Writing for Their Lives: America’s Pioneering Female Science Journalists

In these uninspiring biographical sketches, LaFollette (Science on American Television), a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, profiles women reporters who worked for Science Service, a Washington, D.C., news outlet, between the 1920s and 1960s. Focusing on a handful of journalists, LaFollette discusses Emma Reh’s reporting on the excavation of the Tizatlan ruins in central Mexico in the 1920s, and notes that Marjorie Van de Water’s hiring in 1929 to cover psychology and psychiatry “pioneered a new journalistic beat.” Gender discrimination is a theme throughout: Jane Stafford, America’s “premier medical journalist” in the 1930s, was excluded from an American Society for Control of Cancer press dinner because it was held at the men’s only Harvard Club. Unfortunately, the profiles are rather workmanlike, and the abundance of attention given to the male editors, husbands, and scientists in the women’s lives can sometimes crowd out the main subjects, as when LaFollette expounds at length on how ecology reporter Marjorie MacDill Breit’s physicist husband pushed in 1940 for scientists to self-censor their work in the interest of hiding new discoveries from the Axis powers. This misses the mark. (Aug.)