Rheta Louise Childe Dorr (1868–1948) was an American journalist, suffragist newspaper editor, writer, and political activist. Dorr is best remembered as one of the leading female muckraking journalists of the Progressive era and as the first editor of the influential newspaper, The Suffragist.
Biography
Early years
Rheta Louise Child was born November 2, 1866, in Omaha, Nebraska. She was the second child in a family of four daughters and two sons born to the former Lucie Mitchell and Edward Payson Child, a New York-born druggist.
One night when she was just 12 years old, Child and her sister snuck out of the family home against their father's wishes to hear Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton speak on women's suffrage. The experience proved to be transformative and Dorr became committed to the idea of voting as a fundamental right even at this early age.
Child studied for two years at the University of Nebraska before moving in 1890 to New York City, where she worked as a journalist. While in New York she met John Pixley Dorr, a conservative businessman from Seattle. The couple were married in 1892 and moved to Seattle to start a family.
Even after her marriage Rheta Dorr continued to work as a journalist, interviewing gold miners returning from Alaska writing articles for New York newspapers as a freelancer. Conflict with her traditionalist husband grew and in 1898 the pair separated, with Rheta returning East with her two-year-old son, where she was forced to make her own way financially as a single mother.
New York Evening Post years
In 1902 Dorr went to work at the New York Evening Post, where she wrote investigative features and material on women's issues. She made special investigations as a worker in factories, mills, and department stores in order to study the labor conditions for women and children.
Dorr bridled at the unequal treatment afforded women in the workplace. In 1927 she recalled of her time at the Evening Post:
"Although I was a female, I had a man's ability to earn a very good living. I knew that because my services as a reporter and writer were sought by the then most distinguished newspaper in New York. It was a mark of ability to be asked to join the staff, a mark of special ability if you were a woman, because in those days very few women could get a job on a newspaper anywhere. Yet because of my sex I had to accept a salary hardly more than half that of any of my male colleagues. Moreover, I was given to understand that I could never hope for a raise. Women, the managing editor explained to me, were accidents in industry. They were tolerated because they were temporarily needed, but some day the status quo ante (woman's place is in the home) would be restored and the jobs would go back where they belonged, to the men."
She was eventually named the paper's "Women's Editor," but soon came to understand that she had run afoul of the paper's glass ceiling; when she asked her managing editor what her future was with the paper, she was told she had none outside of her current position, ostensibly due to her radical political views which were outside those traditionally held by the paper.<ref name=Gottlieb>Agnes Hooper Gottlieb, "The Reform Years at Hampton's: The Magazine Journalism of Rheta Childe Dorr, 1909-1912," The Electronic Journal of Communication," vol. 4, nos. 2-4 (1994).</ref>
Political activism
Dorr left the Evening Post in the summer of 1906 and traveled in Europe, where she became even more interested in the growing international movement to grant the right to vote to women. She continued this activity upon her return to America. Dorr wrote investigative features and gritty vignettes on the grim situation faced by urban working women for the short-lived reform periodical, Hampton's Broadway Magazine. Much of this journalism was collected in hard covers in 1910 as What Eight Million Women Want, a book which was regarded as influential in its day.
Dorr was briefly a member of the Socialist Party of America and lived on the Lower East Side of New York City, where she came into contract with the city's immigrant population and became acutely aware of the economic plight of the working class. Dorr's political activity included picketing for striking workers in the garment industry and working with the Women's Trade Union League on behalf of social legislation such as the minimum wage, the 8-hour day, and women's right to vote. Dorr's political efforts were instrumental on building the coalition of social reformers that forced the first major investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Labor into the conditions faced by female workers.