Woman, protagonist Mary Erle,
sitting nervously waiting for an interview outside the office
of the editor of The Fan realises she is an outsider in the
clubby male world of newspapers at the end of the
nineteenth century:
• ‘Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes went slowly
by. The murmur of voices, the baritone laughter in the next
room continued to be audible. At last, when Mary had
finally made up her mind to go, the door was flung open
and a young man with a high colour stumbled out. ‘Ta ta
old chap, thanks awfully. See you in the club tonight,’ and,
bestowing on Mary a prolonged stare, he disappeared
down the long glass corridor’ (p45).
My Turn to Make the Tea
• In My Turn to Make the Tea, Poppy (who, as the only
female reporter is the only person who ever makes the
tea in the Downingham Post office) interferes with the
printing of the paper in order to remove a story that, if
published, would ruin a friend’s career. Poppy resigns,
meeting the editor Mr Pellet halfway up the stairs as he
is coming down to give her the sack:
• It made quite a friendly transaction, and we agreed
that women were a nuisance in an office, anyway…
‘We’ll miss you,’ he said, and they got a promising
young lad of sixteen, fresh from school, to take my
place on the Downingham Post (Dickens, 1962, p222).
Edwardian Women
•
•
Katherine Halstead in Philip Gibb’s Street of Adventure in1909:
‘We women wear out sooner. Five years in Fleet Street withers any girl. Then she
gets crow’s feet round her eyes and becomes snappy and fretful or a fierce
creature struggling in an unequal combat with men’. (Gibbs, 1909: 35-36).
•
Beautiful, brave, principled, yet sketchy - merely the object of the young hero
Luttrell’s amorous awakenings. Her characterisation is limited to that of an
unattainable spirited female ideal, who eventually spurns the hero for the sake of
her work:
‘I must go back. I shall never settle down to the humdrum after all the rush and
scurry of things. It is in my blood now. I must be seeing things and doing things. I
want the old adventures, all the friends, and the good fun and the hard work, and
the long hours and the indignities and the joys of journalism.’ (The Street of
Adventure, p317)
A salary of £4 a week on a ‘Conservative daily paper’ is preferable to Katherine
than marriage to Luttrell. As a woman, she cannot do both (p.317).
•
•
Katherine Halstead contd
• She turned round in her swing chair and said: ‘If
you will give me a cigarette I will tell you the lurid
details.’
• ‘Take ‘em all’ said Brandon handing her his case.
• ‘There’s been a suffrage raid this afternoon.
Thirty-seven arrests. Crowd very rough. Chris
Codrington and I were in the thick of it. The
police got several women by the throats – and
used quite unnecessary violence. Of course I shall
not be allowed to say so.’ (p.43)
More KH
• ‘She seemed to have a touch of coquetry, yet
she had spoken to him with an almost boyish
candour, which he had found slightly
disconcerting. She had a sharp tongue, yet she
was not shrewish, and there was a pretty
feminine light in her eyes. She had the gift of
laughter – he had first heard her laugh on the
night of his interview with Bellamy – yet once
or twice there had been a certain wistfulness.’
(p.45)
‘Mother’ Hubbard
• Mother figure
• Sexless, although only in her late 30s
• Heroically refuses to ‘puff’ a beauty doctor and gets the
sack for it
• ‘There was one place in London where Frank Luttrell spent
many of his evenings when he was not doing late duty for
the Rag. It was the flat on the third floor of the bookseller’s
shop in Shaftesbury Avenue where the names of Margaret
Hubbard and Katherine Halstead were written on the brass
plate. ‘Mother Hubbard’ had given him a general invitation.
‘If you ever want to toast your toes before somebody eles’s
fire,’ she said, ‘remember that we always burn the best
coal.’ (p.110)
Advises the young men on the paper
• ‘Your heart is too big for your body young
man,’ said Mother Hubbard severely. ‘What
you want is a little less heart and a little more
head. You have no business to throw your
money away like this.’ (p.111)
Plight of the working woman in 1909
• ‘The laws of social economy and their very
nature force some women to go out and work,
and the world is all the better for it. But
somehow or other women have to pay a
heavy price for liberty…some of them. They
lose caste. Oh yes I have felt that many times.
Also they lose their femininity – horrid
detestable word…’
Other Edwardian fictional woman
reporters
• Adeline Sargeant’s The Work of Oliver Byrd
(1902):
• Heroine Eleanor Denbigh writes investigative
campaigning articles about ‘the condition of
children in certain London slums; and she had
gathered together a mass of facts and details
relative to their condition and their heredity
which was becoming very useful to the
statisticians and philanthropists of her time’
Dolf Wyllarde’s The Pathway of the
Pioneer (1906)
• Magda Burke edits a weekly illustrated paper
and reports on sporting events such as the
Ladies Swimming Competition at Westminster
Baths (Wyllarde, 1914: 69) and a cricket match
at Lord’s (although being a woman she was
not given a seat in the reporters’ enclosure).
Background
• At the turn of the Twentieth Century, only a
handful of women worked as journalists. The
Daily Mirror, launched in 1903 started out with
an entirely female workforce – although it was a
short-lived experiment. When editor Mary
Howarth was fired as editor, she returned to the
features department of the Daily Mail, where she
edited the women’s page.
• Hamilton Fyfe who took over editorship
described sacking the women as ‘like drowning
kittens’
More Daily Mirror
• The incompetence of the women journalists and their
unsuitedness for the ‘rough old trade’ became the stuff
of Fleet Street folklore:
• ‘Alfred (Harmsworth) is supposed to have sent in
champagne to revive those who fainted under stress.
Some innocent girl, sub-editing an article from Paris, is
credited with the headline ‘Our French Letter’,
hurriedly changed by a man on the staff to ‘Yesterday
in Paris’…Perhaps an exaggerated Victorian respect for
womanhood misled Alfred, both about women readers
and women journalists.’ (Ferris, 1971 pp 120-121)
Steady Progress
• In 1917, Alice Chalmers-Lawford became the
NUJ’s first woman delegate to the Annual
Delegate Meeting and in the immediate post war
period the launch of several women’s magazine
such as Good Housekeeping (1922), Modern
Woman (1925) and Woman’s Journal (1927)
required a larger body of female journalists to
contribute to them
• Of course the subject matter was mainly
stereotypical fashion, cooking and childrearing
Low estimation of women newspaper
readers
• “They [male editors at the Daily Mail] expected women
to be interested solely in knitting jumpers, in caring for
their complexions, in looking after babies, in cooking,
in a ‘good’ murder and in silly stories about
weddings…I wished to be treated as a person doing a
job, instead of which some people were kind to the
poor woman, some people were jealous of the
damned woman and some people thought the
tiresome woman had better go home and make way
for a man.” From Mrs Charles Peel’s memories of being
Daily Mail women’s page editor and contributor 1916 –
1920
Can you stand the strain little flower?
• By the early 1920s enough young women were
enrolling in the London University’s Journalism
course for the lecturers to see fit to invite Evelyn
Isitt, ‘of the London staff of the Manchester
Guardian’ to give a talk on ‘The work of a woman
general reporter’ to the students. Her advice is
not altogether helpful: ‘before thinking of taking
it up you should consider whether you can stand
the strain, the long hours, the rush to get your
copy ready in time…’
Misogynist tendencies then
• Some critics associated the arrival of women with the
disintegration of values in the press. This, for example from
an essay in the Spectator by essayist and playwright St
John Ervine: ‘….the most casual observer of the ‘national’
newspaper cannot fail to notice how womanised the
popular press has become…Articles by, and about women
prevail in these papers and editors, without any
embarrassment will print ‘powerful articles’ by young ladies
not long enlarged from school on the reform of Marriage or
the reorganization of sex or the overhaul of religion. There
seem to be many young ladies who will rearrange the
entire Universe in eight hundred words for a fee of twenty
guineas!’ (1930)
…and now
Pigeon-holing: Keeping Up
Appearances
• ‘…Daisy knew that instead of writing poetry, she ought
to be writing her weekly articles on Women. Dreamily
she mused on it while the bees hummed round her in
the thyme. Should Clever Women Marry Stupid Men?
Should Women and Men Marry At All? What is the
Religion of Women? The Post-War Girl: is she selfish,
rude, clever, stupid, drunk, thin, tall, dark, fair…Daisy
sometimes wondered which of the figures of which she
wrote she most detested. She desired very greatly to
tell them exactly what she thought of them all, but this
would not be accepted or paid for, and she had to go
on babbling of them in half-witted phrases…’(p20-21)
Frustration at her being pigeon holed
• ‘Why was she thus doomed, she impatiently
sighed, merely through an accident of sex, to
write of these grotesque waxworks, of which
intelligent persons have never heard? Why would
they not let her write about inhuman things,
about books, about religions, about places, about
the world at large, about things of which
intelligent persons had heard? ‘A subject for you,
Miss Simpson: Can Women Have Genius? You
might make something good of that, I think…’
(p22)
Rose Macaulay suffered same
• ‘…. Some time ago for instance the literary
editor of a newspaper wrote to me asking if I
would write an article for his paper on ‘Why I
Would not Marry a Curate.’ I rang him up and
gave him a suitable reply. He said, well then,
would I write about a caveman…Shortly
afterwards another editor inquired if I would
write on ‘Should Clever Women Marry?’
