Writing for their Lives

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: These women were writing for their lives. They were writing because they needed a job. And then they began writing for other people's lives to help save their lives and make their lives better.

Katie Hafner:  I'm Katie Hafner, and this is Lost Women of Science Conversations: a series where we talk to writers, poets, and artists who focus on forgotten female scientists. At Lost Women of Science, our mission is to inspire people, particularly women and girls to take an interest in STEM, and we do that by telling the remarkable stories of women who devoted their lives to science. But we also try very hard to explain their scientific work in ways that non scientists can understand. And by doing that, we've become part of a long tradition of science writers and journalists, many of whom were women. It's this tradition that we're going to explore today with Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette. She's a science historian and author of the book Writing for Their Lives, a history of America's pioneering science journalists.  

Hosting today's show is Deborah Unger, our senior managing producer who, like me, was a tech reporter going all the way back to the 1980s. So hey, Deborah. 

Deborah Unger: Hi Katie, nice to be with you today.

Katie Hafner: Yeah, this is a pretty, pretty special episode because, uh, I don't know what your experience was, but when I was a tech reporter starting in the 1980s, I really felt like a fish out of water. How about you?

Deborah Unger: Yes, you could say that. I was often the only woman in the room at press briefings, and I have to say, I can't count the times the male CEOs who I had to interview would ask to speak to my boss because they presumed I was the secretary. And there were the inappropriate, uh, passes  as well. Did you experience that?

Katie Hafner: Oh yeah, just the outright sexism like the whole thing about where's your boss and: What you're you're an actual reporter? You can't write about this stuff. We're the ones who do this, we men. And then the inappropriate behavior, and passes, and then feeling like we couldn't say anything. My own editor at Business Week made a pass at me, and I didn’t know what to do, and then, I do remember there was this one time when I was interviewing Steve Jobs for a story. And he gave me a scoop by mistake, that he meant to give to Newsweek, and I sailed straight out of his office, with every intention to publish it in Business Week, my publication, and he started calling me, like, every 20 minutes, every half hour, to try to sweet talk me out of running the piece, almost like he was, like, wanted to take me on a date. The whole thing was so icky and creepy, and I remember thinking to myself, actually thinking to myself at the time, would he be doing this if I were a man? So, I ignored him. And we ran the story.

Deborah Unger: Good for you, Katie. I don't think we were the first people to suffer from these sorts of things. When I was reading Marcel's book, it was just a surprise to me that it was in the 1920s, as mass media was coming about, that women were taking the role of science writers. Just as we were explaining new tech, they were opening up this field explaining science to a whole new mass audience. It was an interesting and difficult job and they went through some of the same experiences that we did, being the only women in the room. 

Katie Hafner: Exactly. In fact, before this book was brought to my attention, I had no idea that there were women who were science writers going back that far. 

Deborah Unger: Well one of the points that I think that Marcel is going to talk about is how they started with the mass publications. And we'll get into that in the interview. It's, it's really fascinating.

Katie Hafner: Great. Well, I can't wait to hear it. 

Deborah Unger: I am delighted to welcome to Lost Women of Science, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette. Hello, Marcel.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Hello, Deborah. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Deborah Unger: I'd like to start this conversation with a bit of scene setting and history, if I may. We don't think much about the fact that science breakthroughs are considered front page news nowadays. But a century ago, that wasn't the case. So can you tell us about the beginnings of science writing for popular audiences?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Okay, in the early 20th century, we have the rise of the mass media, with the rise of mass magazines and higher circulations for newspapers. And as those publications searched for readers and wanted to expand their circulation, therefore their business, they looked for more topics to intrigue their readers. In the first part of the 20th century, you didn't have a lot of people who were professionally trained either in science or in what we now call science journalism. So the science that appeared in the mass media was more likely to be highly sensational and not of the kind of science news that we think of today, where someone's talking about a breakthrough. 

By the time you get to the 1920s, however, you have people who are more interested in communicating directly to the public using the mass media and trying to find modes of communication to translate what were often perceived as the arcane terminology of scientists. For understanding the link between the mass media and science in the early 20th century, you always have to remember that it's a tension between the topic and business of the media. If you can't get the eyeballs to the front page, if you can't get people to read the stories then they're not going to appear on the front page.

So it's only as journalists began to figure out how to translate, and to explain science in more interesting ways to the public that we have the development of a cadre of science journalists who are accepted in editorial selection and who kind of form a critical mass of writers talking about science.

