Mary Howarth

Mary Macfarlane Howarth (bapt. 10 March 1858 – after 1934) was a British journalist and newspaper editor.

She was the editor of the women's section for the Daily Mail in the late 1890s. then part of the same group.

Although sometimes described as the first female editor on Fleet Street, she was preceded by Delariviere Manley and Rachel Beer. Almost all the staff at the Mirror were women, proprietor Alfred Harmsworth saw it as a paper "for gentlewomen by gentlewomen".

The first issue sold a relatively healthy 276,000 copies, but was soon down to 25,000. Harmsworth lost confidence in his plan for the paper. According to him, "women can't write and don't want to read". He wrote to Hamilton Fyfe to offer him the job of editor. Fyfe replied, confirming that he would be happy to take up the post, as soon as he could resign as editor of the Morning Advertiser.

No other woman was editor-in-chief of the Mirror for over a century, until Alison Phillips took up the post in 2018.

Personal life

Howarth was born in Manchester, the daughter of John Rowcroft Macfarlane and Harriette Anne Embleton.

She married civil engineer Osbert Henry Howarth in 1876 in Southport. They were the parents of writer Osbert John Radcliffe Howarth, who married Eleanor Mary Paget, daughter of Stephen Paget. After her first husband's death, she married Rev. George Herbert Nall in June 1909 at Westminster Abbey.