Introduction

Abstract

Women have long held the notion that if they could somehow wrest control of the newsmaking apparatus, they would have a better chance of being seen and heard. One of the earliest and fullest expressions of this view is attributed to 19th-century US suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, who addressed a crowd in 1893:

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman’s own thoughts, and not as a woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. As it is now, the men who control the finances control the paper. As long as we occupy our present position we are mentally and morally in the power of the men who engineer the finances… Horace Greeley¹ once advised women to go down into New Jersey, buy a parcel of ground, and go to raising strawberries … I say, my journalistic sisters, that it is high time we were raising our own strawberries on our own land. (Sherr 1996, pp. 203–204)