Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist. Gary Scharnhorst. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 306 pp. $27.95 hbk.
This biography fully explores the life of a fascinating nineteenth-century independent woman journalist. She was a publicist, an entrepreneur, and a journalist. She died pursuing a story.
Kate Field’s parents were stage artists, although her father moved between the theatrical and journalistic worlds. Kate was an only child who always aspired to the stage and who, from time to time, performed, although rarely to hearty reviews. She was a success, however, on the lecture circuit, due both to her reputation and stage ability.
Many of Kate Field’s letters have been destroyed, presenting a particular challenge to this biographer, University of New Mexico English Professor Gary Scharnhorst, who relied almost entirely on published sources.
Field was born in 1838, and traveled abroad when she was only 20, accompanying her uncle and aunt to Italy after her father’s death in 1856. Before leaving, Kate arranged to write letters for the Boston Courier, filling her first dispatches with accounts of the Italian revolution, identifying with the revolutionaries and criticizing British papers for their distorted accounts of life in Florence. Soon the Courier dropped her because she was too outspoken, but her letters were picked up by the rival Boston Transcript and by the New Orleans Picayune. When dropped by the Transcript, she commented that she did not want to write for a paper that thought “liberty” was too good for “Italy.” Her writing and her reaction characterized many relationships she would have with editors throughout her career.
While in Italy, she became friends with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and was much enchanted with the literary world in which they moved. In 1861, because of the start of the American Civil War and in response to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death, Kate and her mother returned to the United States, living several of the next years with her aunt and uncle near Boston.
During these early years, Kate wrote under a male pseudonym and, although she flirted with a love affair or two, she remained single and independent throughout her life. Her staunch support of the Union cause angered her uncle, and she soon moved to New York. She wrote for several New York and Boston newspapers, primarily as a literary critic, and by the time she was 30 was writing under her own name. She earned a reputation as an opinionated critic of both literary style and public policy.
Snubbed by the Press Club of New York, she attempted to start a woman’s advocacy club, but as the membership oriented itself more to social events, she withdrew. She moved to Boston and started a club there, with the goal of becoming a social center for “united thought and action.” In 1869 she began to lecture, hoping to support herself on the lecture circuit. She began a lecture tour in 1871, during which she met Mark Twain. The two held little respect for each other, and they became lifelong rivals. She claimed to despise lecture tours, and, ever an elitist, she despised country audiences, saying she never failed to be amazed at the “opaque stupidity of the average villager.”
Between 1872 and 1879, Field spent her time between Europe and the United States, living more than four years in England. She earned a small fortune promoting Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in Britain, and then, in 1880, launched a business in New York that not only failed financially but damaged her reputation as well. The Cooperative Dress Association was designed to import clothing and share profits with investors. It was mismanaged from the beginning.
In 1883, responding to a comment by Oscar Wilde that Americans travel in Europe, but don’t know their own country, Field decided to explore the West. She began a lecture tour in Denver, traveling to Salt Lake City and other stops. In Utah she became fascinated with Mormonism, lecturing that Mormonism represented treason because of the “tyranny of theocracy,” and decrying church-sanctioned polygamy.
Her politics varied from self-described “radicalism” in her twenties to what her biographer calls “a reactionary xenophobe” who believed her nativism was “enlightened and progressive.” She championed white women’s right to vote only because it would negate the votes of black men, and she proposed loyalty oaths for Mormons and literacy tests for voting.
Promoting California wines for the State Viticultural Commission of California, Field took on the prohibitionists. She had always opposed teetotalers as “despotic,” and her new role gave her new reason to promote licensing of establishments to promote wine drinking as opposed to “guzzling.”
Fulfilling a life-long dream to publish her own magazine, Kate began publication of Kate Field’s Washington in 1890. The publication was highly controversial and, claims her biographer, also highly influential in American politics. She championed civil service laws, condemned lynching, argued for intervention in the Congo to prevent genocide, indicted racism, championed the lynching of the Haymarket anarchists, opposed annexation of New Mexico because many of its citizens spoke only Spanish, criticized the “foreign scum” America admitted to its shores, and claimed the Statue of Liberty would only ruin the view in the harbor. She championed the creation of Yosemite and argued to remove import duties on foreign art.
Her last trip was to Hawaii, where she argued the case of the expansionists. While traveling around the island by horseback, she became ill and died in 1896 at age 58.
Field’s story is captivating, not only because she was a fascinating individual, but also because she represented a distinct type of journalism for the period. She considered herself a personal journalist, and editors referred to her with those terms as well. At times her opinions helped her career; at other times they harmed it. She freelanced most of her life, submitting her “letters” to various editors and newspapers. Field presents a very different journalistic model that may well be more interesting today as the industry shifts from the late-twentieth-century model of objectivity to a more personal and involved public discourse.
JEAN FOLKERTS
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill