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Enterprising Ladies: Utah's Nineteenth-century Women Editors
Enterprising Ladies: Utah's Nineteenth-century Women Editors
BY SHERILYN COX BENNION
THE WASATCH WAVE GREETED CANDACE ALICE DE WITT after she took over the editorship of the Piute Pioneer late in 1897:
Candace was only one of fourteen Utah women identified as editors of newspapers or magazines between 1872 and 1900. Most of them were active during the 1890s and most of their editorial terms were brief, but that was characteristic of the time. Editors — male as well as female — changed positions frequently, and newspapers were commonly shortlived. In fact, the women had far more qualities in common with their male counterparts than attributes that set them apart.
As would be expected for journalistic entrepreneurs of either sex, the purposes and personalities of the Utah women varied widely, and their editorial products reflected these differences. Few of them left a record of their motives, but their newspapers provide clues. Some, with no particular cause to plead, intended simply to edit a profitable smalltown weekly newspaper. Some fell into editing almost by accident and likely considered their editorships a temporary lark. Others founded their publications to further a crusade. Some wanted to write and filled many columns with their own efforts, while others wrote very little, relying on patent pages furnished by the newspaper syndicates of the time. Some had partners. Others worked alone. A few who had major responsibility for their newspapers received credit only as subsidiary editors. One may have been an editor in name only.
All of those statements could apply to Utah's male editors, as well. There were differences between the women and the men, but they are less striking than the similarities. Although the men changed jobs frequently, they tended to remain in journalism for longer periods, and perhaps fewer of them embarked on their careers with the idea that their newspaper work might be temporary. Even so, the women often had longer journalistic careers than the period of editorship might indicate, because they continued writing for publication after their editorships ended. If they did not keep writing, they usually became actively involved with community affairs, an indication that the enterprise required to take up newspaper editing was not merely a short-lived aberration of character. They simply sought different outlets, while more men made editing a lifelong occupation.
If the women's newspapers were mixed with others from the late nineteenth century it would be impossible to pick them out, except, of course, for those few that were intended for women readers. Unfortunately, some of the papers would be missing, because the only remaining trace of them is a directory listing or a mention in contemporary publications. Of only four do complete files remain.
Scattered copies of the Piute Pioneer are available; and both the newspaper and its editor, Candace Alice De Witt, the "maiden fair" referred to earlier, were representative in several ways. Candace was one of those who seemed to happen into editing. Like others among the fourteen women editors, she took over a newspaper as a young, unmarried woman. She was born in Manti in 1879, but her family moved to Marysvale, Piute County, in 1881. She grew up in that community and was thoroughly familiar with it by 1896 when J. F. Brunell, who had come there as a schoolteacher, founded the Pioneer. She assisted him until his death in November 1897 and then, at the age of eighteen, became editor.
Actually, the Pioneer did not require much editing. Typical of many small-town papers, it was a four-page weekly, with patent front and back pages. These pages, of six columns each, featured small woodcut illustrations and many short articles, jokes, and, appropriately enough, ads for patent medicines. The articles had titles like "Temperature in Tunnels," "A Submarine Boat," and "An Oriental Beauty."
Two-thirds of pages 2 and 3 were filled with legal notices and local ads. The remaining third was not entirely original, either. Nineteenthcentury editors clipped "exchanges" from other papers and used them liberally. They might give Utah news, offer poetry or humor, or, like a note that Ulysses S. Grant had predicted easy capture of Havana, comment on the national scene.
The Piute County material was limited to the advertising, legal notices, and a few notes from Marysvale and Circleville. The only local item in the issue for March 26, 1898, besides the ads and notices, Was a tongue-in-cheek poetic tribute to his captor written from prison by a convicted burglar.
Candace kept the editorship for six months, after which she sold the paper, but her journalistic work continued. According to an obituary, she assisted the new editor by setting type and writing articles "boosting the mining activities of the camp." As other editors came she would help each to "get a line on the town conditions." After the paper moved to Junction, she was its Marysvale correspondent.
In the meantime, Candace married Roland Blakeslee in 1901 and had three daughters. She also became active in politics, serving as county secretary of the Democratic party for a number of years and as the only woman Democratic county chairman in the state. She was the Marysvale city treasurer under two administrations and town clerk for fifteen months before her death in 1927.
