The Media and the Road to Modernity | 85in the years around 1900 held demonstrations aimed at the media and com-
mitted selective acts of vandalism in order to draw attention to their cause
(Chapman 2013: 117–41).
In general, the popular press helped to enhance the importance of women
since publishers now discovered them as an important target group for the
new sales market. This was true not only for fashion magazines and home
companions explicitly directed at women (like Die Modewelt after 1865, and
successful family journals like the Gartenlaube). In England, new papers like
The Star and the Daily Mail introduced regular women’s pages, and numerous
illustrations were included as a means of attracting female readers. In addi-
tion to advice and articles about everyday life and fashion, they printed many
reports about modern women who could be seen as emancipatory role models.
These ‘women’s pages’ also served as an incentive to read the rest of the daily
paper with its political content. In 1903 the publisher Lord Northcliffe even
brought out a penny paper for women – the Daily Mirror, ‘written by gen-
tlewomen for gentlewomen’ (Lee 1976: 82). However, it only achieved a real
breakthrough when it addressed both sexes with the headline: ‘A paper for men
and women’.
Although women were still underrepresented among journalists, their
numbers were already increasing significantly, and in the United States the
proportion of women was up to an estimated 7 per cent by 1900. In fact as
early as 1879 every eighth Congressional reporter in Washington was a woman
(Emery and Emery 1988: 215; Chambers et al. 2004: 15). In England in 1911
nearly 4 per cent of newspaper owners and publishers and 15 per cent of all
writers were women (incl. Schriftsteller, Lee 1976: 73). For this reason the
‘Society of Women Writers and Journalists’ had been established in England
in 1894, and books on journalism for women appeared on the market.
Even in Russia female journalists gained prominence at several newspapers
(McReynolds 1991: 150f.). Although female editors long remained a minority
in Western countries, journalism gave women access to an academically and
politically informed occupation and allowed them to participate in public life.
This was pioneered first in the United States and then in England, where at an
early stage individual women were able to move into top positions in the field
of political journalism, either as foreign correspondents (Margaret Fuller/New
York Tribune 1846) or editorial writers (Harriet Martineau/Daily News since
1852) (Emery and Emery 1988: 132f.; Chambers et al. 2004: 18f.).
From the 1880s, a few female journalists even made a name for themselves
by performing spectacular stunts that turned them into role models. Nellie
Bly travelled solo around the world in seventy-nine days for Pulitzer’s New
York World in 1889. Two years before, on an assignment for the same paper,
she had disguised herself so she could be admitted to a New York ‘madhouse’
and report on abuses there, an action that subsequently led to reforms. Ida