reviewer and occasional contributor to Harper’s Magazine. Kentucky
congressman Henry Watterson was a frequent visitor, as was Mark
Twain, who Missy affectionally called Sam. By the time Missy was
10-years-old, she was becoming well acquainted with distinguished
authors, artists, engineers and a few statesmen. She rolled Easter
eggs on the White House lawn with the Cleveland children. By the
time Missy was 12-years-old, her mother and aunt had successfully
opened a school for girls, Washington College. The family eventually
moved to an address on 18 th Street where Missy “caught sightings
of a neighbor on 19 th Street, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
Theodore Roosevelt.”
Missy was becoming quite an accomplished pianist in her early
teenage years. She practiced at St. Paul’s Chapel close to her home.
It was on one such occasion that Missy would subsequently recount
as the moment when her “life’s work as a journalist came to her as a
sort of ordained mission.” The rector, in desperate need for monetary
donations for the altar service, begged Missy to write an appeal to
be printed in the local paper. Missy decided to aim high. She sent
her appeal to the Washington Post. Even Sarah thought this might
be too ambitious and cautioned her daughter that professional
newspapermen would not tolerate her poor spelling. Nevertheless,
the following morning the Post was on the doorstep with the milk
delivery. On the editorial page, with proper spelling, was the appeal
letter she had submitted the day before. She was paid $4.60. Unaware
that her behavior was completely without precedent, Missy
subsequently dressed in her best and went down to the offices of
the Post to ask for a full-time job. Of course that did not happen,
although her request was met with politeness rather than pity or
disdain. But Missy had decided that she was going to become a
journalist, whatever it took. She had her mother’s connections,
her brother’s Kodak and a nose for where the action would be. She
freelanced for a while, unchaperoned and taking streetcars late at
night in order to get her stories. She found a sympathetic editor at
the Washington offices of the New York World and started to get
paid for her work. She was offered a position covering “the church
beat” which her mother thought quite suitable. Almost unbelievably,
this led to the “scoop” that launched her early career. On Nov. 9,
1899, she had gone to St. Paul’s Chapel for morning choir practice.
The priest invited her and the housekeeper to witness the secret and
unsanctioned wedding of Admiral George Dewey. This was big, but
the resourcefulness that the young reporter showed in verifying
details of the marriage impressed her editor in a way that few young
male reporters had done. She now had a toe hold in a profession
that pigeon-holed its women writers into areas of interest suitable
for female readers.
Missy may have been naïve in her initial approach to becoming
a political journalist, but took on challenges equal to those of her
young male colleagues, including a stint at the Denver Post. For
five years, she persisted in her attempts to acquire a press pass to
the US Senate. When she finally achieved this goal, she became
the first woman journalist to sit in the Senate press gallery. Missy
BOOK REVIEW
never had the intention of becoming “one of the boys.” She had
grown up in an environment where the education of women had
been a priority and she was determined to use her “women’s pages”
to inform her readers and possibly improve their lives. The 19 th
Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was still more than
a decade into the future.
In addition to her work for the Washington Post and the World,
Missy began to spend some time in New York writing for the New
York Sun. She met a reporter named William Brown Meloney IV.
They were married in 1904. Bill was committed to his wife’s career
as much as to his own. Throughout their marriage, they would
spend periods of time apart, each pursuing their stories. For almost
10 years, Missy was a stay-at-home mother taking care of her son.
She never stopped networking. When she resumed her career, she
used the byline Mrs. William B. Meloney. She wanted women to
realize that they could be respectable wives and mothers and still
pursue an independent career.
In 1914, Missy became editor of Woman’s Magazine and in addition
in 1917, associate editor of Everybody’s Magazine. She was able
to enhance each of these publications by persuading important men
of the day to contribute articles and interviews on topics ranging
from politics to health and science. In 1920, she became editor of
The Delineator and one of her first successes was to be granted a
rare interview with Marie Curie in her laboratory in Paris. She established
a friendship with Marie and her daughters which would last
through their respective lifetimes. Here was another “wow” moment
for me. An opinion piece appeared shortly afterward in the journal
Radiology, authored by Dr. Ann M. Lewicki. Dr. Lewicki described
Missy as a trailblazing woman in a man’s world of journalism. The
following is a quotation from that piece.
“During this first meeting, Mrs. Meloney learned that what Marie
wanted most at this point in her life was some additional radium
so that she could continue her laboratory research. She who had
discovered radium, who had freely shared all information about
the extraction process, and who had given radium away so that
cancer patients could be treated, found herself without the financial
means to acquire the expensive substance. Mrs. Meloney made a
promise to Marie to correct this injustice and to obtain for her the
1g of radium that Marie requested.”
In 1920, 1g of radium cost $100,000. Missy conducted a nationwide
campaign to raise the funds. In 1921, Marie and her daughters
sailed to the US, staying first with Missy in New York and then
travelling with her to Washington, D.C. There, on Friday May 20,
President Warren G. Harding presented Marie with her radium,
properly protected in a lead-lined mahogany box.
For the next several years, Missy spent a lot of her time focusing
on the needs of her female readers. She started a Better Homes in
America movement, instigated conferences on health and nutrition
sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture, and conferences
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