Another young, unmarried editor was Samantha Sessions. She was twenty-three or twenty-four in 1898 when she founded and edited the Woods Cross Watchman. No copies of the Watchman survive, so its character and longevity are unknown.
A second group of editors may be represented by Kate Jean Boan, founder in 1891 of Vernal's first newspaper, the Uintah Pappoose. She was neither young nor unmarried, and her editorial career was certainly not a result of happenstance. However, she was like Candace in that she probably did not have to rely on her paper as a means of earning a livelihood.
Kate was born in 1859 in New York and was reared by foster parents after her mother died at her birth and her father was killed in the Civil War. She married Wesley A. Blake, who took her with him to Colorado, where he was an officer of the Signal Service, and from there to Salt Lake City, where she was left a widow.
She began her newspaper career by working for the Salt Lake Tribune. She then accepted a position as matron of the Indian school at Whiterocks in 1885. There she met and married Amos Quincy Boan. She had a total of six children from both marriages.
Some motherly concern seemed to extend to the birth of her Pappoose, for it greeted readers with this introduction:
From a contributor, the Pappoose received a welcome in poetry:
The paper had four pages with three columns to each. Early subscribers could get it for one dollar a year; after the second number the price rose to two dollars. Short items filled the Pappoose, some reprinted from other sources, but local news was not neglected. The first number carried articles titled "A Holiday Mishap," which described a local shooting accident, and a "A Miraculous Escape," about the rescue of two young boys from beneath a fallen load of hay, along with shorter news briefs. Other frequent features were news columns from neighboring communities, reports on LDS stake conferences, descriptions of the educational progress of the community, explanations of new laws, and summaries of meetings of local organizations and county court proceedings. Advertising occupied nearly half of the paper.
Kate's humor came through often, sometimes at her own expense. She wrote, for example, of stopping at the home of a prominent citizen to ask him to subscribe. He replied, "Well, I'll tell you what it is, I don't want the paper. It is no good and I know more than I ever see in it, . . . but to help a home industry I'll subscribe if you'll promise to do three things." These were to enlarge the paper, change the name, and "don't use my name to help to get subscriptions."
After a year Kate sold the paper, giving a thank you, but no explanation, to her readers. The Pappoose received a poem at its death, as it had at its birth. After changing its name to the Vernal Express, the new editor wrote:
Kate lived on until 1911. No poetic obituary appeared for her, but the Express gave her a front-page tribute:
Unlike Kate, Elizabeth S. Worthen relied on her publication to provide a livelihood, both for herself and for her mother, although she may have entered newspaper work without intending to become an editor. She was born in Panguitch in 1875. Her father died when she was twelve. To earn money she worked in the Panguitch post office, in the town's co-op store, and as typesetter and, eventually, editor and publisher of the Panguitch Progress.
According to J. Cecil Alter, in Early Utah Journalism, the Progress was run for about a year by Will J. Peters, manager of a traveling show, who left it in the hands of Elizabeth, "a feminine printer's devil." Elizabeth's stepdaughter indicates that before Peters came to Panguitch Elizabeth worked at the Progress with Fred E. Eldredge, who had founded the paper in 1895, and M. M. Steele, Jr., and was officially editor from 1901 to 1904. 14 Utah As It Is, published in 1904, stated that the paper was Republican and Mormon and listed E. S. Worthen as editor and manager.
Elizabeth was active in Mormon church organizations and served as city recorder for two terms from 1910 to 1914, at which time she acquired not only a husband, William J. Henderson, but also eight of his children, the youngest of whom was three years old at the time. They lived in Cannonville, where William raised sheep and cattle, and Salt Lake City before returning to Panguitch. Elizabeth died there on January 7, 1955. Her stepdaughter describes her as "a tall stately woman" and adds, "She had a strong mental and moral character. She served her church and city with all her mind and strength. . . . She was a beautiful writer and never misspelled a word."
Another group of women were associated with their husbands in newspaper work. In most cases they saw their papers as business enterprises that would be profitable enough to support them and their families. Certainly this was true of Eva B. and William E. Smith, peripatetic publishers who produced papers in four different Utah towns during the 1890s.
