The National Women’s History Museum created an online exhibit entitled “Women with a Deadline: Female Printers, Publishers, and Journalists from the Colonial Period to World War I.”

The following highlights excerpts from the exhibit, which can be found here. Some of the information was also taken from the New York State Library.

Women have been integral to the development of printing and journalism in North America since the earliest settlers landed in the New World.

Less than two hundred years after Johannes Gutenberg’s 1450 introduction of the printing press, Elizabeth Glover crossed the Atlantic, bringing the first press to be operated in the British colonies. In the 1700s, women edited 16 of the 78 small, family-owned weekly newspapers circulating throughout the British colonies. Women worked as publishers, printers, typesetters, journalists and carved wooden engravings for illustration.

In 1738, following the death of her publisher husband, Elizabeth Timothy became the first female newspaper publisher and editor in America. She operated the “South Carolina Gazette” in partnership with Benjamin Franklin, who had owned that press. Female journalists were among the first to record, comment on, and publicize the events leading up to the Revolutionary War.

At the beginning of the 19th century, women were encouraged to submit their writing from home and to use pseudonyms. Nevertheless, determined women sought a place in this traditional male domain beyond the society pages of newspapers. The Civil War opened many new opportunities to women, including jobs in mainstream journalism. By 1879, women comprised 12 percent of the journalists credentialed for admittance to the press galleries in the United States Capitol.

In the early 20th century, newspaper tycoons Hearst and Pulitzer understood that many new readers of their penny papers were young female factory workers or domestic servants, and the two publishing magnates hired women to write for their papers.

In 1937, Anne O’Hare McCormick was the first woman in “New York Times” history to sit on the editorial board. In 1958, Judith Crist was named drama critic of the “New York Herald Tribune,” the first woman to hold such a title for a major daily. In the early 1960s, she became editor of the arts and editor film critic.

Mary McGrory first joined the staff of the “Washington Star” in 1947 as a book reviewer. In 1975 she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer for commentary for her series of columns about the Watergate scandal.