Ida Tarbell

"Tarbell's private reflections, about gender among other things, do emerge from time to time. Early on, she recognized the predicament of women. At 14, Ida knelt and prayed to God that she would be spared marriage. "I must be free; and to be free I must be a spinster." She was right: Though higher education was becoming more available to women, to have a career, a woman had to forgo having a family. Aside from teaching and missionary work—the two "respectable" careers for educated women—journalism, in its chaotic infancy, offered an opening an intrepid female could slip through."