These Press Conferences Were for 'The Girls'
These Press Conferences Were for 'The Girls'
Pioneering journalist Ann Cottrell Free was among those who experienced Eleanor Roosevelt's one-of-a-kind, all-female first lady press conferences.
This is the first story in a two-part series about Ann Cottrell Free and her experience as a journalist in Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-women press conferences.
On a sunny Mother’s Day in 1997, Elissa Free sits in a rocking chair on the back porch of her old farmhouse in rural Virginia at the center of Shenandoah County and readies a cassette tape recorder.
Her 80-year-old mother, Ann Cottrell Free, seated in the opposite rocking chair, waits as her daughter sets the scene.
“We’re starting again,” Elissa Free says into the recorder and notes the time. “It’s in the morning, about 8:30 or so. …She was in the middle of talking about ‘the girls.’”
There had already been hours of recordings.
“Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences continued,” Ann Cottrell Free interjects, and before they get started, her mother trails off about the beauty of the Lantz Mills area as Elissa’s then-5-year-old daughter darts in and out of the house.
It’s in this hamlet about two hours west of Washington, D.C., where Elissa continued the personal oral history she’d been gathering of her mother and her remarkable career that began as a trailblazing woman journalist in the early 1940s. She had a front row seat to history, even though, at age 24, she was the youngest of Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-women’s White House press conferences, which often relegated her to covering the first lady from the second row.
In thinking back on the time spent interviewing her mother, Elissa told East Wing Magazine in a recent Zoom interview how happy—and relieved—she felt because someday her daughter would be able to read about her pioneering grandmother.
“I had been hearing bits and pieces of these stories for years,” Elissa Free says. “I wanted to get the information down in detail for posterity.”
Back on the porch, the tape is rolling. Ann Cottrell Free continues to describe the women in the room who covered former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences. She doesn’t hold back.
‘I knew nothing about politics’
Ann Cottrell Free was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1916, the only child of Emily Dunlop Blake and Emmett Drewry Cottrell. As a child, she spent summers with her grandparents in Louisa, Virginia. Her grandfather, George McDuffie Blake, was the mayor and publisher of the Central Virginian newspaper, according to a website Elissa Free created. Her mother, a 1938 graduate of Barnard College, got her start in journalism from school publications, and as early as 1936 she secured a job at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Not long thereafter, she was hired on as a “copy girl” for New York-based Newsweek.
“We clipped newspapers,” Ann Cottrell Free explained to her daughter in the oral history. She and a couple other young staffers would cut out stories on a range of topics—from drama to medicine—from various magazines and newspapers and then take them to editors in different departments at Newsweek. That’s how she got to know people.
“I had a grand time,” Ann Cottrell Free recollects of that time in the oral history.
Then one day everything changed.
Ann Cottrell Free was called in to speak with her editor and was asked if she could go to Washington, D.C.
“And, I thought, Today?” she says.
"Yes, right away," she recalls her editor telling her.
“I thought they wanted me to be like a courier, to take something down to the Washington Bureau,” Ann Cottrell Free remembers.
Turns out, the assignment was a promotion. They wanted her to start working in the Washington bureau of Newsweek at a time when the war had drained the male-dominated newsrooms across the country as men went off to fight.
Ann Cottrell Free relocated to Washington in 1940 and became the first full-time woman Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine. Soon she held the same historic title 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.
“There were no women on staff anywhere much,” says Ann Cottrell Free, laughing in the oral history. “And I said, ‘Sure.’ I knew nothing about politics, and the next thing I found myself at the White House almost right away.”
The ‘Press Girls’
The memory must have been seared into Ann Cottrell Free’s mind. It was just before 11 a.m. on Monday, Jan.13, 1941, she begins in a 1984 article she wrote for Modern Maturity. She vividly recalls the moment when the White House chief usher unlocked the iron grille gates to the marble stairway leading to the executive mansion’s second-floor residence for the waiting “press girls.”
The next moment unfolded unexpectedly for this self-described “greenhorn” on her first day covering Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-female press conference. The gates swung open and the women made an “unseemly” mad dash up the stairs, Ann Cottrell Free writes.
“It was my first glimpse inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” she writes. “Frankly, I was less impressed by the handsome decor than by the surprising agility and ferocious front-row-seat grabbing of my new colleagues.”
