“The Proper Sphere” – the Challenges of Writing a “Lady Journalist” in 1875

Maggie Sinclair, the 24-year-old heroine of my upcoming book, Doc O’Brien Meets His Match, isn’t on a crusade for women’s rights (at the moment) or trying to change the social order of her era. She has a gift for writing, and she wants to use it – to write about more than garden parties and debutante balls. That’s all.

One might think that Maggie has a head start, given that her father is the owner and publisher of a major Philadelphia newspaper. But Herbert Sinclair thinks his daughter should stay in her lane: the ladies’ page. And he was far from alone in this belief – it was shared by a significant majority of the population, including women.

It’s impossible to understand 19th century women’s history without understanding the “separate spheres” doctrine. Politics, law, medicine, government – these were part of the public sphere that society designated for men. Women were expected to embrace and remain in “the domestic sphere,” or her “proper sphere.” This meant home and family. Historian Barbara Welter famously summarized the prevailing 19th-century ideal as resting on four virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”

The phrase “proper sphere” appears repeatedly in 19th-century writing. The assumption that women’s public voices should be limited was widespread. Even advocates for women’s education almost always framed it within the language of domestic improvement rather than professional independence – so that a woman could be a better wife and mother.

The popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale and read in parlors across America, celebrated refinement, domestic skill, and moral influence as the central virtues of womanhood. The message was not that women lacked intelligence. Quite the opposite. It was that their intelligence belonged to a different sphere than that of men. Their duty was to use this intelligence to create a pleasant home with children brought up properly (while also pleasing “the man of the house.”)

Writing Maggie required a balance I thought carefully about. She couldn't be a modern woman in period clothing. That would be dishonest to the history, and as a writer, I find this jarring and unacceptable. I’m firmly committed to my historical novel heroines shining within the realities of the world they faced. But she also couldn't be so constrained by her era that she loses agency as a character. The balance I landed on was this: Maggie understands the rules completely. She simply finds them insufficient.

Maggie does not reject these values outright. She simply cannot see why they should limit the scope of her work. She wants to write. To report. To observe honestly. And when she encounters a man who does not feel compelled to shrink her mind in order to protect his own, the ground shifts beneath both of them. You’ll find out what happens with Maggie’s journalistic efforts in Doc O’Brien Meets His Match.

There were successful female journalists by the 1870s, but they were the exception rather than the rule. What these women had in common was not just talent or determination, though they had both. They had a sophisticated, pragmatic understanding of which doors were open and which were not, and they learned to find the ones that weren't locked quite as securely.

A pen name (often male.) A sympathetic editor. A subject – like frontier life or women's issues – that male journalists didn't particularly want to cover. A willingness to work twice as hard for half the credit and to call that progress, because it was. Maggie Sinclair inherits their legacy, whether she knows it or not. And these writers paved the way for the arrival of famous female journalist Nellie Bly by the late 1880s.

For Readers Who Want More

The history of women in American journalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century is genuinely fascinating — and somewhat heartbreaking, and also full of women who were a great deal more resourceful and determined than the official record tends to acknowledge.

If you want to read more, a few starting points: Kay Mills' A Place in the News covers the broader history of women in American journalism. For the period specifically, Marion Marzolf's Up From the Footnote is excellent and more focused on the 1870s-1900s era. And for Nellie Bly herself — who arrived on the scene just a few years after Maggie's story takes place and made everything Maggie was attempting suddenly, dramatically more possible — Matthew Goodman's Eighty Days is wonderful.