This month,after 194 years of male leadership, the Guardian welcomes Katharine Viner as its first female editor-in-chief. This teaching resource looks briefly at a few of the women who helped to pave the way for her in the final century leaving their designate on the newspaper and their stories in the GNM Archive.
Women at the Guardian are nothing original. An album of staff photographs from 1921 shows women on almost every other page, or forming fragment of the circulation,advertising, cleaning, and catering and pictures teams amongst others. By this time,their work had already been appearing in the paper too, from Flora Shaw’s 1898 reports on the Anti-Slavery Conference in Brussels to suffragist Helena Swanwick’s gardening and Country Diary columns and Madeline Linford’s reports from war-torn Europe in 1919. With only byline initials to go on it’s difficult to say how many more female journalists may have contributed to the Manchester Guardian in its first century and almost impossible to comment on their experience of doing so. We know more about Madeline Linford, and her successors as editor of the Guardian women’s page,and later on Jean Stead gave a collection of her papers to the GNM Archive, but its a series of verbal history interviews that perhaps give us our best insight into the experiences of women writing for the newspaper in the 1940s, or 50s and 60s. The careers of just a few of these: Nesta Roberts,Clare Hollingworth, Betty Jerman, and Ann Shearer and Veronica Horwell cover this period and more,and all of them left an interview in the archive. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com