Read All About It! Comms Alumni Shares Untold Stories of Girl Newsies

Autumn Linford's Upcoming Book Reveals The Hidden History of Girl Newsies In The 1930s

Autumn Linford, Photo Courtesy of Auburn University

When you hear the word “newsies,” what probably comes to mind is actors singing and dancing across Broadway stages or raucous young boys in dirty 1930s-style clothing. What you might not know is that young girls also sold newspapers. This gap in our societal consciousness is what School of Communications alumni Autumn Linford aims to correct in her upcoming book, “Extra! A History of America’s Girl Newsies.”

After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from BYU, Linford received her PhD from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She is a media, gender and labor historian. Her interest in journalism history began in Dean Ed Adams’ History of Journalism course at BYU. She found it a “difficult but fascinating class.” For Linford, that class is “where it all started. [Adams] has been a very influential mentor in my life.”

“Newsgirl, Park Row. Location: New York, New York (State)," Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, July 1910, National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Linford was recently awarded the prestigious 2023 Hazel Dicken-Garcia Research Grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). The grant will support her travels to New York City where she will conduct research at the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society for her book. Her research will focus on the untold story of girl newsies and the publishing companies’ efforts to gain an exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA).

When it comes to her interest in girl newsies, Linford said that she first stumbled across them in a photograph. She said, “I’d never heard of them in my readings or pop culture.” Despite their lack of representation in popular media, Linford’s research shows that there were indeed, “hordes of little girls running around streets selling newspapers.”

“Newsgirls waiting for papers. Largest girl, Alice Goldman, has been selling for 4 years. Newsdealer says she uses viler language than the newsboys do. Besie Goldman and Bessie Brownstein are 9 years old and have been selling about one year. All sell until 7:00 or 7:30 P.M. daily. Location: Hartford, Connecticut,” Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1909, National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Through personal accounts, diaries, letters, scrapbooks and oral histories, Linford has found that the experiences of these young girls were similar to their boy newsie counterparts, but were more extreme due to their gender. About these young girls, she said, “They were spunky and they were sad and they were funny and they were sweet. They were everything that real girls are, and they were exploited and put in danger for business purposes.”

Linford’s goal in publishing her research is “to add [the girls’] stories back into the narrative.” Linford believes that it is possible to celebrate the successes of the time period while still acknowledging that internal corruption was being overlooked by the newspaper industry.

She said, “When you only tell the boy newsies’ side of the story, it's easy to paint the picture of a bootstrapping America; boy newsies became a prototype of the American dream. When you add the girls back into the narrative, it becomes very clear that this era was actually built on the backs of children.”