Women's Press Organizations in Mississippi, 1894-Present
Susan Weill
In 1892, Kate Markham Power defied the hackneyed image of repressed southern womanhood and joined a group of six hundred newspaper editors, mostly men, on a railroad trip from St. Louis to Seattle. She was only twenty-seven at the time, and the journal she kept during that adventure, A Bunch of Letters from the Great Northwest, was published as a book by the Jackson ClarionLedger, the Mississippi newspaper where she was employed as city editor. 1
Kate Power ( 1865- 1946) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, at the close of the Civil War. She was formally educated at Mary Baldwin Seminary in Stanton, Virginia, and began her news career in the early 1880s as society editor for the Clarion-Ledger. Over several decades, Power served in nearly every staff position at the newspaper, from city editor to editor-in-chief. 2 Referred to affectionately as "Miss Kate" by other staffers, 3 she was respected for her "sleuth-like mind" 4 and "great initiative." 5 Power's lifelong interest in the news media led her to observe in 1936 that the social issues reported in newspapers in the 1930s sounded "ominously like the newspapers of one hundred years ago." 6
Kate Power was interested in the advancing rights of women, as evidenced by her coverage in Kate Power's Review of the "triumphal entry" into the practice of medicine by Mary Morrison in California. 7 Power often discussed and promoted woman suffrage in her role as a journalist and wrote, "After asking men why they object to allowing women to vote, I have yet to hear one single, sound logical reason." 8 Kate Power's Review, a tabloid published every Saturday from September 1894 through October 1895, featured poetry, sermons, book reviews, "Town Talk," short fiction, recipes, a "Children's Corner," and extensive advertising. The front-page banner headline in the inaugural issue was
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Women's Press Organizations, 1881-1999.
Contributors: Elizabeth V. Burt - Editor.
Publisher: Greenwood Press.
Place of publication: Westport, CT.
Publication year: 2000.
Page number: 301.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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