American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow its only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as there were newspapers in the United States, there were also newsgirls. Girl newsies were photographed, interviewed, studied, argued over, and eventually absorbed into the collective "newsboys" and forgotten.
Extra! Extra! A History of Americas Girl Newsies offers a corrective, demonstrating the importance of newsgirls as early news workers and as symbols of child labor and gender reform efforts. Sometimes younger than ten years old and from impoverished families, girl newsies were already vulnerable to exploitation from the newspaper publishing industry, which relied heavily on child labor during the "golden age" of journalism. However, the newsgirls of this period contributed much to news labor, and they were important to the discussions concerning childhood, child labor reform, and womens changing societal roles. Properly integrating newsgirls into the history of newsies dismantles archetypes and enables a deeper understanding of child news labor.
Autumn Lorimer Linford is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University and has worked as a journalist for more than two decades.
“Extra! Extra! is both a cultural and social history that reveals something about child labor and arguments over child labor. With great sources, amazing images, and a very readable style, this book will serve journalism historians, especially those with an interest in gender issues in journalism and journalism history.”—Linda Steiner, professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland
“Extra! Extra! When we hear those words, sounds of newsboys in Disney’s Newsies come to mind. Drawing upon rich primary sources, award-winning scholar Autumn Lorimer Linford offers a transformative corrective to our popular understanding of newsies by writing young working-class girls, women, and people of color into the narrative.”—Amber Roessner, cultural historian and public memory expert at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism and Media
“Autumn Lorimer Linford has skillfully woven together evidence from diaries, labor records, and popular culture to tell the story of newsgirls, who claimed public space a century ago but then disappeared from American memory. Their voices and faces fill the pages of this engaging book, which restores these girls and young women to journalism history, labor history, and social history. Linford’s research also invites us to consider how girls’ lives long have been debated as symbols of cultural anxieties, while their own experiences remain in the shadows.”—Carolyn Kitch, historian and Laura H. Carnell Professor in the Department of Journalism and the College of Media and Communication at Temple University
