Renowned reporters Nellie Bly, Marguerite Higgins, Ethel L. Payne and Ida M. Tarbell appear on four "Women in Journalism" commemoratives.
The 37-cent stamps were dedicated Sept. 14 during the Society of Professional Journalists' national convention in Fort Worth, Texas.
The four made their contributions to journalism at different times, but all were trailblazers in a field dominated by men.
Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864. In 1885 she persuaded the editor of The Pittsburgh Dispatch to let her write an article about "a woman's place in the world." She soon became a permanent member of the staff and began to use the pen name Nellie Bly, taken from Stephen Foster's song of that name. In 1887 she moved to Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. For her first assignment she feigned insanity and gained admission to the Women's Lunatic Asylum. Her account of the experience exposed the poor treatment of patients in the asylum.
Marguerite Higgins (1920-66) covered World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. In the process she advanced the cause of equal access for women war correspondents and in 1951 became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. As head of The New York Herald-Tribune's Tokyo bureau, she was one of the first reporters on the scene when war broke out in Korea.
Award-winning Ethel L. Payne (1911-91), known as the "first lady of the black press," combined advocacy with journalism as she reported on the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s for The Chicago Defender and later as a broadcaster.
Ida M. Tarbell's "History of the Standard Oil Company" was ranked in the top five works of 20th century American journalism by New York University's journalism department. After holding various jobs, Tarbell (1857-1944) joined McClure's magazine in 1894 where she conducted an exhaustive investigation of the Standard Oil and the methods used by John D. Rockefeller Sr. to consolidate his hold on the oil industry. The articles, published from 1902 to 1904, helped bring about legal actions that led to Standard Oil's breakup several years later.