This study's major contributions lie in its sharp refocusing of the nexus of journalism and literature in order to illuminate the contributions of women in both fields.... While Front-Page Girls is partly a recovery project, bringing to scholarly attention forgotten literary texts and episodes in media history, it is also a much-needed supplement to the longstanding discussion on the intersections of fiction and journalism.
Lutes puts her academic expertise and knowledge of the newspaper profession—she's a former staff writer for the Miami Herald—to superb use in this fascinating, clearly enunciated examination of the historical and cultural role of the American woman journalist during the decades bridging the 19th and 20th centuries.... Lutes reclaims the female reporter's pioneering and transformative position, first historically (e.g., Nellie Bly's exposing social ills; Ida B. Wells's fight against lynching), then as conjured in fiction by Henry James and such former newspaper women as Willa Cather and Edna Ferber.... Especially in consideration of today's body-conscious media culture—whether in front of, behind, or via hidden camera—Lutes's work is a revelation.
Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State University:
Jean Marie Lutes challenges accounts linking the developing standard of journalistic objectivity to the emergence of realist fiction, both of which were seen as male domains. In so doing she adds a new aspect to the story: how women journalists—both white and African American—contributed to journalism and to literary culture.
In the sensational press of a century or more ago, women did not rise by quietly doing their chores. The way to get ahead was to make oneself the story, often by assuming an undercover role and emerging to report the dangers, bodily and otherwise, that one had faced.... Jean Marie Lutes, once a reporter herself, finds scholarly diversion in reconsidering the roles sex and body played in the work of the stunt girls and the sob sisters. She also contemplates such fictional journalists as Henry James's Henrietta Stackpole, who became James's symbol of the evils of the popular press.
Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania:
Front-Page Girls is conspicuously well written. The prose is clear, vivid, and sophisticated while sustaining a high degree of complexity in the analysis. The cultural history Lutes presents is compelling and important. She is an exceptionally skillful critic and interpreter and is able to combine close readings of textual passages with persuasive arguments about the cultural significance of women in journalism.
Maurine Beasley, University of Maryland, College Park:
Front-Page Girls is a splendid addition to the literature of journalism and literary history from the perspective of women's studies. This seminal work provides a much-needed examination of the careers of American women journalists in fact and fiction from 1880 to 1930 by merging literary and journalism history. It points out that women journalists, long trivialized as stunt girls and sob sisters, played important roles in a mass-produced commodity culture that marketed their own femininity along with their news stories. Studying the intersections of race, class, and gender in depicting women journalists, Lutes makes a convincing case that they have not been given the attention they deserve from scholars who have overlooked their significance as symbols of contested womanhood. She tells a compelling tale of women who personified both authorship and spectacle as they entered a new world of publicity and power dominated by images of their bodies as emblems of women's place in a modern America.
As Jean Marie Lutes uncovers stories of girl stunt reporters, the first African American newswomen, and sob sisters—writers who specialized in wringing tears from the reader—it becomes very clear that it would be hard for a young journalist today to have an experience like these women... thankfully. The history begins with tales of the girl student reporters who would feign madness to report from the inside of a New York City asylum or spend days in cigarette factories following young girls forced to work under sweatshop conditions.
Verna Kale:
Lutes supports her arguments with... evidence from journalism archives as well as from pamphlets, popular novels, and other ephemera.... Her carefully considered close readings and rhetorical analyses that distinguish this project. Writing in clear, journalistic prose herself, Lutes identifies a particularly female literary tradition among these varied writers.... She focuses on the American fascination with and disdain for the female journalist, and, finally, the attempts of the journalist-turned-author to reconcile the performativity and sentimentality of female authorship with a modernist aesthetic.... Exploring a diverse array of authors across a fifty-year period, Lutes organizes her work around a unifying thesis that makes this book an important contribution to the fields of journalism, history, literary studies, and popular culture.
Patricia A. Schechter:
Ambitious and provocative.... For historians, Lutes's well-written, acutely observed book provides a theoretically sophisticated provocation to further study.
