Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement: 1868-1914

Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement: 1868-1914. Agnes Hooper Gottlieb. Lewiston, NY and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd., 2001. 208 pp. $89.95 hbk. American women of the nineteenth century had a hard time convincing the world that they were more than creatures of the home whose primary purpose was to serve their men folk and raise their children. Prevailing notions defined them as angels of the hearth and denizens of the domestic sphere, and any attempts to enter the world of politics, commerce, and industry were quickly met with disdain, disbelief, and hostility. Women learned that when they called for change, it was best to couch their demands in words that would be acceptable to a conservative nation. By defining themselves in the traditional role of housekeeper, they could deflect criticisms that they were acting out of their proper sphere. They could use the vocabulary of mothers and housewives to convince others that they were ideally equipped with the required temperament and experience to clean up the nation, starting with their own neighborhood, then expanding into the city and beyond. Thus the term came into existence. It was a clever way for women to claim a public voice while maintaining the outward appearance of continuing in their traditional role. Ironically, however, by reiterating woman's role as housekeeper, the term also trivialized women's efforts and prevented them from breaking out of the stereotypical definition of housekeeper, which haunts them even today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Agnes Cooper Gottlieb, an associate professor of communication and women's studies at Seton Hall University, uses the municipal housekeeping movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the backdrop for her discussion of a number of women journalists who worked in a variety of roles for newspapers and magazines during the era. After describing the movement as well as the general development of women in journalism through the nineteenth century, she highlights the lives and careers of more than a dozen women who came to adopt much of the movement's rhetoric in their writing. In chapters devoted individually to women who wrote for and about the women's club movement, those who wrote for newspapers, and those who wrote for magazines, Gottlieb describes each one's role as a promoter of reform. She analyzes the journalist's work, highlighting the ways in which she expressed the values and used the strategies of the municipal housekeeping movement to promote her cause. Some of the writers discussed in detail are Jane Cunningham Croly (Jennie June), Helen Winslow, Rheta Childe Dorr, Florence Kelley, and Helen Campbell. …

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