Madeline Linford and Women Journalists
Madeline Linford (1895 - 1975) has been called one of the most remarkable newspaperwomen of her time.
She was the founder and first editor of the Manchester Guardian’s women’s page, launched in 1922. Her successful career as an editor helped to pave the way for today’s women journalists. In 2015 the Guardian appointed its first female editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.
Linford was the only female editor for 25 years. She was promoted to the editorial team at a young age, but she had already proved her talent as a reporter from war-torn Europe.
Linford later recalled her brief to create a page that was ‘readable, varied, and always aimed at the intelligent woman’. She provided a forum for new women writers like Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby to publish for the first time.
Linford invited established contributors to write for her page, including suffragette Evelyn Sharp. She wrote this letter to the Manchester Guardian’s editor from Bow Street Police Court, where she was prosecuted for window breaking. She and Scott disagreed over the militant tactics of the suffragettes
Linford was a successful novelist as well as a biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), pioneer of women’s rights. She writes that Wollstonecraft ‘laid the first stones of that rough and painful road that has led to the enfranchisement of women’.
Former heiress, activist and journalist, Nancy Cunard (1896 –1965) was hired by the Manchester Guardian to report on the closing moments of the Spanish Civil War. This telegram records an unfolding humanitarian crisis - ‘half a million starving Spanish refugees. Situation catastrophic’.
In this short video, Archivist Janette Martin looks at a report sent by Nancy Cunard from Perpignan on 9 Feb 1939.