March is National Women’s History Month, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of the National Women’s History Project. The NWHP first took on the task of bringing about awareness of the contributions women have made throughout history, something that was routinely omitted from history books. In fact, the NWHP reports that back in the early 1980s, women were only mentioned in 3 percent of the content of teacher training textbooks. This year’s theme is “writing women back into history.”We’ve come a long way, baby, and we thought it appropriate to mention a few great ladies of journalism.
- Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a women’s rights activist, journalist and book reviewer. She was the first woman allowed to use the Harvard Library and the first female foreign correspondent, assigned by her employer, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.
- Katharine Graham (1917-2001) was a Pulitzer Prize winning author and publisher of The Washington Post. She employed journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who were instrumental in exposing the Watergate scandal.
- Ida Tarbell (1857-1944), writer, journalist and teacher, was a famous “muckraker” of her time. Nowadays we call that “investigative reporting.”
- Barbara Walters (born 1929) was the first woman to anchor a major network news program and continues to work in broadcast media.
- Nancy Hicks Maynard (1946-2008) was the first African-American female reporter at The New York Times and the first to own a daily metropolitan publication, The Oakland Tribune. Maynard was also co-founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education located in Oakland, Calif.
