Kit Coleman

Kit Coleman

Kit Coleman (1856-1915) was the pseudonym of the Irish-American columnist Kathleen Blake Coleman.

Coleman was the first accredited female war correspondent . She wrote about the Spanish-American War for the Toronto Mail in 1898 . Coleman was also the first president of the Canadian Women's Press Club, an organization for women journalists.

childhood

Kit Coleman (née Catherine Ferguson) was born to Patrick and Mary Ferguson (née Burke) in Castleblakeney on February 20, 1856. Her date of birth is sometimes incorrectly listed as 1864 and her maiden name is incorrectly listed as Blake. Her father was a farmer. First Catherine attended school at Loretto Abbey in Rathfarnham. She received her degree in Belgium.

Kit Coleman later recalled how her parents supported her in her quest for creative expression. Her father passed on her love for books and her mother, who was blind, brought her closer to music. She also learned to play several instruments. The greatest influence on their intellectual development had their uncle Thomas Nicholas Burke, a Dominican priest. He was a liberal recognized public speaker. Through him she learned religious and social tolerance. This played out again later in her work as a journalist.

Private life

Coleman married an older man early and was a wealthy landowner named Thomas Willis, various sources indicate that she was either 16 or 20. She married Katheleen Blake under her adopted pseudonym. The couple had one child who died early. Willis himself died shortly thereafter. The marriage was not a happy one. Because of this, Coleman was disinherited from her husband's family. She emigrated to Canada as a young widow in 1884. In Canada she worked as a secretary until she married her boss Edward Watkins. She lived in Toronto and Winnipeg, where she gave birth to two children (Thade and Patricia).

In 1889, after Watkins' death or divorce from Watkins, Coleman first began cleaning herself and her two children. She then started writing articles for local newspapers, mostly for Toronto's Saturday Night magazine.

Career

Kathleen Blake Watkins moved to Toronto in 1890 to pursue journalism. She was the first female journalist to have her own column in a Canadian newspaper. She was employed by the Toronto Mail (later Mail and Empire). In the 1890s and early 1900s she wrote a seven-column page for the Toronto Mail called "Woman's Kingdom" which appeared weekly. At first she wrote on simpler topics, as they were also common in other women's columns that were gradually appearing at the time. The topics included, for example, theater reviews, fashion and cooking recipes. In one of her most popular columns, she gave advice to someone who was lovesick. She later rebelled against her editors' assumptions that women were only interested in household, fashion, and their advice column and insisted on articles on topics she thought women would be interested in, such as politics, business, religion, and science. Your column is honest and frank, that it reached a wide readership, including the Canadian Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier . Her documents also covered topics such as social reform, women's issues, domestic violence and poor working conditions for women. Kit Coleman's columns have also been published in other Canadian newspapers. She worked for Mail until 1911.

Soon Kathleen Blake Watkins began writing the daily news in her columns and became one of the Toronto Mail's star reporters. In 1891 she interviewed the French actress Sarah Bernhard , who was then performing in Canada.

She was a correspondent for the Toronto Mail during the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, as well as at the Mid-Winter Exposition in San Francisco and also at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in London in 1897. She became known worldwide. An American reference book in 1984 called her "brilliant" and stated that no female journalist and probably no male journalist under the position of editor-in-chief had a greater influence on the prestige and circulation of a North American newspaper.

War correspondent for the Spanish-American War in Cuba

Katheleen Blake Watkins

During the Spanish-American War in 1898, Kathleen Blake agreed to go to Cuba to cover the fighting on the front lines. The Toronto Mail sent it to Cuba, which got the newspaper itself a lot of publicity. However, she was encouraged by her manager to write about "nonsense", as she called it, instead of actually reporting from the front, as he said that women were not suitable. She received her war correspondent accreditation from the United States government, becoming the first female accredited war correspondent in the world.

She was allowed to accompany American troops. However, the military themselves and other war correspondents were against their use and almost managed to get them to show up in Florida. However, Blake made it to Cuba in July 1898, just before the war ended. Her accounts of the deaths and the aftermath of the war were the high point of her career and made her famous. On her way back to Canada, Kathleen stopped in Washington where she spoke to the International Press Union of Women Journalists.

Career after war correspondence

Upon her return from Cuba, Watkins married Theobald Coleman and moved to Copper Cliff, Ontaria. There her husband was a doctor for the Canadian Copper Company. In 1901 the Colemans moved to Hamilton, Ontario.

In 1904, she founded the Canadian Women's Press Club to combat discrimination against women in journalism. She was named the club's first president. Although Coleman asserted herself as a journalist in the male-dominated domain of journalism and also operated a lot of activism for women's rights in her publications, she did not confess to feminism or women's suffrage until 1910.

Many of her colleagues saw Coleman as a role model, such as the journalist Katherine Hale from Mail and Empire. The suffragettes hoped that she would work as an activist for women's suffrage. Coleman's political ambivalence came from her employment with the Toronto Mail and Mail and Empire, both of which spoke out against women's suffrage. Coleman wasn't sure how much women or journalists should get involved in politics.

In addition to her work as a journalist, Coleman also published poetry and books of poetry.

Coleman died of pneumonia on May 16, 1915 in Hamilton, Ontario.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Barbara M. Freeman: FERGUSON, CATHERINE (Kathleen Blake) . University of Toronto / Université Laval. Retrieved April 17, 2015.
2. ^ ^{A b} Ella Hassett: Kit Coleman (1864 - 1915) journalist, was a correspondent . Retrieved April 17, 2015.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Tabitha Marshall: Kathleen Coleman . Retrieved April 17, 2015.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Library and Archives Canada: Kathleen Blake Coleman . Government of Canada. Archived from the original on April 21, 2014. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 17, 2015. 
5. ^ Henry J. Morgan: Types of Canadian women and of women who are or have been connected with Canada . W. Briggs, Toronto 1903 (Retrieved April 17, 2015).