Journalistas: 100 Years of the Best Writing and Reporting by Women Journalists by Eleanor Mills (Editor), Kira Cochrane (With), Naomi Wolf (Introduction)

From the Publisher

Since their emergence as a journalistic force after the world wars, women have continued to break new ground in newspapers and magazines, redefining the world as we see it as well as the craft as it applied. Many of the pieces in Journalistas feel almost unsettlingly relevant today--the conclusions Emma "Red" Goldman drew in her 1916, "the Social Aspects of Birth Control," Maddy Vegtel's 1930s article about becoming pregnant at forty, and Eleanor Roosevelt's call for greater tolerance after America's race riots in 1943. Many have pushed other limits: Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth brought feminism to a new generation; Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones caused a media revolution: Ruth Picardie's unflinchingly honest column about living with cancer in 1997 brought a wave of British candor and a host of imitators; and when two iconic women come face to face, we have at one end, Dorothy Parker on Isadora Duncan (1928), and at the other, Julie Burchill on Margaret Thatcher (2004).

The New York Times - Jill Abramson

But most of the pieces collected by Eleanor Mills (an editor at The Sunday Times of London) and Kira Cochrane (a novelist and former journalist) are so marvelous that I quickly cast aside my doubts. Their choice of writers, including Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy, as well as a number of British writers who were less familiar to me, is superb. The book is divided into subject areas, and I was glad, in these times, to see the authors boldly put war first - before home and family.

Publishers Weekly

Two British journalists (the Sunday Times) have assembled an edifying, historically astute, yet still entertaining collection of pieces written by women from diverse periodicals throughout the 20th century-from both sides of the Atlantic. So-called women's concerns dominate the subject categories, such as "Home & Family" (e.g., Eleanor Roosevelt's "My Day") and "Sex & Body Image" (e.g., Angela Carter's "Fat Is Ugly"), although the most riveting selections cover war and politics, such as Martha Gellhorn's "Dachau" and Marie Colvin's "The Arafat I Knew." Emma Goldman's floridly righteous anti-WWI essay "The Promoters of the War Mania" sets a thunderous tone; Nellie Bly's "Ten Days in a Madhouse" (1888) is the earliest selection, and suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst and even Zelda Fitzgerald ("What Became of the Flappers?") make appearances. Notable American writers are well represented, including Mary McCarthy ("Report from Vietnam"), Erica Jong ("Hillary's Husband Re-elected") and Joan Didion ("On Self-Respect"), and a few appear in surprising ways, such as novelists Djuna Barnes, in her early career as a gonzo journalist, recounting her experience being forcibly fed as a jailed suffragist (1914), and Anne Tyler in a hilarious character sendup of Maryland governor Marvin Mandel on trial (1977). (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Mills and Cochrane, an editor and a former researcher at the Sunday Times (UK), respectively, have collected approximately 70 examples of what they consider the best writing and reporting by American and English women of the past 100-plus years. There are selections (some abridged) by the "very greats" (many of whom-e.g., Sylvia Pankhurst, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anne Tyler-were/are not professional journalists) as well as by the more obscure, all selected because they "illustrate aspects of female experience which still resonate today." The writings, each prefaced by a brief biographical note, are organized chronologically within categories like "War," "Home and Family," and "Emancipation and Having It All." Although entries are introduced with a short biographical note, they are not (and would have benefited from being) placed within the context of the history of American women in journalism-for that, see Maurine Beasley and Sheila Gibbons's Taking Their Place: A Documentary History of Women in Journalism. Instead, Journalistas is for those who enjoy dipping into history at random to find an article from the 1930s on the challenge of being a new mother at 40. Recommended for libraries where journalism and women's anthologies are popular.-Judy Solberg, Seattle Univ. Lib. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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