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https://theconversation.com/australias-first-female-journalists-reported-on-wars-and-human-rights-around-the-world-but-many-died-in-obscurity-199204>
"
Review: Bold Types: How Australia’s First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail
– Patricia Clarke (National Library of Australia Publishing)
When I look out into a class of journalism students, the faces I see will often
belong to young women. In contemporary journalism education, this is the norm.
In many countries, about two thirds of journalism tertiary students are female.
And in Australia, women have held the majority of journalism jobs for some
time.
This is a remarkable turnaround when you consider journalism was, not that long
ago, almost entirely produced by men. It was only after the 1950s that women
started joining the profession in small numbers. Even then, they were typically
confined to writing for the “women’s pages”.
Before this time, female journalists were almost unheard of. Which makes the
women of
Bold Types, who worked as journalists in Australia from 1860 to the
end of World War II, particularly worthy of our attention.
Facing obstacles at every turn, they were adventurous and incredibly
courageous. As author Dr Patricia Clarke writes:
The journalists in Bold Types were a particularly ground-breaking group,
given the societies in which they were living. The earlier journalists wrote
thousands of words in longhand using quill pens. They ventured into muddy
battlefields, down mines and into slums and prisons in their
crinoline-style, ankle length dresses. Women who reached positions of
standing and power could suffer the full brunt of gender discrimination
either publicly or subtly. They also had to ignore the ethos of a society
that disapproved of middle-class women working at all, much less in a such a
public job [as] journalism."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