(‘What the Public Wants’ A Casual
Commentary, Methuen and Co 1925
General Criticism of working females
at a time of unemployment
• Winifred Holtby: ‘[working girls’] fiercest
critics are often the wives of men who live in
hourly fear of unemployment; mothers of
beloved children whom they dream of in
nightmares as suffering under the hardships of
the Means Test and 2s a week allowance…
• Strong ‘back to home’ pressure after WW1
• Magazines like Good Housekeeping
energetically promoted the ‘return to home’
theme, recommending women, who may have
worked during the First World War, now
retreat back behind their front doors and
make their homes cocoons of domesticity for
their men folk.
Daisy’s reaction
• For Daisy, this complicated attitude results in a
fractured personality that she simply cannot hold
together: to her mother and features editors she is
Daisy Simpson required to write inane articles on the
modern woman; to the upper middle class circle to
which she aspires to be part of, and to which her fiancé
biologist Raymond Folyot belongs, she is bold, beloved
Daphne, five years younger than Daisy. To yet another
sphere she is Marjorie Wynn, author of popular novels
and when her latest is a soar away success, a
newspaper commentator required to write even more
inane articles than Daisy
Deviants
• Social scientists characterise the women who
entered journalism during the early years of mass
newspaper production with reference to social
science theories of ‘deviance’ similar to that used
to describe female politicians. By choosing
journalism, they were diverging both from the
accepted role of the middle class woman as
home maker, and were also diverging from
acceptable female professions of nursing and
teaching.
Fictional Deviants
• Katherine Halstead (Street of Adventure) is an unnatural
woman in that she chooses journalism over marriage and
babies (‘I pray God there may be babies,’ said Frank
• ‘No,’ said Katherine, ‘not on £120 a year. I am not cut out
for it.’ (Gibbs, 1909, p314)
• Tommy in Tommy and Co doesn’t even know if she is a boy
or a girl
• Daisy Simpson (Keeping Up Appearances) is a social
deviant, daring to set foot in the upper middle class Folyot
household
• Mabel Warren (Stamboul Train)is a sexual deviant (tweedwearing lesbian)
More deviants
• Helen Pratt(Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris
Changes Trains, 1935) talks and behaves like a man:
• At that time Helen was Berlin correspondent for one of
the political weeklies and supplemented her income by
making translations and giving English lessons…She
was a pretty, fair-haired fragile-looking girl, hard as
nails, who had been educated at the University of
London and took Sex seriously..She could drink most of
the English journalists under the table, and sometimes
did so but more as a matter of principle than because
she enjoyed it.’ (Isherwood, 1977, p.38)
Modern deviants
• Susan Street (Ambition) is an unnatural mother,
giving up her son to pursue her career in tabloid
journalism
• Mary Much and Martina Fax (My name is Legion)
are lesbians (again…)
• Rita Skeeter: Rowling’s description of Rita
mentions her ‘square jaw’ and ‘mannish hands’ –
is this a veiled insult to the journalist she is based
on, or is this yet another female deviant [is she
really a man?] See Rowling’s Leveson testimony
Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train
(1932)
• What does this chapter tell you about the
image of Mabel Warren Greene wants to
portray?
Mabel Warren in Graham Greene’s
Stamboul Train (1932)
• Despite her masculine appearance and cynical
toughness, also trapped by her gender. At our
very first meeting with her, at Cologne Station,
she muses on her role at her paper, the Clarion:
‘‘When you want sob-stuff, send Dizzy
Mabel.’…there wasn’t a town of any size between
Cologne and Mainz where she hadn’t sought out
human interest, forcing dramatic phrases onto
the lips of sullen men, pathos into the mouths of
women too overcome with grief to speak at
all…’(p.35).
• We later learn in the novel that when it comes to being a
journalist, she is anything but ‘Dizzy’ – she is focussed,
fearless, tenacious and writes exemplary copy. Yet ‘Dizzy’ is
the term all her colleagues – when they are mentioned
they are all men’s names – have given her. Although a very
different character to Daisy Simpson, Mabel too yearns to
get out of the human interest stories and celebrity
interviews she is paid to write and instead get her teeth
into a proper news story. She also evidently presents
herself in the Clarion as a man, as is clear in the copy she
files to her newspaper office: ‘Our correspondent pointed
out… ‘You have a wonderful knowledge of the female
heart, Mr Savory,’ he said (p.96) Another example of the
fractured personality.
