Postage Stamps Honor Women Journalists

By: Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press Writer (AP) Four famous female journalists will be honored on U.S. postage stamps next month.

The U.S. Postal Service plans to issue stamps Sept. 14 featuring Nellie Bly, Marguerite Higgins, Ethel L. Payne, and Ida M. Tarbell.

First-day ceremonies will be held at a Society of Professional Journalists convention in Fort Worth, Texas, and the 37-cent stamps will go on sale across the country the next day.

The four women made their marks in a field then dominated by men. They avoided the limitations of women's and society pages to do investigative journalism, war correspondence, and political reporting.

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864. In 1885 she persuaded the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch to let her write an article about "a woman's place in the world." She soon became a permanent member of the staff and began to use the pen name Nellie Bly, taken from Stephen Foster's song of that name.

In 1887 she moved to the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. For her first assignment she feigned insanity and gained admission to the Women's Lunatic Asylum. Her account of the experience exposed the poor treatment of patients in the asylum.

Marguerite Higgins covered World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. In the process she advanced the cause of equal access for female war correspondents and in 1951 became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

As head of The New York Herald-Tribune's Tokyo bureau, she was one of the first reporters on the scene when war broke out in Korea. She was ordered out of the country by a U.S. military commander who said women didn't belong at the front, but that was reversed after an appeal to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the allied commander in Korea.

Ethel L. Payne, known as the first lady of the black press, combined advocacy with journalism as she reported on the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s for The Chicago Defender and later as a broadcaster.

Ida M. Tarbell's "History of the Standard Oil Company" was ranked in the top five works of 20th century American journalism by New York University's journalism department. After holding various jobs, Tarbell joined McClure's Magazine in 1894 where she conducted an exhaustive investigation of the Standard Oil Company and the methods used by John D. Rockefeller Sr. to consolidate his hold on the oil industry. The articles, published from 1902 to 1904, helped bring about legal actions that resulted in the breakup of Standard Oil several years later.