Nothing is known about the division of editorial labor on the Smiths' papers. They are first listed in N. W. Ayer and Sons' American Newspaper Annual for 1891 as editors and publishers of the Box Elder County Herald. Eva must have been the woman referred to by the Park Record that year: "The Bugler and the Herald of Brigham City are engaged in a life and death struggle for supremacy. The Herald is edited by a lady, and she seems to have the best of the argument." No copies of the Herald survive, and the Eagle and the World were inconsistent in listing editor and publisher. The Smiths founded the Eagle, and William was named as editor and publisher in its first number, but then Eva was listed as editor. The World listed "Smith & Smith" as publishers. The fourth paper, the Nephi Ensign, claimed only William as editor.
The World and the Eagle provide additional examples of papers that used a minimum of locally produced material. Both consisted of eight pages of six columns each. Only two of the pages, featuring local news briefs and local ads, were of home manufacture. The remaining six were patent.
Married editors about whom more is known, even though few copies of their newspaper survive, were Ada and Legh Freeman. Ada started a paper in Ogden in 1875 before her husband came to join her, and she continued to bear a large share of responsibility for it while he scouted the territory for stories, subscribers, and advertisers, taking credit for the newspaper Ada produced in his absence.
Ada Virginia Miller was born in Virginia in 1844. She taught school, became an assistant principal, and wrote articles for two newspapers before Legh Freeman came to lecture in his home town of Culpeper, Virginia, in 1869 and married her. Legh and his brother, Frederick, had been publishing newspapers along the route of the transcontinental railroad as it moved west, until a mob destroyed their press at Bear River City, Wyoming, in 1868. Writing as "General Horatio Vattel, Lightning Scout of the Mountains," Legh had made something of a name for himself.
Perhaps because of financial losses in stock speculation, Legh decided in 1875 to go back to following the railroad, this time to Ogden. He had been on amiable terms with the Mormons and probably counted on their support. While he remained in Wyoming to mine coal claims there, Ada went on to Ogden and announced that the Ogden Freeman would soon appear. In an early issue she noted:
Upon his arrival in Ogden, Legh received little support from either Mormons or Gentiles. Such good will as the paper was able to attract during the four years of its existence probably came as a result of Ada's efforts, not Legh's. An 1883 Ogden directory stated:
After numerous altercations, both verbal and physical, Legh announced that a branch of the Ogden Freeman would be published in Montana at the terminus of the Utah and Northern Railroad. By August 1879 he had ordered the Ogden paper discontinued and had sent for his family to join him in Montana. Ada, who by then had borne a fourth son, supervised loading of the printing equipment into two covered wagons for the trip to Butte and drove the first wagon while a printer drove the second. In southwestern Montana the rough road dislodged a shotgun hanging in her wagon, and a load of bird shot struck Ada's hip. Six days later she died. Legh wrote:
In a situation apparently very different from that of Ada Freeman was Ireta Dixon Hemenway, listed as editor of the Utah Valley Gazette under her maiden name from its founding in 1889 until October 1890. After October, until its sale early in 1891, the name of her husband, Charles, was on the masthead. It would seem from attacks on him in the rival Provo Enquirer that Charles was responsible for the paper from its inception. He answered the Enquirer's charges in the first person and defended himself without denying that the Gazette's editorial policy was his creation.
All of the newspapers mentioned so far were intended to be of general interest. Although marked by the idiosyncracies of their editors, they were similar to other weekly newspapers of the time in purpose, content, and appearance. Some Utah periodicals with which women were associated were more specialized, either in their content or in the audience they sought to reach. Representative in that it had a social cause to promote was the Salt Lake Sanitarian, the only one of these specialized publications that was produced by spouses. This was a joint endeavor with a difference, however, because it was edited by Milford Bard Shipp and two of his plural wives, Ellis Reynolds Shipp and Maggie Curtis Shipp.
Ellis was the first of the three to obtain her medical degree. Born in 1847, she had moved with her family to Utah and in 1866 married twicedivorced Milford, who was eleven years her senior. Then she decided, after the deaths of a son in 1868 and a daughter in 1873, that her life's work would be caring for the sick.
