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The first study of the role of the newspaperwoman in American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, this book recaptures the imaginative exchange between real-life reporters like Nellie Bly and Ida B. Wells and fictional characters like Henrietta Stackpole, the lady-correspondent in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. It chronicles the exploits of a neglected group of American women writers and uncovers an alternative reporter-novelist tradition that runs counter to the more familiar story of gritty realism generated in male-dominated newsrooms.
Taking up actual newspaper accounts written by women, fictional portrayals of female journalists, and the work of reporters-turned-novelists such as Willa Cather and Djuna Barnes, Jean Marie Lutes finds in women's journalism a rich and complex source for modern American fiction. Female journalists, cast as both standard-bearers and scapegoats of an emergent mass culture, created fictions of themselves that far outlasted the fleeting news value of the stories they covered.
Front-Page Girls revives the spectacular stories of now-forgotten
newspaperwomen who were not afraid of becoming the news themselves-the
defiant few who wrote for the city desks of mainstream newspapers and
resisted the growing demand to fill women's columns with fashion news and
household hints. It also examines, for the first time, how women's
journalism shaped the path from news to novels for women writers.
From the Back Cover
"Front-Page Girls is conspicuously
well written. The prose is clear, vivid, and sophisticated while
sustaining a high degree of complexity in the analysis. The cultural
history Lutes presents is compelling and important. She is an
exceptionally skillful critic and interpreter and is able to combine close
readings of textual passages with persuasive arguments about the cultural
significance of women in journalism."-Nancy Bentley, University of
Pennsylvania
"Jean Marie Lutes challenges accounts linking the developing standard
of journalistic objectivity to the emergence of realist fiction, both of
which were seen as male domains. In so doing she adds a new aspect to the
story: how women journalists-both white and African American-contributed
to journalism and to literary culture. "-Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State
University 
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