“Like Home”: Gerrymandering the Physical Public Sphere in Female Journalist Narratives

Abstract

The cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.