When the Detroit Free Press celebrated its centennial in 1931, it ran a full-page feature about the history of women on the paper’s editorial staff, written by women’s editor Mary Humphrey.1 (The cheeky dek: “How the Free Press columns were slowly invaded.”) By Humphrey’s math, for about 45 of those first 100 years, the Free Press was published without a woman’s byline.
Then came Jennie O. Starkey, in 1878. She was in high school still, a few months shy of her graduation. She was the first woman to be employed full-time as a member of the newspaper’s editorial staff. She worked in the newsroom and not from her home — another anomaly, even as more women journalists began contributing to the paper. (Her father Henry Starkey had also worked at the Free Press, as city editor, for two years, from 1855 to 1857, before leaving the press to begin a public service career.2)
Starting as the editor of a department called “The Puzzler,” she later took over “The Household” department and then “Fair Woman’s World,” “The Letter-Box” and “The Sunday Breakfast Table.” “The cream of society considered it a privilege to have Miss Starkey ask them for news of their ‘Social Doings’ (that was the name of her column),” Humphrey wrote in 1931.
Jennie was a society woman in her own right, a charter member of the Michigan Women’s Press Association and later president of the Michigan Women’s Press Club, and a founding member of the Michigan Authors’ Association, established to promote a literary arts community in the state. She was an officer of the Mount Vernon Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
It’s unclear to me how long she worked at the Free Press, though she was still there in 1893, a 14-year veteran of the paper, when she was profiled in a book of notable women of the 19th century.3
Her service at the paper is barely mentioned in her obituary, published in that paper on October 23, 1918. She died of pneumonia at age 55 after contracting the Spanish flu, one of hundreds of thousands of people who died that month in the worst wave of the 1918-1920 flu pandemic.
“I lose one of my oldest and most valued friends in the death of Miss Jennie O. Starkey,” wrote John C. Lodge, then an alderman, later mayor, first a newspaperman who had been city editor at the Free Press during Miss Starkey’s tenure on the society desk. “Many men who today are occupying enviable positions owe their success to some thoughtful kindness on her part.”
I learned about Jennie Starkey in March, 2020, a pandemic coincidence; I had been toying with the idea of a news history-themed cemetery tour, though it turns out Detroit’s notable dead news leaders have a sprawl problem. But we do visit Jennie on my Elmwood tour, as well as a few other news history figures, among them George Pierrot, Martha Jean "The Queen" Steinberg, and the Pelham brothers, founders of the Detroit Plaindealer.
As for women pioneers at the Detroit News, I know less about them than I should, but that’s what lifelong learning is all about. Notable among them: Vera Brown, who began her career as a reporter in 1918 and stayed at The News for 10 years before moving to the dishy Detroit Times. She was also an accomplished aviator. Karen Dybis has a great profile of Vera here.
No relation: Nancy Brown, beloved columnist, editor and what we might today call community engagement visionary; tens of thousands of people turned up for casual “Column Folk” events around town. I wrote about her recently for the News.
There was Florence Davies, who edited the paper’s arts and society pages and was the first local reporter to take notice of Frida Kahlo when she was in town with Diego Rivera in the early 1930s, as Louis Aguilar reports. June Brown Garner, an important figure in the history of the Michigan Chronicle, was brought on as a columnist for the News in the 1960s. And Newser Deb Price wrote the first nationally syndicated column about gay life.
Fun fact: Mary Humphrey was also the founder of the paper’s “Old-Song Singer’s Club.” “Anyone of any age may join the Old-Song Singers society. Active members must be able to sing every verse of a song at least 25 years old — and the older and quainter, the better.” Sounds fun!
In a confluence of research interests that I’m not quite ready to discuss yet, I was delighted to learn this morning that Henry Starkey was also a founding member of Detroit’s first base ball club, the Franklins, in 1857. The club was mostly made up of members of the Free Press printing office. From “Baseball Fever: Early Baseball in Michigan,” by Peter Morris.
Much of what I know of Jennie comes from a short profile in “Woman of the Century,” a “cyclopaedia” of “leading American women of all walks of life,” edited by Frances Willard and Mary Livermore and published in 1893. I did not review all 1400+ profiles in “Woman of the Century” to be able to say definitively that there are no Black women in this book, but searches for prominent Black suffragists, journalists, writers and thinkers of the era, women certainly more prominent than a 30-year-old society editor in Detroit — Ida B. Wells, Frances Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell — turned up nothing.