Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Guiding Light for Working Women
Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Guiding Light for Working Women
Pioneering journalist Ann Cottrell Free launched her career in the first lady’s all-women press conferences and went on to cover the world.
This is the second story in a two-part series about Ann Cottrell Free and her experience as a journalist in Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-women press conferences.
From the back porch of their farmhouse in rural Lantz Mills, Virginia, in 1997, Elissa Free listens closely to her mother retell the story she’s heard in bits and pieces over the course of her entire life. In fact, you could say that the tidbits of her mother’s legacy sent Elissa Free on a path to journalism herself. It was her destiny, perhaps, since both her mother and father were career journalists.
Here, she continues recording the oral history of her mother’s extraordinary career that began in newspapers on the brink of the United States entering World War II.
Elissa is the daughter of Ann Cottrell Free and James S. Free, who met in Virginia while working at the Richmond Times Dispatch. They later met up again in Washington, D.C., while working as correspondents for different news bureaus. Her mother was the first full-time woman Washington, D.C., correspondent for Newsweek magazine and covered former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her all-women press conferences. The female reporters there were better known as “the press girls.”
Soon thereafter, Ann Cottrell Free’s career continued to advance when she became the first full-time woman correspondent at the Washington, D.C., bureaus of The Chicago Sun and the New York Herald Tribune, which were all located on the 12th floor of the National Press Building, according to her biographic website created by her daughter.
“I guess I kind of grew up with journalism as a calling just by osmosis,” Elissa Free told East Wing Magazine in a recent Zoom interview. “I just was raised in that atmosphere.”
When it came time to settle on her own career, Elissa Free entered the field as a secretary and then moved into a production assistant position for CBS’s Face the Nation and CBS’s Morning News. A year or so later, she heard about a new media concept called Cable News Network (CNN). In May 1980 she was hired by CNN, and the network launched the following month.
“I was there literally from the beginning,” she says. Elissa Free spent more than 20 years at CNN before exiting the industry in 2001. And like her mother, while helping launch CNN she found herself at the threshold of a pivotal shift in journalism.
Growing up, though, Elissa didn’t necessarily grasp that her mother, along with a select group of females who covered Eleanor Roosevelt over the course of 12 years beginning in March 1933, had helped clear a path in her (and other women's) professional futures.
In fact, she doesn’t have a clear memory of when she first realized her mother was a first in her field. It didn’t really register in her mind until much later that her mother's membership in Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-female press conferences was something special.
“I think she told me probably when I wasn’t paying attention,” Elissa Free says. “It doesn’t really sink in for a while.”
Ann Cottrell Free goes to Washington
Newsweek had a suite on the 12th floor of the National Press Building within sight of the White House and just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol, according to The National Press Club, which established the space in a different location in 1908. It moved into the current 14-story building along 14th and F Streets in 1927. The building was filled with Washington bureaus. Newsweek’s workspace had three small offices joined together, according to Ann Cottrell Free.
It’s worth noting that The National Press Club excluded women until 1971. Until then, female journalists had their own press club—the Women’s National Press Club, formed in 1919 (the same year Congress passed the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote). According to the National Press Club, the Women’s National Press Club benefited from then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s support. Ann Cottrell Free was a member and Eleanor Roosevelt became a member in 1938 because of her syndicated news column “My Day.”
Not long after Ann Cottrell Free had been working in Washington, she was witness to a scandalous story written by one of the press girls about Eleanor Roosevelt while the first lady was working as the assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense, an unpaid government job. Eleanor Roosevelt had hired one of her closest friends, Mayris Chaney Martin, a renowned dancer whose main job was to coordinate a nationwide physical fitness program, according to the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at George Washington University.
Christine Sadler of The Washington Post wrote a story about a “highly paid” dancer on the government payroll, Ann Cottrell Free explains to her daughter in the oral history. Critics of Eleanor Roosevelt used the appointment (with a slated salary of $4,600) as a means to attack the first lady’s role in home front defense programs.
“The newspapers just hounded [Eleanor Roosevelt] to death,” Ann Cottrell Free recalls.