Yet Greene is not sympathetic
• During the novel, she is permanently drunk, from our very first
meeting: ‘But of course dear, I don’t mind your being drunk..’ (p.34)
to our last, ‘there was a faint smell of liquor in the air,’ (p.194). In
the intervening pages, she also gives off odours, mostly of alcohol,
but also of ‘cheap powder’ (p.45); she is associated with the ‘gross
bouquets’ of a field of cabbages that fills the compartment with a
‘smell of gas’(p.68) as she subjects Czinner to a gruelling interview.
The image is reminiscent of Auden’s ‘Beethameer’ poem in The
Orators, with the newspaper ‘nagging at our nostrils with its nasty
news’ and reinforces the image of reporters as invasive and
uninvited. Mabel herself, never waits to be asked into
compartments, but doggedly pursues her prey ‘she ran him to earth
in a second-class sleeper…she sat down without waiting for an
invitation.’
• Yet Mabel is far more complex than the
brutally dogged (Greene refers to her as
‘sadistic’ in A Sort of Life, (p.155)) reporter she
first seems. She is permanently afraid that her
pretty lover, Janet Pardoe, will leave her for a
rich man and is painfully aware of her
unattractive appearance: ‘In a mirror on the
opposite wall Miss Warren saw her own
image, red, tousled, very shoddy…’ (p.35)
Greene’s journalists
• Mabel, Minty (England Made Me, 1934), Fred Hale
(Brighton Rock, 1938, Thomas Fowler, The Quiet American,
1955)
• character of the journalist in Greene’s fiction as similar to
that of his spies and assassins: information collection, often
by shady means, double crossings, deception and the
powerful and subjective process of producing information
for an audience, whether newspaper readers or Secret
Service handlers are activities shared by his journalists and
his spies: ‘Journalism is a curiously grey profession, and this
would again have appealed to Greene, who never tired of
articulating his fondness for indeterminate areas in all
human affairs.’ Chakrabarti, 2004, p.3
Influence of The Times
• ‘I was happy on The Times, and I could have remained happy there
for a lifetime…No one on The Times was ever known to be sacked
or to resign. I remember with pleasure – it was a symbol of the
peaceful life – the slow burning fire in the sub-editors’ room, the
gentle thud of coals as they dropped one by one in the old black
grate.’
• In A Sort of Life, he recalls some of The Times reporters he met
during his three-year stint, and of particular note is Vladimir
Poliakoff, the diplomatic correspondent, ‘In a grey homburg hat
with a very large brim, who would come into our room to consult
the files, carrying with him an air of worldliness and mystery (why
was he not reading them next door in the foreign room where he
naturally belonged? Perhaps he wished to remain for obscure
reasons of state incognito)’. This romantic description illustrates the
easy elision Greene makes between the spy/journalist character
Journalist/Spy theme
• Mabel the journalist is also Mabel the spy. Suspecting the
elderly man with the moustache to be Dr Czinner, a
Yugoslavian Socialist agitator who famously disappeared,
suspected murdered by Government forces after giving
evidence in a political show-trial she leaps onto the Orient
Express, and follows him, doggedly, snapping at his heels as
the train speeds across Eastern Europe. In a particularly
tense scene, she steals into his compartment while he is
out, reckoning she has three minutes to find some kind of
clue among his belongings:
• ‘First there was the mackintosh. There was nothing in the
pockets…She picked up the had and felt along the band and
inside the lining; she had sometimes found quite valuable
information concealed in hats…’(p.57)
Helen Pratt, Mr Norris Changes Trains
(Christopher Isherwood, 1935)
•
•
•
•
•
heavy drinker
Possibly also a lesbian
Talks in very stilted tones like Mabel
More masculine than the male yet effeminate narrator
works in Europe rather than England, and is another tough customer but
who, unlike Mabel, shows no signs of weakness. In fact here she is the
opposite of Mabel –fragile and feminine on the outside, hard on the
inside, as opposed to Mabel’s outer bravado and her inner self-loathing
and vulnerablity:
• At that time Helen was Berlin correspondent for one of the political
weeklies and supplemented her income by making translations and giving
English lessons…She was a pretty, fair-haired fragile-looking girl, hard as
nails, who had been educated at the University of London and took Sex
seriously..She could drink most of the English journalists under the table,
and sometimes did so but more as a matter of principle than because she
enjoyed it.’ (p.38)
• astute political observer, correctly predicting
the outcome of the presidential election in
March 1932, when Hindenburg was reelected: ‘So the old boy’s done the trick again,’
said Helen Pratt. ‘I knew he would. Won ten
marks off them at the office, the poor fools.’