In the meantime, Milford had married Margaret Curtis, almost three years younger than Ellis. Maggie also had settled on medicine as a career. She traveled to the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1874 but, after a month of homesickness, returned to Salt Lake. Ellis left three children to take Maggie's place in Philadelphia. After a summer off in 1876, Ellis gave birth to a baby girl back in Philadelphia in 1877 and stayed on to complete work for her degree in March 1878. Five years later, Maggie received her degree, and Milford, who had studied law while Ellis was away, switched to medicine and obtained his degree also.
In April 1888 the three Doctors Shipp founded the Salt Lake Sanitarian. It was a monthly of twenty-four pages "devoted to the prevention and cure of diseases and injuries, and the promulgation of the laws of health and life." The editors intended to cultivate an understanding of physiological laws, "educate the people in the laws of life and sanitation," and discuss "the care of the sick and treatment of disease." They would be tied "to no exclusive dogmas" but would "endeavor to advance only such principles as are established in the light of science and have the sanction of professional authority."
Ellis wrote articles with titles like "Olive Oil," "Scarlet Fever," "Hygiene of Beds," "Poisons and Their Antidotes," "Sleep," and "Mothers' Methods," the last a continuing series. Maggie wrote "Nurses," "Cholera Infantum," "The Skin — Construction and Care," and "Confidence Between Mother and Daughter." Most of the Sanitarian's content, however, was reprinted from other medical periodicals. Ellis and Maggie must have had full responsibility for putting it together from September to December 1888 while Milford served time in the Utah, penitentiary for unlawful cohabitation. They ran an Obstetric and Nurse School for women of the territory during the same period and al-
A CHRONOLOGICAL LISTOF UTAH'S NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN EDITORS
Lula Greene Richards, Woman's Exponent, 1872-77.
Ada Virginia Miller Freeman, Ogden Freeman, 1875-79.
Emmeline B. Wells, Woman's Exponent, 1877-1914.
Jennie E. Anderson Froiseth, Anti-Polygamy Standard, 1880-83.
Ellis R. Shipp, Salt Lake Sanitarian, 1888-89.
Maggie C. Shipp Roberts, Salt Lake Sanitarian, 1888-89.
Ireta Dixon (Hemenway), Utah Valley Gazette, 1889-90.
Susa Young Gates, Young Woman's Journal, 1889-1901.
Eva B. Smith, Box Elder County Herald (Brigham City), 1890 or 1891; Eagle (Kaysville), 1893-94; World (American Fork), 1896-99.
Kate Jean Boan, Uintah Pappoose, 1891—92.
Kate Hilliard, Ogden Times, 1896.
Candace A. De Witt Blakeslee, Piute Pioneer, 1897-98.
Samantha Sessions Smith, Woods Cross Watchman, 1898.
Elizabeth S, Worthen, Panguitch Progress, 1898 and 1903-4.
most could have established their own obstetric ward, Ellis having had ten children and Maggie nine.
Beginning with the second volume of the Sanitarian in April 1889 until its demise in January 1891 only Milford was listed as editor. Ellis continued to write for it, but Maggie did not; and one author suggests that the eventual death of the publication might have been caused by feuds between Maggie and Milford who later were divorced. A modern reader might wonder if the content of the publication was not at fault. Reprinted articles were long, not very lively, and replete with difficult medical terminology.
Ellis went on to further study, service on the staff of the Deseret Hospital, delivery of 5,000 babies, publication of a volume of poetry, leadership in women's literary groups, and membership on the Relief Society general board before her death in 1939.
Maggie married Brigham H. Roberts after her divorce from Milford and died in 1926 in Brooklyn, where Brigham was presiding over the Eastern States Mission of the Mormon church.
Medical education was the goal of the Sanitarian. Another cause that contributed to the founding of Utah periodicals was woman suffrage. A publication of which no copies now exist but which reportedly had suffrage as its major concern was the Ogden Times, founded and edited by Kate Hilliard in 1896, the year that Utah achieved statehood following a campaign by its women to be allowed to vote once again as they had during the 1870s and most of the 1880s.
Publications for Mormon women also were supporters of women's rights. Considerable attention has been given in published works and theses to them and to their editors, so they will be mentioned only briefly here. Utah's first woman editor was Louisa Lula Greene Richards, who founded the Woman's Exponent in 1872. The twenty-three-year-old Lula came from the small town of Smithfield, and her total prior journalistic experience consisted of editing the handwritten "Smithfield Sunday School Gazette."