Ultimately, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from her position at the Civil Defense office as did the dancer in early 1942, according to The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers.
“I think Christine made a dreadful mistake in running that story,” Ann Cottrell Free says in the oral history. “I didn’t think it was worthwhile.”
It was a scandal in the sense that Eleanor Roosevelt’s program, designed to uplift war workers, was viewed as an unnecessary expense, Ann Cottrell Free adds. “But, I mean, it was something to do. In today’s world, it would look good.”
Inside the Newsweek bureau, Ann Cottrell Free worked long hours for little pay.
“I went down to Washington and worked for Ernest Lindley. I don't believe I told you about him, did I?” she says to her daughter.
“Spell it,” Elissa Free says, nudging her as she did throughout the recordings that recount prominent people who touched her mother’s life.
“Lindley, L-i-n-d-l-e-y,” Ann Cottrell Free responds. “He was a rather taciturn, tall man with a mustache.”
He was the famed Ernest Lindley, who was a press columnist and chief of the Washington, D.C., bureau of Newsweek. In fact, Ann Cottrell Free made this modern comparison: he was “just as famous as Dan Rather is on the radio—on television today.”
The second in command was a man named Richard Rendell, who went by Dick, her mother says. He was talented, but he had difficulties with alcohol, recalls Ann Cottrell Free.
“I never will forget, Elissa, when Dick was really drunk one day,” she says. “We had a little washstand in the corner of this little primitive office there. I remember him urinating into the washbowl. It didn't really shock me, I just—I was sorry he was so drunk.”
When Ann Cottrell Free left Newsweek for The Chicago Sun, her living conditions hadn’t improved. She earned $27.50 a week and had to stretch that to cover all her expenses, including food, transportation, clothing and housing. She, like many other working women at the time, lived in a boarding house. There was no air conditioning, and most of the women had roommates.
“That was an interesting experience,” Ann Cottrell Free says, recalling she was always moving in those early days. At times, her mother rode the Greyhound bus into Washington, D.C., from Richmond, Virginia, to prod her out of poor living conditions, especially as winter approached because she lived in a place with no heat.
“[My mother] was always riding to the rescue,” she recalls.
Scoop!
Through the 1930s and 1940s, there was still a stigma associated with women being too outspoken or doing so-called “manly things,” Lisa Burns, a first ladies scholar and Quinnipiac University media studies professor who edited Media Relations and the Modern First Lady, told East Wing Magazine in a recent phone interview. “By limiting [Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences] to women reporters, it made it seem safer. It made it seem as though it was appropriate because we’re just talking about ‘women’s things.’”
Mrs. Roosevelt held at least 348 press conferences, according to The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, typically on Monday mornings. Although by Ann Cottrell Free’s estimate, it was closer to 500. There were guidelines for covering the first lady’s press conferences, including not quoting her directly. At times, though, the press conferences gave the newswomen opportunities to scoop the White House press corps, which was made up of mostly men.
Before Ann Cottrell Free’s time covering the first lady, for example, Eleanor Roosevelt announced in April 1933 that the White House would serve beer once Prohibition ended. The 21st Amendment repealing the 18th Amendment (which established a nationwide ban on the manufacturing, sale and transportation of alcohol) was ratified on Dec. 5, 1933.
“[Eleanor Roosevelt] is the first one to say it. It was sort of breaking news about the Roosevelt stance on the end of prohibition,” Burns says, adding the White House sometimes would use Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences to float New Deal programs and gauge public opinion.
Two years after Ann Cottrell Free started attending Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences, she was elected in 1943 as the second chairwoman of Mrs. Roosevelt’s Press Conference Association (organized as a safety protocol in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941).
It was during her chairmanship, when Eleanor Roosevelt returned from a five-week trip to the South Pacific visiting military bases and hospitals, that the newsmen who were covering President Franklin D. Roosevelt were insistent on attending the first lady’s press conference. “We let men in—just once!—on the insistence of FDR’s press secretary Stephan Early, with Mrs. R’s’ OK,” Ann Cottrell Free writes in a 1984 article for Modern Maturity about her time covering Eleanor Roosevelt.
