Rheta Childe Dorr

Rheta Louise Childe Dorr (1868–1948) was an American journalist, suffragist newspaper editor, writer, and political activist. Dorr is best remembered as one of the leading female muckraking journalists of the Progressive Era and as the first editor of the influential newspaper The Suffragist.

Biography

Early years

Rheta Louise Child was born November 2, 1866, in Omaha, Nebraska. She was the second child in a family of four daughters and two sons born to the former Lucie Mitchell and Edward Payson Child, a New York-born druggist.

One night when she was just 12 years old, Child and her sister snuck out of the family home against their father's wishes to hear Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton speak on women's suffrage. While in New York she met John Pixley Dorr, a conservative businessman from Seattle. The couple were married in 1892 and moved to Seattle to start a family.

She was eventually named the paper's "Women's Editor," but soon came to understand that she had run afoul of the paper's glass ceiling; when she asked her managing editor what her future was with the paper, she was told she had none outside of her current position, ostensibly due to her radical political views which were outside those traditionally held by the paper.

Political activism

Dorr left the Evening Post in the summer of 1906 and traveled in Europe, Much of this journalism was collected in hard covers in 1910 as What Eight Million Women Want, a book which was regarded as influential in its day. Dorr's political efforts were instrumental on building the coalition of social reformers that forced the first major investigation by the U.S. Bureau of Labor into the conditions faced by female workers. Nevertheless, Dorr for a time retained a faith in the cause of centralized state socialism, only abandoning her allegiance to that idea in the early 1920s, following her experiences in revolutionary Russia and Czechoslovakia. with her writing syndicated to numerous other papers. In addition to her journalism, Dorr wrote two popular books on the European situation, including an account of the overthrow of the regime of Tsar Nicholas II entitled Inside the Russian Revolution, published in 1917, and The Soldier's Mother in France, published in 1918.

Dorr returned to Washington, D.C., after the end of the war and planned to go on a tour of the United States to conduct research for a series of magazine articles. This plan was cut short, however, when in late in the night of November 18, 1919, Dorr was hit by a motorcycle and was hospitalized with a broken arm and other serious injuries.

From 1920 Dorr became active in Republican Party politics, working on the Presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding and becoming a member of the Women's National Republican Club.

In 1922 Dorr assisted Anna Vyrubova with the writing of her memoir, My Memories of the Russian Court.

Death and legacy

Dorr had one son, Julian Childe Dorr, who was a United States Consul to Mexico during the Presidential administration of Herbert Hoover. The former envoy died in Mexico City on September 2, 1936.

Rheta Childe Dorr died in New Britain, Pennsylvania, on August 8, 1948. She was 81 years old at the time of her death.