During the five years of her Exponent editorship Lula issued the sprightly eight-page paper twice each month and kept the promise of its prospectus that it would "contain a brief and graphic summary of current news, local and general; household hints, educational matters, articles on leading topics of interest suitable to its columns, and miscellaneous reading," as well as reports of the female Relief Societies and other church organizations.
After Lula married and had two children, both of whom died, she turned the editorship over to Emmeline B. Wells, who was forty-nine, thrice-married with grown children, and eager to fulfill a lifelong ambition to be the editor of a magazine. She brought the Exponent through the remainder of its forty-two years, reluctantly seeing its replacement by the Relief Society Magazine in 1914.
It was Susa Young Gates who founded and edited the Relief Society Magazine for its first seven years. Her nineteenth-century editing experience was acquired on the Young Woman's Journal, a monthly she founded with the thought that it would
The Journal survived from 1889 until 1901.
If the needs of various groups within the Mormon church stimulated the publication of specialized periodicals, some outside the church felt a need to publish their views on Mormon plural marriage. One of the most vociferous opponents of polygamy was Jennie E. Anderson Froiseth, editor of the Anti-Polygamy Standard.
Jennie, born in Ireland in 1849, moved to Salt Lake in 1871 after five years of study at European convents and marriage to Bernard Arnold Martin Froiseth, a surveyor and mapmaker assigned to Fort Douglas. She edited the Standard from its inception in April 1880 until its final number in the spring of 1883. As vice-president of the Women's National Anti-Polygamy Society, she also traveled throughout the country to strengthen antipolygamy sentiment and to form new branches of the organization.
A monthly of eight pages, with a subscription price of one dollar a year, the Standard carried a subtitle from I Corinthians 7:2, "Let every Man have his own Wife, and Let every Woman have her own Husband." In her "Salutatory," Jennie quoted the constitution of the society to explain the paper's aim: "to plan and execute such measures as shall in the judgment of its members tend to suppress polygamy in Utah and other Territories of the United States." An editorial added that the society's members felt only "kindness and good will" toward Mormon women but hated the system under which the Mormons were suffering.
The paper carried news notes, some household hints, reports of non- Mormon churches, a mining page, biographical sketches of notable women, and poetry, as well as exposes of polygamy. Jennie used many of the exposes in her 1886 book, The Women of Mormonism; or The Story of Polygamy as Told by the Victims Themselves. She also was busy bearing children — five of them — and working for the establishment of a home for escaping families of polygamists.
The Froiseths stayed on in Salt Lake after Bernard left government service to operate a map publishing and real estate business. Jennie, a poet and dramatic reader as well as an editor, was a member of the Poetry Society and the Ladies' Literary Club and a vice-president of the Utah Association for the Advancement of Women. She was associated with the Orphan's Home and Day Nursery and provided the major impetus for the founding of the Sarah Daft home for the aged. She died in Salt Lake at age eighty-one.
How can this diverse group of women and publications be summarized? Perhaps only by stating that they were as various a lot as any other group of frontier editors. It seems that they were accepted as equals by their male counterparts, who greeted them with encouragement when they became editors, teased them when they made mistakes, criticized them when they took contrary positions on political or social issues, and reported their retirements exactly as they did for editors who were men. No comments were found that supported a view of newspaper editing as an inappropriate occupation for women.
Publishing did not require a large capital investment in those days; and a woman, as well as a man, who had some spirit of adventure, a modicum of ambition, and a way with words might see journalism as a reasonable activity to pursue. Utah's population was growing; communities competed for settlers and businesses; advertisers relied on the print media to reach prospective customers. Newspapers were concrete signs that cities and towns were flourishing.
Like the new towns, Utah's early women editors often flourished only briefly. Seven of them lasted as editors for a year or less. Only Emmeline B. Wells and Susa Young Gates had editorial careers of more than ten years. Still, in spite of the wide ranges in length of editorship, type of publication, personal characteristics, and editorial aims, it may be possible to sum up these editors by borrowing the characterizations of western frontier women in general that William Forrest Sprague suggested in Women and the West. Certainly, the Utah editors had the three qualities he found typical: They were hopeful, ambitious, and enterprising.
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