Throughout her time as a Washington correspondent, Ann Cottrell Free reported on a range of stories, including the attack on Pearl Harbor, the declaration of America’s entrance into World War II, military and homefront mobilization, women in the armed forces and war factory production, in addition to covering Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences, according to Ann Cottrell Free’s biographic website.
‘The story is over’
On Monday, April 12, 1945, Ann Cottrell Free recalls in Modern Maturity, the role of the United States helping feed war-torn countries post-war was discussed in Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conference. “Her mind was on the coming peace, a united nations organization,” Ann Cottrell Free writes. “News about Nazi death camps strengthened her resolve to do all within her power to safeguard future human rights.”
At that press conference, she continues, Eleanor Roosevelt “opened her bulging black book.” She discussed her first engagement, a charity bazaar, scheduled for later that afternoon. It would be the only event she attended on that day before it was announced that her husband had died at 63 at his personal retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, from a stroke after serving an unprecedented four terms as president.
“She said, ‘The light went out in Washington. It was profoundly sad.’”
—Elissa Free
In recalling that moment, Elissa Free remembers her mother describing the news like this: “She said, ‘The light went out in Washington. It was profoundly sad.’”
In the immediate aftermath, Ann Cottrell Free writes in Modern Maturity, the press girls stayed as close as they could to Eleanor Roosevelt leading up to a farewell reception on April 20, 1945.
“When [the first lady] said ‘the story is over,’ we felt that the Eleanor Roosevelt story—though few of us would cover it—was a long way from the end,” Ann Cottrell Free writes.
Her mother, according to Elissa Free, was the first journalist to reach Bess Truman, wife of Harry S. Truman, the vice president who was sworn in as president after Franklin D. Roosevelt died. “They probably thought it was intrusive. But, after all, it was her job,” she says.
According to a 1994 letter to Gilbert Klein Jr., then president of the National Press Club, Ann Cottrell Free disclosed having a conversation with Bess Truman at her front door and then following her and her daughter, Margaret, in a taxi over to the White House, where she was standing outside the room when the swearing in of Harry S.Truman was taking place.
“Mrs. Truman—throughout her conversation on the phone with me and with Mrs. R—was quite tearful,” she writes.
The all-women’s press conferences would indeed come to an end. Mrs. Roosevelt’s Press Conference Association, chaired by Ann Cottrell Free, also disbanded in 1945.
One of the first questions Bess Truman asked as first lady, according to Burns, was whether she had to continue to do press conferences.
“They told her no because there are no rules about this,” Burns says. “She had no interest in talking to the press.”
The women reporters wanted to write about Bess Truman, especially because of the unexpected nature of the situation. Bess Truman agreed to let them submit a list of questions to her, to which she would respond in writing.
“She gave one-word answers to most of them or ‘no comment,’” Burns says. “So giving them almost nothing.”
With Eleanor Roosevelt exiting the White House, the relationship between the first lady and the press, Burns says, underwent a setback in transparency, marked by a lack of access to the White House for newswomen. It wouldn’t be until Lyndon Baines Johnson assumed the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 that First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson engaged the press like Eleanor Roosevelt once did.
Ann Cottrell Free’s time covering the first lady had come to an end. But her story was just beginning.
From the White House to the world
After the war, Ann Cottrell Free took a leave of absence from her newspaper and traveled to China, working as a foreign correspondent for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
“I consulted with Mrs. Roosevelt before doing that,” Ann Cottrell Free said in a Washington Press Foundation panel discussion in 1989. “She wrote me from New York and wished me Godspeed, and told me people to see, because we knew things were a terrible mess out there. I wasn't in touch with her while I was there, but I wrote her a long letter on my return, coming through the Red Sea, about what I had seen. I said my heart was so full that I could hardly write it, because I'd seen so much suffering and so much corruption.”
Mrs. Roosevelt responded.
“I think that was very thoughtful of her, because then when I saw her the next time, a few months after that, she had become our chief delegate, so to speak, on the Human Rights Commission in Geneva,” Ann Cottrell Free said in the Washington Press Foundation discussion. “She said that the forming of the Declaration of Human Rights was the most important thing she had ever done.”
Ann Cottrell Free went on to explain in the panel that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a culmination of everything.
“Don't forget what we'd gone through—the death camps—and now they were trying to send people back behind the Iron Curtain, where they didn't want to go. It was terrible. She was trying to make some sense out of that, in upholding human rights,” Ann Cottrell Free said in the discussion.
Ann Cottrell Free went on to Geneva, Switzerland, to meet with Mrs. Roosevelt, one of the final meetings she had with the former first lady.
In 1947, following her United Nations assignment, she became a roving correspondent through 14 countries, according to her biographic website. She wrote stories for the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers from French Indochina (now Vietnam) during its last days. In India, she covered Mahatma Gandhi and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and witnessed the transfer of power from British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten to Nehru, narrowly escaping the Moslem-Hindu riots that followed. She traveled to Egypt and lived among Yugoslavian war refugees. She also reported from Egypt's Sinai desert, Indo-China, Palestine, Greece, Vienna, Rome, Paris, London and Berlin.
By 1950, Ann Cottrell Free returned to Washington and married James S. Free, a Washington correspondent for the Birmingham News. In 1955, they welcomed their only child, a daughter, Elissa.
In the late 1950s, Ann Cottrell Free switched her focus to animal protection stories and eventually helped mobilize congressional and public support for the successful passage of the Humane Slaughter and Animal Welfare Acts, according to her biographic website. In 1963, she received the Animal Welfare Institute's Albert Schweitzer Medal for her groundbreaking work.
She also was ahead of her time in environmental journalism. She was one of the first reporters to write about pollution, particularly from pesticides. In the 1960s, Ann Cottrell Free became friends with marine biologist Rachel Carson, which eventually led to a successful public campaign for the establishment of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells, Maine.
Long after her time in Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences, Ann Cottrell Free corresponded with future first ladies from time to time, her daughter says.
In February of 1966, Ann Cottrell Free showed a letter she received from Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947 to Lady Bird Johnson. Mrs. Johnson, in a letter to Ann Cottrell Free, said:
[Mrs. Roosevelt] had a capacity for understanding and serving—as well as accomplishing—that few have ever and can ever match. What a kind, good and wonderful world this would be if all of us would contribute one-tenth as much to our fellow man as Mrs. Roosevelt did.
In 1995, Ann Cottrell Free also had sent a copy of the Modern Maturity story commemorating the 100th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday to then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who responded with delight:
What an extraordinary experience that must have been for you—to be a participant in Mrs. Roosevelt’s women-only press conferences! Mrs. Roosevelt continues to be an inspiration for me, and you can be assured I will do my best to maintain her ‘caring legacy.’
Ann Cottrell Free continued to pursue stories well into traditional retirement years. In fact, that Modern Maturity article, according to Maurine Beasley, professor emerita at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism and co-editor of the 2001 book Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia, was originally pitched to an editor at The Washington Post who wasn’t interested in it. Still, Beasley says, her contribution to the history of the coverage of the first lady is significant.
“Ann definitely recognized the leadership of Eleanor in terms of elevating the stature of women, themselves,” she said in a recent phone interview. “In particular, the right of women to participate in the public world.”
During that era, few women worked outside the home. And to pursue a career and a family was something that few middle class people did.
“[Ann Cottrell Free] showed how this could be done,” Beasley adds.
Today, Ann Cottrell Free’s legacy lives on in the form of an annual award given by the National Press Club in her name—the Ann Cottrell Free Animal Reporting award, established by her daughter in 2006.
But it was her time in Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences that perhaps showed Ann Cottrell Free and women across the country that they, too, could pursue a life that didn’t confine them to the role of a traditional housewife.
“Ann recognized that a first lady’s position gave her the opportunity to be a leader of other women,” Beasley says. “And that was one of the things she respected and admired.”