Gendering journalism (history): The emergence of the woman journalist, Toronto, 1880--1895 (Ontario, Kit Coleman, Faith Fenton)

This dissertation asks how the nineteenth century woman journalist emerged as a meaningful cultural and professional identity. As a cultural history it begins by considering the partisan newspaper as a cultural formation that, given its changing relations of production, came to position itself as independent and partisan simultaneously. Rearticulated as a paper of the people, its readership was revisioned as a family. The weekend edition became the location of new representational practices that were both entertaining and enlightening that materially effected this change in its identity and mission. As the public sphere was feminized by a multitude of reform initiatives and the private sphere was publicized and regimented through new domestic technologies and practices, the woman's page emerged as a space within the newspaper that helped to make sense of these changing relations, even as it altered them, while situating the newspaper within domestic relations. Within this cultural formation, the woman journalist emerged as a product of these conditions, even as she re-produced them. Using the journalism of two women journalists, Kit Coleman and Faith Fenton, as case studies, it argues that the format of the woman's page was a crucial site where these conditions coalesced, creating the conditions within which they could forge for themselves a professional identity. The woman's page spoke especially to the family's moral head of household in a highly personal voice that articulated the shifting relations between the public and private sphere. By constructing a knowing and authoritative voice through a series of gendered practices the woman journalist developed a highly intimate and personalized relationship with her readers that turned the woman's page into a domesticated space within the larger newspaper. This space was transformed, however, through her travels and social explorations which helped to broaden her journalistic authority using sensational techniques from the new journalism that were carefully negotiated within regimes of gender that were produced in part by the woman's page itself. These women had to negotiate continually the shifting intersections of journalism and gender, producing a journalistic practice that was historically contingent and was both the product of and produced a new gendered identity for women at the close of the century.