Marie Manning
Marie Manning was a pioneering female journalist, born in Washington, D.C., around January 22, 1868, to English immigrant parents. Despite facing personal challenges, including the early death of her mother and feelings of self-consciousness about her appearance, Manning pursued a career in journalism that began with her work at the New York Herald in 1897. She gained significant recognition for her advice column, written under the pseudonym Beatrice Fairfax, which effectively invented the personal advice column format and addressed the needs of young, unmarried women. Her practical and empathetic advice resonated widely, leading to a substantial increase in newspaper circulation.
Manning's career was marked by notable achievements, including her participation in the women's suffrage movement and her role as a founding member of the Women's National Press Club. Throughout her life, she balanced her professional ambitions with her responsibilities as a wife and mother of two sons. After a hiatus due to family commitments, she returned to journalism in 1930, further expanding the scope of her advice column to address a wider audience. By the time of her death on November 28, 1945, she was celebrated as a trailblazer for women in journalism, having left a lasting impact on the field.
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Marie Manning
Newspaper Columnist
- Born: January 22, 1872
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
- Died: November 28, 1945
Biography
Marie Manning was born in Washington, D.C., most likely on January 22, 1868, although the record is not clear on the year. Both her parents were English immigrants. Her father, Michael C. Moore, worked for the War Department; her mother, Elizabeth Barrett Manning, died when Marie was six years old.
Manning’s education was accomplished in private schools in Washington, New York, and London. An autobiography which she wrote in later life gives few personal details, although she mentions her early self-consciousness about her plainness and her height of nearly six feet. She married Herman Gasch, a real estate agent, in 1903. The couple had two sons, Oliver and Manning.
Her longstanding desire to become a journalist reached fruition after she met an editor of the New York World, Arthur Brisbane, at a party in Washington. Her first professional writing was done for the New York Herald in 1897, but soon thereafter she joined the staff of the World, where she earned a tiny fraction of the thirty-dollar weekly salary paid to male journalists. As a result of an interview that she conducted with former president Grover Cleveland, however, publisher Joseph Pulitzer raised her salary to a rate nearly equivalent to the men on the staff. Later she joined Brisbane and a contingent of World journalists who gravitated to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal.
After a year of working on the paper’s women’s page, she was asked by Brisbane to write a column responding to requests for advice that were coming to the paper, chiefly from young, unmarried women. Using the pseudonym Beatrice Fairfax, she in effect invented the personal advice column, preceding by years the famous column by Dorothy Dix. Manning’s practical advice, usually in the “Dry your eyes, roll up your sleeves” vein, substantially increased the circulation of the newspaper. Letters poured in to her at the rate of as many as fourteen hundred per day. Although she also wrote short stories for nationally prominent periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine and Collier’s and two romantic novels under her own name, her distinctive success came as Beatrice Fairfax.
The demands of marriage and the rearing of her own two boys led her to retire early from regular journalism, and a succession of other writers became Beatrice Fairfax. Heavy losses in the stock market crash of 1929 forced Manning to return to her column in 1930, now syndicated in two hundred Hearst newspapers. Times had changed in the interim. The scope of her advice widened, as men and women from different walks of life sought her opinion on questions of etiquette and a wide range of personal problems.
Marie Manning took the problems of women and her profession seriously. She participated in the women’s suffrage movement before 1920 and was a founding member of both the Women’s National Press Club and the Newspaper Women’s Club. In her later years she covered women’s news for the International News Service. At her death on November 28, 1945, she was recognized as a pioneer female journalist.