Anonymous in Their Own Names: Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant

by Susan Henry

Overview

Anonymous in Their Own Names recounts the lives of three women who, while working as their husbands' uncredited professional partners, had a profound and enduring impact on the media in the first half of the twentieth century. With her husband, Edward L. Bernays, Doris E. Fleischman helped found and form the field of public relations. Ruth Hale helped her husband, Heywood Broun, become one of the most popular and influential newspaper columnists of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 Jane Grant and her husband, Harold Ross, started the New Yorker magazine.


Yet these women's achievements have been invisible to countless authors who have written about their husbands. This invisibility is especially ironic given that all three were feminists who kept their birth names when they married as a sign of their equality with their husbands, then battled the government and societal norms to retain their names. Hale and Grant so believed in this cause that in 1921 they founded the Lucy Stone League to help other women keep their names, and Grant and Fleischman revived the league in 1950. This was the same year Grant and her second husband, William Harris, founded White Flower Farm, pioneering at that time and today one of the country's most celebrated commercial nurseries.


Despite strikingly different personalities, the three women were friends and lived in overlapping, immensely stimulating New York City circles. Susan Henry explores their pivotal roles in their husbands' extraordinary success and much more, including their problematic marriages and their strategies for overcoming barriers that thwarted many of their contemporaries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826518460
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	08/20/2012
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Susan Henry is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at California State University, Northridge, and a former editor of Journalism History.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: "My name is the symbol of my own identity and must not be lost" 1

Part I Doris E. Fleischman

1 "I just knew she was the brightest woman I'd ever met" 9

2 "I won the right by the device of understatement" 25

Doris E. Fleischman Illustrations 41

3 "Keeping up the appearance of independence" 49

4 "Whatever your job is, you do it" 65

Part II Ruth Hale

5 "She totally conquered where she came from" 83

6 "A married woman who claims her name is issuing a challenge" 97

Ruth Hale Illustrations 115

7 "It was a curious collaboration" 125

Part III Jane Grant

8 "I meant to remain in the East once I got there" 145

9 "There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her" 161

Jane Grant Illustrations 177

10 "I really preferred to get my financial reward from the magazine" 187

11 "I'm Miss Grant, though married-and happily, too" 203

Coda: "I still feel that she is looking over my shoulder" 219

Notes 231

Selected Bibliography 277

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

Living in New York City in the first half of the 20th century, Fleischman, Hale, and Grant had much in common: they worked as journalists, married reluctantly, kept their maiden names, and spent most of their lives supporting their husbands’ careers. Fleischman was the backbone of Edward Bernays’s public relations activities, but never met with clients. Sacrificing her own career and ultimately her marriage, Ruth Hale helped make Heywood Broun an enormously successful journalist. With Harold Ross, Jane Grant cofounded the New Yorker, but fought to be compensated for her efforts. In addition, these women maintained complex households, where they entertained guests several times per week in the service of their husbands’ business interests. Henry, a professor emeritus of journalism at Cal State–Northridge, is at her best showing how these conflicted feminists balanced a multitude of professional and personal tasks. However, Henry makes each woman the subject of a minibiography, and this three-part separation proves as odd as the title, an allusion to their participation in the Lucy Stone League, which supported women’s efforts to keep their birth names. A chronological or thematic approach might have served her subjects better. Photos. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"In Anonymous in Their Own Names, Susan Henry has told with sensitivity and verve the story of three modern women of achievement whose lives have been overlooked in the rush to celebrate their famous husbands. Through excavating the unknown lives of Doris E. Fleischman, Ruth Hale, and Jane Grant (married to journalism greats Edward L. Bernays, Heywood Broun, and Harold Ross), Henry has illuminated the history of professional women, feminism, and family relationships in the twentieth century. She has also reminded us of the deep roots of male preferment in our culture. Henry's book is a major contribution to the study of gender and biography which all readers will enjoy."
—Lois Banner, author of Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox and Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle, and Professor of History and Gender Studies, University of Southern California

Susan Henry is to be roundly applauded for bringing to light the lives and accomplishments of these little-known women.
—Washington Independent Book Review

In the end, it tells the truth that most know but rarely acknowledge: women were there, these three especially.
—Foreword

"Henry... is at her best showing how these conflicted feminists balanced a multitude of professional and personal tasks."
-Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher