Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie, a Journalist in the Gilded Age

by Elia W. Peattie, Susanne George Bloomfield (Editor)

Selected Writings of Elia Peattie is a collection of articles, editorials, and narratives by Elia Peattie written during her tenure at the Omaha World-Herald from 1888 to 1896, richly illustrated with photographs from the period. Elia (Wilkinson) Peattie (1862–1935) was born during the Civil War and came of age at the advent of the era of the New Woman. In many ways Peattie embodied this new age of independence for women, writing both fiction and journalism and becoming one of the first Plains women to write editorial columns in a major newspaper that addressed public issues.

 

Not shy with her opinions about current events in the state of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, Peattie tackled subjects such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, capital punishment and lynchings, prostitution, the Omaha stockyards, beet-field workers in Grand Island, schools and child rearing, the need for orphanages, shelters for unwed mothers, charity hospitals, and the New Woman.

 

Editor Susanne George Bloomfield includes a biography of Peattie, who is described as "tall, dignified, and kindly, and possessing a wicked sense of humor." Peattie's work now stands as a rare and valuable history of Nebraska, showing us a lively frontier society through the eyes of a woman engaged in the life of her community and her own struggle to balance her family and career

335 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2005

About the author

Elia Wilkinson Peattie (January 15, 1862 – July 12, 1935) was an American author, journalist and critic.

Elia Wilkinson was the daughter of Frederick and Amanda (Cahill) Wilkinson. She was born on January 15, 1862, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but moved with her family to Chicago when she was young. She stopped attending school when she was fourteen, but kept up a reading habit. In 1883 she married Robert Burns Peattie, a Chicago journalist.

She began writing short stories for newspapers, and became a reporter with the Chicago Tribune and subsequently the Chicago Daily News. In 1889 she moved to Omaha, becoming chief editorial writer on the Omaha World-Herald. She wrote for magazines including Century, Lippincott's Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, St. Nicholas, Wide Awake, The American Magazine, America, Harper's Weekly, and San Francisco Argonaut.

In 1888 she was commissioned by Chicago publishers to write a young people's history of the United States, and wrote the seven-hundred page The Story of America in four months. Her novel The Judge won a $900 prize from the Detroit Free Press in 1889, and was subsequently published in book form. Later in 1889 the Northern Pacific Railroad employed her to visit and report on Alaska: A Trip through Wonderland became a popular guide-book. With Scrip and Staff (1891) was a story of the children's crusade. Some time after 1890, Peattie befriended fellow writer Kate McPhelim Cleary while both were living in Nebraska. The two bonded over their financial, health, and family concerns.

Peattie subsequently returned to Chicago and became literary editor of the Chicago Tribune. Some time during her period in Illinois, she was a member of the Eagle's Nest Art Colony in Ogle County. One of her sons was the famed botanist, naturalist and author Donald Culross Peattie (June 21, 1898 - November 16, 1964).