Deborah Unger: And it seems that a lot of those were, were women. Can you tell me a bit about their background and where they started doing their work?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: In the early 1920s, the development of an organization called Science Service with funding from a wealthy newspaper publisher gave an opportunity to hire people regardless of who they were, but to hire them to write about science. Fortunately, the first person who was appointed to run that organization, Edwin Slauson, was married to a suffragist and was someone who just said, all right, if you can write you can, if you're a woman, if you're a man, doesn't matter. I want you to write the best possible story. So he opened the door and allowed women to succeed or fail on their merits. And that was something that was rather unusual in journalism for the day. 

At that point, if you were a journalist and you wanted to work for a major newspaper, it was more likely you'd get assigned to the women's pages, or to cover society news. Covering science was not something that the women reporters on the New York Times or other major newspapers in the United States were allowed to do or even encouraged to do.

Deborah Unger: Can you tell me a little bit about science service? I think today people don't understand how newspapers were fed stories from a service organization like that. And were there bylines? What happened? How did that work?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Well, Science Service sold stories without bylines as wire service stories. They sold what they called enterprise feature stories with bylines. And then they also published their own newsletter. And later they had their own radio show. And all of that content was content that anyone could use. Their prices were rather minimal. The whole idea was to get science out there to the public any way they could do it.

Deborah Unger: And I believe that Slauson was very, very keen on having very accurate science. That it was really important that the stories did have this tension between being exciting enough to be picked up, but also accurate so that the scientists themselves would appreciate what was going on.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Yes, the best science of the day had to be both accurate and interesting. It didn't matter if it was accurate if nobody was interested in reading it. If people were interested in reading it and it wasn't accurate, then that would discourage scientists from cooperating with the journalists in the future.

Deborah Unger: And so the women who went into this field, were they scientists turned writers or writers turned scientists?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: They were all the above. The women who are the pioneers that I write about in the book, who first worked for science service, were often women who were trained in science, or women who were just interested in science and who were intelligent enough to be able to interview a working scientist and interpret his or her work for the audience. Some of the writers had advanced degrees but most of them had only a minimal college education. These women. were writing for their lives. They were writing because they needed a job. And then they began writing for other people's lives to help save their lives and make their lives better.

Deborah Unger: Which brings me on to the women themselves. And so we can talk about who they were in the particular. The book is filled with lots, lots of examples of these fascinating and extraordinary women, but I'd like to focus on just a few so that we can really get into their stories. And the one that perhaps pops out most to me at least, is Emma Reh, she's staring from the cover of your book looking very elegant and very intense as well. Can you tell me a bit about Emma Reh, and her life?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Emma's a fascinating character in that she's an immigrant to the United States. She was not born in the United States, so she came here as a, as a child. And her English was probably pretty minimal when she arrived, but she did exceedingly well in school and went on to get two degrees in chemistry from George Washington University and worked for a while as a chemist. So she's one of the ones who had scientific training. And then she got a job with Science Service writing about science. She unfortunately got into a marriage that wasn't working out. In those days it wasn't as easy to get a divorce in the United States. So she decided to head to Mexico to be able to get a divorce. And she decided she was going to make her living writing about science in Mexico. 

Now, that's a point in Mexican history when archaeology and anthropology are taking off. So she's right in there when there's a lot of exciting science going on. And she's on the spot, going to archaeological digs, interviewing the top people in the field, and also becoming interested in archaeology and anthropology of the day. But it, it was tough. She often talked about in her letters back home about the minimal amounts of money she was bringing in. And Emma's a good example of the stringers that I write about in the book. And I don't think we should forget them as we're talking about the role of women, especially talking about the role of women in science journalism in that period. 

Emma didn't have, when she left science service, she didn't have a guaranteed income. If she didn't sell a story, she didn't have any income coming in. And I write about a whole host of women who were stringers for Science Service who were writing during the 30s and writing, during World War II and even afterwards. Especially during the Depression years, those women found their writing for outlets to be a very important part of their income.

Deborah Unger: I should just say that a stringer is someone who isn't on contract with the paper and has a relationship with an editor, but is only paid piecemeal for the work that they do, and that means that they don’t have a steady income. I've been a stringer myself and understand that very, very well.

But turning back to Emma, you just mentioned her archaeological reporting, and I wanted to read a passage from your book on this, which I found fascinating.

