But the battle to be seen and heard is nothing new. Women journalists have been fighting to share these untold stories for decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Historically, the original alternative presses were created and run by those who had no voice or little representation: women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Since the early 1800s, women have used the pen and the press to create opportunities, raise awareness, and change the world<\/span> One of the first women to gain notoriety as a journalist was Anne Royall (June 11, 1769-October 1, 1854). Her work combined necessity and tenacity, as with most movements. After her husband had died, his family contested his will in court. The litigation went on for seven years, ultimately leaving Royall penniless. She had a knack for storytelling and humor, and her work was well-liked\u2014until she turned her pen on the people in power. She published a paper called <\/span>Paul Pry<\/span><\/i>, which exposed government fraud and corruption in Washington, D.C.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Royall was suddenly a maligned writer and a popular target for other papers. The local press called her “a literary wildcat from the back woods and a virago (a loud and overbearing woman with masculine attributes). The negative press led to declining subscriptions and ultimately failed when the mail carriers refused to deliver the paper to subscribers. She was charged in 1829 with \u201cbeing a public nuisance, a common brawler and a common scold,\u201d though was fortunate to have charges reduced to just “common scold.”<\/span><\/p>\n As Jeff Biggers in <\/span>Smithsonian Magazine<\/span><\/i><\/a> wrote, <\/span>“Royall knew how to make her readers laugh, and laugh at men\u2014a dangerous talent, especially for a freethinking woman who rattled the bones of Capitol Hill and made Congress ‘bow down in fear of her’ as the whistleblower of political corruption, fraudulent land schemes, and banking scandals. She was also a thorn in the side of a powerful evangelical movement sweeping across the country.”<\/span><\/p>\n Around the same time as Royall, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was making a name for herself as a journalist and for her radical views on women’s rights and education. Her career is a list of firsts; she was the first woman allowed access to the library at Harvard, considered to be the first female war correspondent (covering war and revolution in Europe), and her book <\/span>Women in the Nineteenth Century<\/span><\/i> is considered the first major feminist work in the U.S. She was also the first editor of the transcendentalist journal <\/span>The Dial<\/span><\/i>, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called Fuller “my vivacious friend.”<\/span><\/p>\n Fuller was an early champion of feminism, and her writing helped to make women’s issues part of the national conversation. Fuller used her platform to promote women’s rights to education and employment, prison reform, and the emancipation of enslaved people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Author Megan Marshall wrote more about the dynamic of Fuller and her groundbreaking body of work in her novel, <\/span>Margaret Fuller: A New American Life<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>talked to WUWM public radio about Fuller<\/span><\/a>. Tragically, Fuller died in a shipwreck just off the coast of Long Island, New York, in 1850, but her legacy as an early American feminist journalist lives on.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\nAnne Royall: A “Thorn in the Side”<\/span><\/h3>\n
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\nMargaret Fuller<\/span><\/h3>\n
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