How Elizabeth Jordan Avoids Pitfalls of 19th Century Female Journalists

While in her essay, "Sympathy and Sensation: Elizabeth Jordan, Lizzie Borden, and the Female Reporter in the Late Nineteenth Century," scholar Karen Roggenkamp's argument that female reporters at the end of the 19th century were able to use their emotion and sympathy as a "rhetorical asset" that could "produce a more realistic and 'objective' form of journalism" (32-33) is a sound, and well-documented one, it seems to diminish the new perspectives and sometimes-revolutionary tactics of a writer like Elizabeth Jordan. Jordan used the framing of a female perspective as more than just a means to produce more-objective articles, and she also used other tools, besides this framing, to further her journalistic career.

In Jordan's reporting on the Lizzie Borden trial she attempted to offer a more insightful view of the accused, something that Roggenkamp states Jordan thought "male reporters, and the women in the courtroom" could not offer "because they have been influenced by bad journalism" (42). Here Jordan seems to make it clear that it is not her female sympathy that allows her to view Borden more objectively, but her ability to not be mislead by "bad journalism." If Jordan's journalistic voice was merely a result of some inherent feminine qualities than why would the rest of the women who attended the Lizzie Borden trial not regard Borden in the same way she did? Instead it seems clear that Jordan was concerned with crafting a new and alternative perspective that neither men, nor women, had explored, rather than merely being "more objective. Still, as Roggenkamp points out when she writes that "female journalists carved out a space for themselves in a male-dominated field by using the construct of womanly sympathy" (33), Jordan knew that framing her perspectives as inherently feminine was necessary to further her career in journalism.

Even in Ruth Herrick's Assignment, a story where Jordan presents womanly sympathy as a positive and useful quality that allows for female journalists to find truth where male journalists cannot, and thereby offer a more objective perspective, Jordan seems to be employing other cunning tactics to aid her journalistic career. Again she is using female sympathy as a way to explain her own experimentation in journalism, but the story itself is a piece of meta-fiction that acts a public relations tool. Jordan had to have known that a story about a female journalist gaining a confession from an accused female murderer, and not divulging the information, would be controversial when published shortly after the Borden trial ended. The story may have been written well before Borden's acquittal, but its polemic nature still had to be clear to Jordan. This suggests that Jordan may have been using the story as a promotional tool for her career. First she lays out that woman journalists (which she is) are able to obtain perspectives and insights that male journalists cannot (which she has done), but also she seems aware of the fact - as sensationalist reporting at the time showed - that controversy sells. Jordan may have intended for the story to be controversial in order to boost her status as a journalist and writer, something that she did not need to frame as a woman's perspective in order to do.

While Jordan did employ the framing tactic Roggenkamp discusses in her essay it seems important to note not only the other techniques Jordan used to survive in the male-dominated field of journalism, but also that Jordan's framing may have simply been used to get published, not to explain her new perspectives, perspectives that seem difficult to label as "feminine" if, as the Borden trial shows, even other women did not have them.