Mary Lynn Stewart. Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940

Scholars interested in French journalism will find a much-needed source in Mary Lynn Stewart’s Gender, Generation, and Journalism in France, 1910–1940. This study of French newspaper women fills a scholarly gap in book-length histories of French journalism, which don’t focus on women, and of French women journalists, which don’t focus on the daily press. It also complements scholarship on British and American women journalists. The book provides a detailed overview of the evolving place of women in French journalism through portraits of a selection of successful newspaper women with bylines in major daily newspapers. It charts the mostly modest expansion of opportunities from one generation of women journalists to the next as the newspaper industry evolved in response to the Great War and the Great Depression. In part 1, “Generations, Mentors, and Mothers,” Stewart begins with an overview of the careers of “first-generation” or “pioneer” women journalists Séverine and Marguerite Durand, who provided mentorship, advice, and access to employment for women of the second and third generations. Both women modeled a new kind of “stand-up”—as opposed to “sit-down”—journalism that showed women they could “[seek] out the facts, not just [comment] upon them” (23).

Art history · Journalism · Media studies · Mentorship · Newspaper · Political science · Portrait · Scholarship · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law