At the end of 1898, the Geneva Daily Times announced its expansion from four pages to eight, and promised new features for women, including short stories and fashions.

By the spring of 1899, the Times seemed to be searching for how to pay some lip service to the “new woman” while sustaining the traditional values assigned to female behavior, identity, and consumerism.

The British writer Sarah Grand coined the term “new woman” in 1894 to refer to women seeking individual independence and social change. As white women gained access to higher education and entered the “pink collar” workforce as well as the professions, the cultural tension grew in the middle and upper classes between the qualities necessary for a woman to succeed in the male world and those imposed upon them by marriage, childbearing, and domesticity.

The Times attempted to navigate these shoals of Scylla and Charybdis not through local interest stories or profiles of Genevans, but by printing stories pulled from the wire services. A New York Tribune report bore the mirabile dictu headline: “A Wonder of Paris. It is a Daily Published by Women. La Fronde Managed and Made by Feminine Brains.” The editor-in-chief and manager of the all-women enterprise........

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