Sex & the Press

It was not such a thrilling subject: women in politics. Nor such a vivid story: yesterday, Sarah Schuyler Butler, daughter of President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, said that women should drop feminism and sex-consciousness in politics and "get down to work"; today, Mrs. Elizabeth S. Rogers of the National Woman's Party retorted that she and her friends would stay "proudly feministic."

Nor was it a very serious accident that had befallen the young female reporter who had gathered the news. Going to the Associated Press office from her interview with Mrs. Rogers, the young lady had been bowled over by a taxicab; bruised, muddied, shaken up but not hurt.

But the young lady had done the right thing. That was, while only to be expected of a really good reporter, somewhat significant. She had regained her feet, brushed herself off, proceeded to the Associated Press office and written her story before thinking of smelling salts or a hot water bottle. And the young lady was "somebody," too. So newspapers published the story of her accident, complete with homilies on reportorial disregard of self, and also her picture --pretty Mrs. William (Julia Davis) Adams, daughter of onetime presidential nominee John W. Davis.

The whole episode gave newsreaders this thought: why might anti-feminist Miss Butler not find in Mrs. Reporter Adams an excellent example of the kind of unsex-conscious industry she would like to see women exhibit in politics? Scarcely any metropolitan newspaper today is without women on its staff; not only as editrixes of sob columns, advice to the socially incompetent, fashion pages and society notes, but also as literary and dramatic critics, cartoonists, humorists and "straight" news reporters like Mrs. Reporter Adams. These daughters of journalism ask no favors and receive none because they happen to wear skirts instead of trousers.; nor do they waste time and energy arguing womanhood for womanhood's sake.

To which argument Mrs. Rogers might well reply: "Ho! But for every ten male reporters, humorists, critics there is only one Mrs. Reporter Adams, one Anita ('Blondes') Loos, one Irita Van Doran [of 'Books' in the New York Herald-Tribune], And how fine it would be if these women would get proudly feministic, cleanse the newspapers of their manifold manly vices.

"Furthermore," Mrs. Rogers might continue, "for every hundred Ochses and Pulitzers and Hearsts and Curtises and Howards and Pattersons and McCormicks, there is only one Lucy Cotton Thomas. There ought, simply as a matter of equality, to be far more female Newspaper Proprietors."

The reference here would be, of course, to the beautiful but businesslike guiding spirit of "A great American newspaper published by an American woman," the actress-widow of Publisher Edward Russell Thomas of the New York Morning Telegraph.* Since her husband's death last summer she has taken in hand his newspaper (said to have been the bright inspiring star of her early career as a Texas cinema ingenue) and made it grow apace. It was already noted for its special attention to news of the racetrack and the theatre. She has made it a race-track and theatre newspaper de luxe. Instead of a serious-minded Arthur Brisbane on the front page, there is a column of smartcracking and eye-winking by "Beau Broadway." National and foreign affairs are not neglected but they are accelerated to synchronize with the mental machinery of people who like "the black bottom" and fleet horses. It is a paper which dares print a statement from the Board of Temperance, to the effect that 1927 finds Prohibition stricter than ever, under the front page caption: "TODAY'S BEST LAUGH." Its sensationalism is not the morbid pandering of Hearst, MacFadden or Patterson-McCormick, but nimble-witted, gay, nearer the vein of the chorus dressing-room than the registry desk of the morgue. With an effect more amusing than depressing, the Telegraph publishes "OUR DAILY HORROR"--one short conventionalized notice of a wife-slaying or a murderer's last words. No press agent, however lowly his client, is ever turned away: Publisher Thomas herself was once an anxious young thing at the Gaiety Theatre.* And with three kingdoms--the turf, the stage and the screen--solidly behind her, Lucy Cotton Thomas has lately set out to make a conquest of Manhattan's 150,000 clubwomen, by publishing personal scraps and intimate snippets, smart but never with the venom of Town Topics, about society people.

It would be true that in all metropolitan publishing there is no figure like the slim, well-tailored one that daily talks over the telephone to the Telegraph's department heads from her sumptuous uptown apartment. In Moscow, the late Vladimir Lenin's sister edits a four-column complaint department for Pravda, the official Communist sheet. In Detroit, 50 years ago, Ellen Browning Scripps saved her pennies, aided her brother in starting the News, read proof, prepared miscellany, helped found a vast fortune. In Manhattan for many years the minions of the Tribune (now Herald-Tribune) looked not to Publisher but to Mrs. Ogden Mills Reid as their actual, active "big boss," But none of these would constitute such a feather for Feminism's cap as Lucy Cotton Thomas--if, indeed, Feminism would own so bright a feather. Perhaps the racetrack, stage and screen would be provinces beneath the serious notice of proudly womanly women (though Mrs. Publisher Thomas, as her best biographer has written, achieved that "sublime climax . . . heartstrings entwined with baby fingers"--a daughter). Or again, perhaps Mrs. Publisher Thomas would not have fared so well had her cry been "Sex Equality" instead of "A Great American Newspaper."

*10c a copy. Not to be confused with the New York Telegram.

*She played the ingenue lead in Turn to the Right. In the cinema, Blind Love, she was a rosebud heroine.