(p.92)
Redeeming features
• loyal friend to Bradshaw, despite her disparaging remarks about his
and his friends’ homosexuality: ‘I must say Bill you are a nice little
chap but you do have some queer friends…you did know Pregnitz
was a fairy,’ (p187). She is also a fearless reporter, coming into her
own after the Nazis come to power in 1933, although her methods
of obtaining information are occasionally cruel:
• ‘But not even Goring could silence Helen Pratt. She had decided to
investigate the atrocities [the Nazis’ ill-treatment of Jews and
Communists] on her own account. Morning, noon and night, she
nosed around the city, ferreting out the victims or their relations,
cross-examining them for details. These unfortunate people were
reticent of course, and deadly scared. They didn’t want a second
dose. But Helen was as relentless as their torturers. She bribed,
cajoled, pestered. Sometimes losing her patience, she threatened.
What would happen to them afterwards frankly didn’t interest her.
She was out to get facts.’(p.180)
Isherwood’s own attitude to
journalists
• This mixture of approval and doubt about Helen’s tactics are a good
reflection to Isherwood’s attitudes towards journalists at the time.
He clearly enjoyed their company and spent time with the foreign
press corps as he describes in his autobiography Christopher and His
Kind:
• ‘Some foreign journalists – those who were openly critical of the
Nazi government – used to dine together, most evenings, at a small
Italian restaurant. Among them was Norman Ebbutt of the London
Times. Everybody else in the restaurant, including at least one
police spay, watched them and tried to overhear what they were
saying…Christopher [Isherwood – he refers to himself in the third
person throughout] had got to know Ebbutt, so he went to him with
the information [about the conditions of political prisoners held by
the Nazis at the Nollendorfstrasse Barracks]. Ebbutt had already
made himself unpopular with the authorities by his revelations;
even his own editor was worried about his frankness.’
Isherwood’s Guilt?
• By 1933, British newspapers had begun reporting the threat to the
Jews posed by Hitler, with the Daily Express and Daily Mirror being
the most outspoken. As a writer, Isherwood seems to have felt it
was his duty to report as many details as he could about life in
Berlin during this turbulent time, and, reading his autobiography,
particularly when referring to journalists, it appears he feels he has
in some ways fallen short of his task:
• ‘Goebbels, the party propagandist, was obliged to make himself
available to the foreign press. And it wasn’t too difficult to arrange
interviews with Goering or even Hitler. Christopher wasn’t Jewish,
he belonged to the Nazis’ favoured foreign race, he spoke German
fluently, he was a writer and could easily have been accepted as a
freelance journalist whom they might hope to convert to their
philosophy…What inhibited him? His principles? His inertia?
Neither is an excuse. He missed what would surely have been one
of the most memorable experiences of his Berlin life.’
• Compare this rather shamefaced admission to
Helen Pratt’s triumphant expulsion from
Germany following a series of ‘scalding articles’:
• ‘To hear her talk, you might have thought she had
spent the last two months hiding in Dr Goebbels’
writing desk or under Hitler’s bed. She had the
details of every private conversation and the
lowdown on every scandal.’ (p.185)
Examples too numerous to mention
• Here, for example is a passage from Peter Foster’s The Spike (1965)
a typical, and rather badly written ‘Fleet Street’ novel. The Editor
(we never learn his name) wants to take a mistress:
• ‘There were, as anywhere, amenable secretaries. Or he could have
looked among the ranks of lonely, ambitious women journalists, a
few of whom were quite attractive. Usually their own marriages had
gone wrong on the grounds of organisational incompatibility, it
being extremely difficult to run a home and satisfy a husband
working conventional hours, and at the same time succeed in
journalism. Wives found it difficult to convey the peculiar
satisfaction of being printed in the paper, while few husbands could
feel especially proud of what their wives wrote, and even less if it
meant yet another late homecoming. So food and affections grew
cold.’
• In this context the word ambitious is clearly used as criticism
Julie Burchill’s Ambition (1989)
• The novel opens with Susan Street, deputy editor of
the Sunday Best, lying in bed next to the body of
Charles Anstey, the editor, who has just died in the
middle of them having sex.
