Writing for Their Lives
America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
A breathtaking history of America’s trail-blazing female science journalists—and the timely lessons they can teach us about equity, access, collaboration, and persistence.
Writing for Their Lives tells the stories of women who pioneered the nascent profession of science journalism from the 1920s through the 1950s. Like the “hidden figures” of science, such as Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson, these women journalists, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette writes, were also overlooked in traditional histories of science and journalism. But, at a time when science, medicine, and the mass media were expanding dramatically, Emma Reh, Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, and many others were explaining theories, discoveries, and medical advances to millions of readers via syndicated news stories, weekly columns, weekend features, and books—and they deserve the recognition they have long been denied.
Grounded in extensive archival research and enlivened by passages of original correspondence, Writing for Their Lives addresses topics such as censorship, peer review, and news embargoes, while also providing intimate glimpses into the personal lives and adventures of mid-twentieth-century career women. They were single, married, or divorced; mothers with child-care responsibilities; daughters supporting widowed mothers; urban dwellers who lived through, and wrote about, the Great Depression, World War II, and the dawn of the Atomic Age—all the while, daring to challenge the arrogance and misogyny of the male scientific community in pursuit of information that could serve the public.
Written at a time when trust in science is at a premium, Writing for Their Lives is an inspiring untold history that underscores just how crucial dedicated, conscientious journalists are to the public understanding and acceptance of scientific guidance and expertise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these uninspiring biographical sketches, LaFollette (Science on American Television), a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, profiles women reporters who worked for Science Service, a Washington, D.C., news outlet, between the 1920s and 1960s. Focusing on a handful of journalists, LaFollette discusses Emma Reh's reporting on the excavation of the Tizatlan ruins in central Mexico in the 1920s, and notes that Marjorie Van de Water's hiring in 1929 to cover psychology and psychiatry "pioneered a new journalistic beat." Gender discrimination is a theme throughout: Jane Stafford, America's "premier medical journalist" in the 1930s, was excluded from an American Society for Control of Cancer press dinner because it was held at the men's only Harvard Club. Unfortunately, the profiles are rather workmanlike, and the abundance of attention given to the male editors, husbands, and scientists in the women's lives can sometimes crowd out the main subjects, as when LaFollette expounds at length on how ecology reporter Marjorie MacDill Breit's physicist husband pushed in 1940 for scientists to self-censor their work in the interest of hiding new discoveries from the Axis powers. This misses the mark.
