Food Editors Using Pen Names
A common practice of newspaper food writers was to use pen names, sometimes at the request of management because they wanted to preserve the continuity of the columnist; after all, it was expected the female reporter would leave employment once married. Food writers were not the first women at newspapers to use pen names. As other historians have noted, female news reporters began using pen names in the late 1800s “because for a woman to work as a newspaper reporter was considered unsavory and disreputable.”
Some of the most famous female journalists of that time were using pen names. Columnist “Dorothy Dix” was really Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, and Elizabeth Cochrane was hired by Joseph Pulitzer to travel around the world in eighty days as stunt girl “Nellie Bly.” In 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle introduced a food writer with the pen name “Jane Friendly,” supposedly for the sake of anonymity and continuity. When Jane Gugel Benet became the Chronicle’s food editor in 1953, she continued the “Jane Friendly” moniker, even though she was no stranger to the newspaper, beginning first as a copygirl during World War II and eventually working in nearly every department.
The food editors at the Spokane Spokesman-Review used the pen name “Dorothy Dean” for decades, with several women sharing the continuous byline. The first woman serving in that role was Estelle Calkins, who eventually left not because she married but to become a college professor. The next, Edna Mae Enslow Brown, did leave after two years when she married and started a family. Emma States wrote as Dorothy Dean during the war years, from 1941 to 1946, before leaving for a job in Seattle. Verle Ashlock was the next Dorothy Dean, leaving after one year because she married and went to work at the university while her husband completed his college degree. In 1948, home economist Dorothy C. Raymond took over the position of “Dorothy Dean” until she retired in 1957.
The Hearst newspaper chain used the pen name “Prudence Penney” for the position of food reporter at many of its papers beginning after World War I. (That is an image of a Seattle Prudence Penny above.) Because it would have been expensive to wire recipes across the country, there were different “Prudence Penny” reporters at the individual Hearst papers. Local journalists then took on the name in the manner that Aunt Sammy did in communities across the country. “Prudence Penny” began her reign in 1920 and was a quick success. During her first year on the job, Mabelle Burbridge of the New York Daily Mirror answered more than 70,000 letters addressed to Prudence Penny. At least one man took on the role – Hyman Goldberg for the New York Daily Mirror in the 1960s – and he was described as “a crusty, cigar-smoking, girl-watching ex-police reporter” in his obituary. In another example, home economist Cecil Fleming wrote as Prudence Penney while the food editor at the Detroit News. It was said of Fleming, “She knows why the jelly doesn’t jell and why the meringue weeps.”
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