Electric Lit: The Cry of the Pack by Elizabeth Garver Jordan, Condensed Introduction by Brooke Kroeger, July 17, 2024

Read in full plus the Garver story on the Electric Lit site, here.

Elizabeth Garver Jordan’s stories exemplify the adage, “Write what you know.” What she knew emanated from her reporting and editing for top publications in the nation’s media capital—New York City—as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. It emanated from the success she achieved among men inclined to consider the women working in their midst a nuisance. The reportage, fiction, and essays in The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman reflect the rarity of Jordan’s career path in the 1890s. She rose from journalism’s trenches, not from a feminized perch. She earned respect as a peer of the men in charge.

During much of Jordan’s working life, women journalists numbered fewer than 250 in the United States, some 10 percent of the whole, not close to half like today. She was in the miniscule group of women reporters excused from the softer side stories and assigned to the paper’s front section, where the hard news appeared.

In 1893, she was twenty-eight, and three years into the decade she would spend on the staff of Joseph Pulitzer’s the New York World. She expressed pride in her assignment to the city desk and not to the stunt girl arena, where famed investigative journalist Nellie Bly and her imitators—to their credit—carved out the only place to date where “girl reporters” could build big-bylined reputations off the women’s pages.

Predictably, Jordan’s initial charge as Assistant Sunday Editor at The World was to run the pages devoted to women and children; but before she left the paper in 1899, she had advanced to have charge of comics and opinion. In the 1890s, this was neither commonplace nor unprecedented. As just two examples from the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley entrusted Margaret Fuller with the post of literary editor a half a century earlier, from 1842 to 1844, and Nelly Mackay Hutchinson reprised the role for Greeley’s successor from 1881 to 1890. Still, Jordan rates her own good-sized dot on the continuum that plots the careers of the few women who succeeded in man-like terms on the country’s mass circulation dailies.

Jordan did not have the benefit of a consistent byline to aggrandize her reputation as a reporter. As was typical for hard-news denizens, her articles went mostly unsigned. In her post as an assistant editor, achieving outside recognition would have also been difficult, especially since her name was not listed on the paper’s masthead. Her name, however, does appear in 1893 articles that list the country’s women journalists of special note—and that was even before The World sent her to cover the trial of Lizzie Borden.

Like the best of Jordan’s predecessors, her networking ability was key to her success. In 1899, when George Harvey left The World to become Editor of Harper & Brothers, he tapped Jordan to be the top Editor of Harper’s Bazar. (Women’s work, to be sure, although the Editor of Ladies’ Home Journal was Edward Bok.) It was as Editor of Bazar and from her magazine fiction that Jordan’s reputation grew, starting with her city room tales, first published in magazines and then collected into a book in 1898. “These tales of a newspaper office are feminine, not because they are weak, but because they are womanly,” one critic wrote in a review of Jordan’s debut fiction collection. “The woman in journalism, in all her varieties, is delicately but truly portrayed.” In the story “The Cry of the Pack,” Jordan writes about sexual violence in the workplace and the attitudes of men at the time towards women journalists.

Elizabeth Garver Jordan deserves a place in the larger saga of journalism’s women for her early hard news positioning on the staff of The World, for her depictions of the woman journalist’s life in the 1890s and early 1900s, and for anticipating the next two movements on the boulder-strewn road to women’s progress in the field. Read her reportage and essays as windows into how women found a way to thrive in a culture that offered them a reluctant, disdainful welcome. Read her fiction for its nuances and undercurrents, and for the more complete picture of journalism history that it paints.

– Brooke Kroeger
Author of Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism
Adapted from the Foreword to The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman