Last month’s column explored the various appeals the Geneva Daily Times made to women readers, ranging from news about Paris fashions, advice about child-rearing and party games, romantic fiction in which heterosexual love conquered all, and feature articles about professional women who did not stray from the fenced-in pastures of female identity. It was admirable, for instance, if a married but childless woman, Helen Grenfell, was elected to become Colorado state school superintendent, and if the “remarkably pretty and graceful” Mme. Durande ran her own newspaper in Paris.
Men wrote the articles for or about women. A singular exception appeared in the Oct. 3, 1899 edition, which printed a feature-length letter with spot illustrations written by Lottie Leonard Miller to an unattributed Cincinnati newspaper. It described her struggles to become a journalist. She began by pointedly stating the pay inequities for men and women: “There are hundreds, yes, thousands of minor positions which girls and women are filling in factories and shops; but for the most part the work is very laborious and pay distressingly small.” Women of talent and ambition who seek better jobs and higher pay “find themselves provokingly beset by all sorts of obstacles.”
After six weeks of “ceaseless, harrowing toil in a large dry goods establishment,”........