• Flashbacks chart the life of Susan from schoolgirl
wannabe to deputy and then editor of a tabloid ‘whose
circulation was three million and rising’
• In between shows the life of an ambitious journalist
and the seedier side of tabloid journalism
• Loses custody of her son but it doesn’t seem to bother
her
Ambition is partly autobiographical
• ‘Julie – bookish, bright, midly delinquent – ran away to
London aged 17 to answer an NME advertisement for a
‘hip young gunslinger’ and almost immediately became
star of the rock press, writing about punk. Married her
fellow gunslinger Tony Parsons, aged 18, had a son,
Bobby, abandoned both in 1984 to run off with Cosmo
Landesman, another journalist…(Interview with Lyn
Barber, The Observer, 1998). Barber describes Ambition
as ‘forgettable’ and it is fairly dire prose, but does
capture the spirit of late 80s tabloid journalism pretty
well.
Wendy Henry and Patsy Chapman
• Wendy Henry and Patsy Chapman were two
tabloid Fleet Street editors in the 1980s: Wendy
Henry edited the News of the World until 1988,
when she moved to the Sunday People, Chapman
took over from Henry on the News of the World.
They were notoriously hard-nosed ruthless
tabloid editors who had come up through the
features pages and therefore were neither
trusted nor respected by the male newsroom
culture. Burchill has said that Susan Street is also
partially based on the Fleet Street pair.
‘Killer Bimbos of Fleet Street’
• ‘Wendy Henry was the first ‘Killer Bimbo of Fleet
Street’. She arrived, stilettos at the ready, to edit
News of the World. She was the first female
national newspaper editor that anyone could
remember and certainly the flashiest. Short skirts
and fishnets had not been standard editing gear
before. Not everyone adjusted well. "I will not
work for anyone wearing an ankle chain," cried
Nina Myskow, who walked out as Ms Henry
walked in, brandishing a brand of "yuck
journalism" that would do for her in the end.’ Ann
Treneman, Independent, 1998
Where are they now?
• Where are the female editors of Fleet Street?
The last to go was Rebekah Brooks who was
famously compared to a witch (by a female
lawyer) after her appearance at the Leveson
hearing.
• Er and again as she went to her trial this
month
Rita Skeeter
• Rita: "How about giving me an interview
about the Hagrid you know, Harry? The man
behind the muscles? Your unlikely friendship
and the reasons behind it. Would you call him
a father substitute?"
• Hermione Granger: "You horrible woman. You
don't care, do you, anything for a story, and
anyone will do, won't they?” (Goblet of Fire)
Rita’s interview with Harry
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJl96LYFG
C8
Rowling on Rita
• This is what Rowling has said of Rita: ‘Well I'll tell you the truth but I
doubt very much that anyone's going to want to hear this. I tried to
put Rita in Philosopher's Stone - you know when Harry walks into
the Leaky Cauldron for the first time and everyone says, "Mr Potter
you're back!", I wanted to put a journalist in there. She wasn't
called Rita then but she was a woman. And then I thought, as I
looked at the plot overall, I thought, that's not really where she fits
best, she fits best in Four when Harry's supposed to come to terms
with his fame. So I pulled Rita from Book One and planned her
entrance for Book Four and I was really looking forward to Rita
coming in Book Four. For the first time ever, my pen metaphorically
hesitated over writing her, because I thought, everyone will think
this is my response to what's happened to me. But the fact is, Rita
was planned all along. Did I enjoy her a little more because of
what's happened to me - yeah I probably did!’
Rowling at Leveson
• How does her testimony reflect on her
portrayal of Skeeter?
A N Wilson’s My Name is Legion
• Mary Much and Martina Fax (handout)
• What does this excerpt tell you about Martina
and Mary (and, also, the author’s view of
women)
Mattie Storin, House of Cards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH7kLSz0Eq4
• The TV series, based on the novel of the same name by
Michael Dobbs was a hugely influential series in 1990s
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDIdrbHuoWU
• This year (feb 2013) returned to our screens, remade
for American TV starring Kevin Spacey – a major Netflix
coup
• Shows that sex, power and journalism are a heady
mixture
US representations of women
• Blood Diamond: Maddy Bowen: ‘let me do my
work’
• http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi34
7799833/
• How is Maddy portrayed compared to the
English journalists? How does she react with
the Leonardo di Caprio character, how is she
dressed, how does she talk?
• His Girl Friday (will look at in American week)