2022 Conference Abstract | May Birkhead and the Gendered Labor of the Society Scoop
May Birkhead spent nearly three decades reporting on American high society in Paris: for the Paris edition of the New York Herald (from 1912-1926), the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune from 1927 until 1934, and as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, with her fashion columns often picked up and reprinted by local newspapers across the U.S. Birkhead—the daughter of a Missouri dentist who happened into journalism in 1912, when the ship she was travelling on rushed to the Titanic’s aid—reported from the position of an insider within Paris’ expat high society. She was rumored to deliver her daily columns in a limousine and show up late at night to file reports in an evening gown, after dinner at the Ritz. A familiar name and front-page attraction for much of her career, Birkhead is now nearly unknown: the subject of little more than passing mention in scholarship on the era’s journalism. This paper will look at the society columns Birkhead published six days a week in the Paris Tribune between 1927 and 1934. It will draw on the work of Alice Fahs, Catherine Clay, Barbara Green, and others to consider Birkhead’s participation in, and revision of, the gendered labor of the society columnist. It will also examine the tension between Birkhead’s portrayal of the life of luxury of Paris’ American elite with the very real labor of delivering a daily newspaper column for the paper.
Read more about the role of women journalists: Cannon recommends Alice Fahs's 2011 study Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space from the University of North Carolina Press.
Nissa Ren Cannon is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her research focuses on transatlantic modernism, citizenship, and print culture, and she is working on a book on the interwar infrastructure of expatriation. She has recently published on the American Library in Paris in Cultural History and on transatlantic steam travel in Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille in ELN. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Nissa was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.
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