Dorr, Rheta Childe

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DORR, Rheta Childe

Born 2 November 1866, Omaha, Nebraska; died 8 August 1948, New Britain, Pennsylvania

Daughter of Edward and Lucie Childe; married John P. Dorr,1892; children: one son

The daughter of Episcopalian parents, Rheta Childe Dorr joined the National Woman Suffrage Association at twelve, attended the University of Nebraska for one year, and enrolled at the Art Students' League in New York City in 1890. She took her first reporting job on the New York Evening Post and was a muckraker at Everybody's Magazine and Hampton's from 1907 to 1912. Briefly a member of the Socialist Party, she became active in the Republican Party in 1916. A militant suffragist, she edited the Suffragist, and from 1913 to 1916 was a member of the Heterodoxy, an early feminist discussion group. As a foreign correspondent, she covered the Pankhursts' suffrage struggle in England, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and Mussolini's march into Rome.

Dorr was the author of several books, most of which (aside from her autobiography) consisted of materials previously published in newspapers and magazines. As an autobiography, A Woman of Fifty (1924) represented both a highly successful creative act and a "self-revelation." Illustrating the traditional effort of an American intellectual to relate personal experience to the pattern of cultural change, Dorr sketched a political journey—one that led from a progressive vision of cooperative millenialism to a conservative faith in a "sane, practical democracy," with the "Great War" acting as the important transforming experience. However, Dorr was firm in her commitment to feminism; the chronological narrative revolves around her own early awakening to feminism and her struggle as a journalist to support herself and her son. Throughout her lifetime, Dorr worked to bring others from a perception of women as a "ladies' aid society to the human race" to an affirmation of their "breaking into the human race" with "full freedom."

In What Eight Million Woman Want (1910), Dorr dealt with "woman's invasion of industry" as a permanent factor in the American economy, carefully employing data obtained from reporting on all social classes of women in Europe and America. Having investigated various employments by working as a laundress, seamstress, department store clerk, and assembly-line worker, Dorr sympathetically revealed the "intimate lives of the factory workers in order to tell their story as they would tell it themselves if they had a chance." She also emphasized the social-reform activities of educated middle-class women's organizations, concluding that the fulfillment of their demands for women's economic, social, and political freedom was in the best interest of a democratic society. Dorr reiterated these beliefs in Susan B. Anthony (1928), a witty and sympathetic biography and history of women's life in America that dramatically situated Anthony within the social context of the post-Civil War era.

Dorr was a war correspondent from 1917 to 1918. Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) condemned Bolshevik politics and marked her break with New York socialist friends. Interpreting events in terms of "excesses" of an "unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob" intent on disengaging from the "Great War," Dorr recommended a large dose of American economic aid and the "help and guidance" of strong leaders with pragmatic republican values. Dorr ably captured the feeling of a country at war in her description of the July Revolution and the "women's battalion of death"—but Inside the Russian Revolution was marred by its strong ethnocentric bias.

Dorr was among the first journalists to report "hard news" about all classes of women, and she was among the best of the muckraking journalists. While her war correspondence was not consistently outstanding, she was among only a few women who obtained western-front reporting assignments during World War I. Her autobiography must be considered not only an "extraordinarily revealing" document but also a provocative commentary on American culture.

Other Works:

A Soldier's Mother in France (1918). Drink: Coercion or Control? (1929).

Bibliography:

Banner, L. W., Woman in Modern America: A Brief History (1974). Filler, L., Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936).