Nixola Greeley-Smith, 1880-1919; The Life and Work of an American Journalist. (ePub)

Nixola Greeley-Smith was an important feminist journalist during the first two decades of the 20th century. She was a progressive and a social critic who was ahead of her time; a writer who fought for issues such as suffrage for women and economic independence for women, as well as social justice in general. Nixola regularly brought to light the hardships faced by poor working females in America. However, she has largely been forgotten today. What little notice is paid to her is usually to dismiss her as a "sob sister," a derogatory term meant to demean her and trivialize her talents and achievements. That label is attached to her on the basis of no evidence; an attempt by patriarchy to neutralize and blunt a dissenting voice. Greeley-Smith was a humorist and satirist who mocked the pomposity and stupidity of patriarchy with searing wit and barbed darts that flowed from her pen. She often used black humor to express her outrage. Few journalists could successfully author a blackly humorous piece about wife beating, but Nixola did. See, for example, "Wife Beating as a Fine Art." Read herein her eight-part series "The Girl on the Firing Line," a hard-hitting set of articles on the lives of working women in America. There was also her 20-part series on the types of husbands, "all of them more or less undesirable;" or her series "Priscilla," Nixola's retelling of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. And her piece on police brutality among the poor, "The Vindictive Banana."