She goes on to divulge that, at 24, she was indeed the youngest of the more than 30 women squeezed into the Monroe Room who could hear Mrs. Roosevelt’s “determined footsteps” hurrying down the hall.
As First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt entered the room, Ann Cottrell Free describes this unfiltered moment:
“We all stood. Wearing a dark-blue dress, with a pearl-encrusted fleur-de-lis pin at her neck, the tall and gangling First Lady bore herself with certain grace. Her blue eyes, brisk, yet gracious manner more than made up for the protruding front teeth that so delighted caricaturists.”
On this particular day, the United States had not yet inserted itself into World War II, but France had fallen. The Royal Air Force had just won the Battle of Britain. And, Ann Cottrell Free writes, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease bill (a proposed policy to promote the defense of the United States that also supplied the Allied nations with free food, oil, equipment and weapons) was the focus of heated debates on Capitol Hill.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences were unique. They provided opportunities for the first lady to advocate for her issues. They also were closed to men. Eleanor Roosevelt insisted on this, according to research, in order to put pressure on newspapers to hire female reporters.
Another pioneering journalist, Lorena Hickok (a long-term romantic interest of Eleanor Roosevelt), first presented the idea of a press conference for only females to the first lady in hopes it would provide greater opportunity and job security for women reporters. Those newswomen at Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences became known as “the press girls” or just “the girls.”
One of the reasons Eleanor Roosevelt set up these press conferences, says 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 to give women news that men did not get or were not interested in.
“In that era, the women’s pages and the society pages were the portions of the journalistic field that women were more or less confined to,” Beasley, who knew Ann Cottrell Free personally, told me in a recent phone interview. “There were always a few women who managed to break out of that narrow realm. But for the most part, society reporting [was] their bread and butter.”
Back inside the Monroe Room on Ann Cottrell Free’s first day, she watched Eleanor Roosevelt shake hands with every woman as she entered. Then, the first lady began with an opening statement with her “bulging black-leather engagement book” held together with rubber bands in front of her. The big event ahead was the president’s third inauguration, albeit a more subdued affair because of world events, according to Ann Cottrell Free. The reporters included those for the society page to which Eleanor Roosevelt mentioned the pale-rose-hued satin gown she was planning to wear for the inaugural gala. Then, Ann Cottrell Free writes, the first lady opened the floor to questions that included:
“Do you think, Mrs. Roosevelt, that married men should be drafted?”
“Only as a last resort,” she responded, adding that she would not approve of men marrying just to avoid the draft.
“Do you plan a return visit to Blue Plains?”
“Not just yet,” Ann Cottrell Free recalls the first lady answering. In February 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt became the first president’s wife to testify before a Congressional committee concerning the conditions of three District of Columbia welfare institutions, including Blue Plains Home for the Aged, according to the Library of Congress.
As the questions continued, Ann Cottrell Free noticed “Mrs. R”—what the newswomen in the press conferences called the first lady behind her back—address most of the reporters in the front row by their first names. Among them were 12 “girls” who were present on Ann Cottrell Free’s first day and who had also attended the first lady’s first press conference, held nearly seven years earlier on March 6, 1933, in the Red Room.
There was Chicago-based newspaper reporter Maude McDougall, who Ann Cottrell Free tells her daughter was the oldest newswoman at the press conferences.
“Seemed ancient to me,” she says. “She looked like she was in her 80s, but she was probably in her 60s. She was an old warhorse. …She looked…rather decrepit, but she managed to write the stories and get everywhere and do everything.”
There were younger ones in the room, too, whom she described as “glamorous.” The distinction between the women’s appearances was something Ann Cottrell Free, with her forceful personality, spoke of often.
“I think of the group, [Ann Cottrell Free] was probably one of the most vivacious and attractive members,” Beasley says, adding at that point in her young career, she also was probably one of the hardest working for someone whose career was taking off. Many women then tended to their physical appearance using cosmetics to show they were feminine, that they were true women despite working in a male-dominated occupation, she adds.
As time went on, Ann Cottrell Free came to understand what the others in the room already knew about Eleanor Roosevelt: she was adored by the female reporters.
“If [the press conferences] did not quite shake the world,” Ann Cottrell Free writes, “they certainly helped change some of it for the better.”
Little did Ann Cottrell Free know in those early years just how much of a North Star Eleanor Roosevelt would become over the course of her career.
Read the second part of this two-part series next week.