You write: she had become friends with Mexican archaeologist Manuel Gamio, a leader of the indigenismo movement, and begun making frequent journeys into the rugged backcountry. On a three day trip on horseback to Texcala, she visited the sites of fortified cities on mountaintops, “where only pines grew, and from which we could look all over the state”. Can you tell me a bit more about Emma's work in Mexico?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Oh, yes. The letters where she's describing after she's come back from visiting a dig, or actually staying for several weeks at the site of a dig, are really quite amazing. They were living near the site in sort of minimal housing but then going to visit the sites and there while they're actually uncovering things. But she also had fallen in love with the culture and the people of Mexico and the geography. She describes the people and the setting in such beautiful lyrical language. But she's then, on the other side, her investigative side, she's becoming intrigued with the notion of uncovering the lives of these people who once lived on that land. So she began to be more interested in writing herself about the people and the archaeology that was being done.

Deborah Unger: So, she went from being a science writer to actually being an academic.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: To being a researcher.

Deborah Unger: Researcher.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: A researcher published and accepted in the academic community. And after World War II she was doing work down in Central and South America assisting people with learning more about how to improve their nutrition and their agriculture. So she really lives this very interesting life of both service to the world and to the public through her writing, and then later her service to the public by being on site and helping people who are less privileged than she is. 

Deborah Unger: More on early science journalists after the break.

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Deborah Unger: Besides Emma Reh, there are many many fascinating science journalists that you discuss in the book, and one that really caught my attention was Jane Stafford. She had a very long and storied career, mostly with the science service.

And as you point out, she was a pioneer in the field, so who was Jane Stafford? And can you tell me a little bit about her writing?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Yes, now in contrast to Emma Reh, who's born into circumstances which are far from wealthy and privileged, Jane Stafford was born into a wealthy family in Chicago and went to Smith College, and had chemistry training, and some training in writing and literature. So she really, in a way, didn't need to have a job, but she wanted to have a job. So she became a writer by choice and became fascinated with the world of medicine and medical communication. 

She also turned out to be a very good writer. One of the things that you can see all the way through her writing are her innovative uses of literary references and occasionally even popular culture, something that we see with many of the other female writers. They weave references to things that they believe their readers might, might be familiar with.

Deborah Unger: From what I can see, she dealt with some very controversial topics–

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Oh yes, yes.

Deborah Unger: Which was not something that was easy to deal with, like venereal disease and birth control. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Yes, she coordinated with other public health specialists in what became a very important campaign in the United States to bring that topic out into the open.

What’s interesting is she’s also described as a very proper, perhaps not the right word, but she’s described as a very elegant, not terribly boisterous person. So the idea that she’s talking about venereal disease, and what we now call sexually transmitted diseases and pushing to have them discussed in an accurate, as well as an appropriate way, really was a pioneering effort on her part.

Deborah Unger: In fact, we managed to track down an audio that Jane did in 1987 for the National Association of Science Writers. In the interview, she discusses the difficulties of writing about STDs. Here’s a short clip of Jane:

Jane Stafford: As I said,  at one time when I first went to the Science Service syphilis, gonorrhea was taboo in the newspapers. Even, you couldn’t even say venereal disease or sexual disease or sex for that matter in the newspapers. You couldn’t use that word. It was a little limiting as you can imagine.    

Deborah Unger: So that was sort of the beginning of the health Journalism that we're now so very much familiar with, almost every outlet will have its health column and its health focus, shall we say.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: In the sense that it's the professionalization of that. Up until then, health columns were not always as professional in how they were approaching things. And just because you had people like Jane Stafford doing accurate reporting on medicine didn't mean that you also didn't have people who were also pushing inappropriate or unreasonable cures and treatments at the same time.

So they were always battling against the forces of disinformation and misinformation. And that was a battle that all of these women were seriously concerned about in their writing.

Deborah Unger: Yeah, and journalists are definitely still battling those forces today. Another battle that you described in your book is the discrimination that these journalists faced as women in a male dominated field. So for instance, Jane Stafford tried to get equal pay, and it seems as though even though she was very successful, she came up against a brick wall. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: That's again a matter of the culture of the workplace at the time. So, Edwin Slauson had opened the door and given these women the opportunity to write, to have a job, to see their articles in print. The ability to have equal pay for equal work was something that was going to be many, many decades in the future. Even if we have it now. There was still a tendency to pay men more, even if they were doing the same writing on the same staffs of newspapers and magazines. So it was more a matter of science service being in the sort of mainstream of cultural attitudes toward women and the pay scale for women.

Deborah Unger: Mmm, I see, I see. Now, moving on to the scientists themselves, it’s clear from the book that Stafford did understand that women scientists were also not getting their due. Jane even wrote about a victim of the Matilda Effect, when male scientists take credit for the work of female scientists. Coincidentally, the incident that Jane Stafford was involved in was about a female scientist called Matilda- Matilda Brooks, who discovered a way to treat cyanide poisoning, but Stafford failed to attribute this discovery to Brooks initially. 

