If asked, most Americans could name a few contemporary women who are famous journalists, such as the newspaper columnist Ellen Goodman, the literary journalist Joan Didion or the television reporter Lesley Stahl. But how much do we know about other women journalists whose work has influenced American life? Grand Connections asked John Pauly, professor and chair of the communication department, to identify 10 American women journalists of the 20th century who may be less known but whose work has proved important. Here are his choices, in alphabetical order.

By John Pauly

1. Winifred Black (1863-1936). Writing under the pseudonym "Annie Laurie," Black was one of the most famous of the early "sob sisters." Black and other early women reporters often were asked to write dramatic, emotional accounts of sensational events, such as celebrity murder trials. But Black also was a crusading journalist who went undercover to document the problems of indigent children, factory workers and hospital patients. Her stories about the Galveston flood of 1900 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 helped to promote relief for survivors of those disasters.

2. Madeleine Blais (1948- ). Blais, a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is widely respected for her probing, sensitive profiles of ordinary people. She has written, "I am most often drawn to people walking the edge, curiously undefeated." Blais was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, for her 1980 Miami Herald story about an 83-year-old man's campaign to convince the Pentagon to reverse his 1919 dishonorable discharge. Blais's profiles are collected in The Heart Is an Instrument (1992). She also is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995), an account of the championship season of a high-school girls' basketball team.

3. Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Historian David O'Brien has called Dorothy Day "the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism." Born into a family of journalists, Day established her early reputation as a writer for New York socialist papers such as the Call, Masses and Liberator. Following her conversion to Catholicism in 1927, Day turned her attention more steadily to issues of social justice and peace. In 1933 she and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a penny monthly that she continued to publish and edit until her death, and that still is being published today.

4. Martha Gellhorn (1909-1998). For more than 50 years, Gellhorn wrote war correspondence for publications such as Collier's, Atlantic Monthly and The Guardian. Her first war report was on the Spanish Civil War of 1937-38; one of her last was on the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, written at age 80. Born in St. Louis, Gellhorn, who also wrote 13 novels, resented being known as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. "I was a writer before I met him," she wrote, "and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?"

5. Lorena Hickock (1893-1968). Born into a poor and abusive family, Hickok eventually became an influential adviser to Eleanor Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. After finishing high school, Hickok worked as a reporter for newspapers in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and New York. By the 1930s she had become a "front-page girl" for the Associated Press, competing directly with men for major stories. She became friends with Mrs. Roosevelt while reporting on the 1932 presidential campaign. Hickok urged Roosevelt to assert a more public role as First Lady and helped her organize special press conferences for women reporters. From 1933 to 1936 Hickok worked as chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on Depression-era social conditions for the Roosevelt administration.

6. Jane Kramer (1938- ). My personal favorite. For more than 30 years, in her "Letter from Europe" and other features for The New Yorker, Kramer has explored the politics of cultural change in Europe, Latin America and Africa. Her style blends remarkable intelligence and political savvy with a novelist's command of narrative with the research skills of an anthropologist. Her most recent books are The Politics of Memory (1996) and Whose Art Is It? (1994).

7. Penny Lernoux (1940-1989). Lernoux was for many years the Latin American correspondent of the National Catholic Reporter. She won a wider audience with her book Cry of the People (1980), a study of U.S. government support of murderous regimes in El Salvador, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries. Her 1984 book, In Banks We Trust, acutely explored the political origins of the 1980s debt crisis in international banking.

8. Anne O'Hare McCormick (1880-1954). The Catholic-educated McCormick was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for more than 30 years. Hers was a career of firsts. In 1937 she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence. She later became the first woman to serve on the editorial board of the Times. Her posthumous book Vatican Journal 1921-1954 (1957) collected her articles on the Catholic Church and the papacy.

9. Nan Robertson (1927- ). Robertson won acclaim for her 1992 book The Girls in the Balcony, an account of seven women's sexual discrimination lawsuit against the New York Times. The "balcony" she refers to was that at the National Press Club. Women reporters were not permitted to cover events at the club until 1955; until 1971, they were forced to cover events from a tiny balcony overlooking the main floor. Robertson also won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her influential Times series on toxic shock syndrome, which discussed her own nearly fatal battle with the condition.

10. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931). Nearly 70 years after her death, Wells-Barnett remains the most politically influential African-American woman journalist in U.S. history. Born a slave, Wells worked as a reporter, correspondent, editor and publisher of newspapers in Memphis, New York and Chicago. But she achieved her greatest fame as a pamphleteer and tireless opponent of lynching. Following publication of her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Wells twice went on lecture tours of Great Britain to rouse international public opinion against lynching.

Top