This occurred because Brooks’ collaborators failed to include her in the journal article about it. So how did Stafford right this wrong? Can you tell me that story?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: What Matilda came up with was a method of treating people for cyanide poisoning. And the two and possibly three male scientists just went on and presented papers and talked about the work as if she had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And she had not even been in a collaboration with them.

Deborah Unger: And then Jane Stafford stepped in.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: And Jane Stafford stepped in, yes, which was one of the few ways in which you could correct the record at the time. Unlike today when there are more let's say formal ways in which one can uh, attempt to get a scientific journal or an association to acknowledge a matter of theft of ideas. In those days Jane Stafford's newspaper article turned out to be a fairly effective way to get the point across. And there is a bit of correspondence saying that at least one of the men seemed to have expressed regret.

Deborah Unger: Oh, that's good. That's good at least. It makes me think of the discrimination that both the scientists and the science writers faced at that time. Maybe it was part of the times, but Jane was a very proficient and well respected writer, and she was part of an organization that won awards for science writing. And yet, when they came to arrange the awards ceremonies, there was something rather bizarre happening there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: She had been one of the founding members of the National Association of Science Writers. And when their organization was being given in a major award, and she was also an officer of the organization at that point, unfortunately, the, the group that was giving the award decided they were going to schedule the award ceremony in a club in which only men could be members and where women were not admitted into the building. And even though her boss, Watson David, objected several times when this kind of thing happened, when she was not invited to something, for example, to an important press event, the organizations often would refuse to change the venue and continue to keep that male only, exclusive, kind of club venue for quite a few years. 

Deborah Unger: What do you think this tells us about the larger environment that they were working in at the time?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: It could be very discouraging. One of the things that I admire about these women is their persistence. They never gave up, they never stopped writing, they kept learning more about science, they kept doing their best to cover every aspect of the particular fields that they were monitoring, and they seemed to always find new ways to express what they were writing about. If you look at their output, they just became better and better writers as they got on. And some of them, like Marjorie Van de Water, were writing right up until the ends of their actual lives, within months of their deaths.

Deborah Unger: So they were just strong women.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Exceedingly strong. Exceedingly strong women. Intelligent, funny, resilient, interested in the world around them including popular culture, but also sensitive in an amazing way given their accomplishments. Sensitive to the needs and the problems of the people they were writing for, and especially as we get into World War II, sensitive to the plight of people who were caught up in the war.

Deborah Unger: That's a lovely way of putting it. So do you have a favorite writer that resonated with you and your career?

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: No. That's like asking which is my favorite pet of all time. I once thought that my dream would be if I could go back in time and have all of those women around my dining room table at the same time and then just sit in the corner and listen to them talk and laugh and share experiences together. Because they really were an amazing group of women who cooperated and coordinated and worked together, which is also another message, I think, for how perhaps we can be in the workplace in the future.

Deborah Unger: That's a nice way of putting it, a dinner party with all these fantastic women laughing and telling, telling their stories.So how, how did the work of these women science journalists shape the idea of science and of public health at the time that they were writing? And I guess they were starting to write in the twenties, thirties, up through the forties, fifties and sixties even.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: One of the ways in which they change the reporting on science and medicine and public health is that they are interacting frequently with the experts in those fields and attuned to the issues that are coming up in those communities. In particular, as the concern about a rise in venereal disease and sexually transmitted diseases occurs, they also were looking at issues of diet, nutrition, which was a particularly important issue during the Depression as people didn't have often enough money to buy the right kind of food, so throughout, they're always pioneering and having their ears to the ground and attuned to what's occurring within the field they're covering, whether it's archaeology or, or anthropology or chemistry or public health. And then bring that, the newest, latest information to their readers in ways that would be interesting, but also accurate and comprehensive.

Deborah Unger: Thank you very much, Marcel, for talking to us today, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on Lost Women of Science Conversations.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette: Thank you very much for the opportunity.

Deborah Unger: This episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations was produced by Sophie McNulty. Our thanks go to Marcel Chotkowski Lafollette for taking the time to talk to us. Stefanie De Leon Tzic recorded the conversation, Lexi Atiya was our fact checker, Lizzie Yunnan composes all our music, and Keren Mevorach designs our art. Thanks to Jeff DelVisio, our publishing partner, Scientific American. Thanks also to executive producers Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX. Thanks for listening and do subscribe to Lost Women of Science at lostwomenofscience.org, so you'll never miss an episode.