Eleanor Franklin Egan (April 28, 1879 — January 17, 1925) was an American journalist and foreign correspondent for the '' Saturday Evening Post''.

Early life

Bertha Eleanor Pedigo was born in 1879 (some sources give 1877), the daughter of Henry Pedigo and Bina Graves Pedigo. She lived for a time at the Rose Orphan Home in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was raised by her adoptive family in Kansas City, Missouri.

Career

Eleanor Pedigo Franklin moved to New York City in 1898 in search of an acting career, having done some theatre work in Kansas City. From there she became a theatre critic at ''

Leslie's Weekly ''Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper'', later renamed ''Leslie's Weekly'', was an American illustrated literary and news magazine founded in 1855 and published until 1922. It was one of several magazines started by publisher and illustrator Frank ...

'' magazine, and eventually moved into political journalism. In 1903 she was sent to Japan and later Russia; she covered the Russo-Japanese War, and the Russian Revolution for ''Leslie's'' and, from 1915 to 1925,

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

and its aftermath for the '' Saturday Evening Post''. In 1915, she survived the deadly submarine attack on the British passenger ship ''Barulos''. Her reporting from Armenia in 1919 featured eyewitness accounts of desperation:

''I did not believe that there were people anywhere down on their knees eating grass. I thought it very likely that starving persons might go out and gather grasses and greens of various sorts to be prepared for food, but that men, women and children should gather like cattle in herds to graze, this I did not believe – not until I saw it.''

She moved to the Philippines to co-edit the ''Manila Times'' with her second husband, and served as first president of the Philippine Anti-Tuberculosis Society while she was there. She served on the advisory committee of the 1922 Conference on the Limitation of Armament, in Washington, D. C. Egan helped First Lady

Helen Herron Taft Helen Louise Taft (née Herron; June 2, 1861 – May 22, 1943), known as Nellie, was the wife of President William Howard Taft and the first lady of the United States from 1909 to 1913. Born to a politically well-connected Ohio family, Nel ...

to write her memoirs. She also published ''The War in the Cradle of the World'' (1917), about British military actions in Iraq. Her book is still studied as an early 20th-century American analysis of the region. Egan had opposed women's suffrage in print, but published an essay admitting to a change of heart soon after suffrage was won: "I feel like apologizing to the women of the combat battalions who have done all the fighting and who now bear all the scars."

Personal life

Eleanor Pedigo married twice; first, briefly, to Joel Dalbey Franklin in 1895; they divorced. Her second husband was journalist and publicist Martin Egan; they married in 1905, in Japan. She died in New York in 1925, aged 45 years, from

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...

secondary to giardia, a food- and water-borne parasite; among the honorary pallbearers at her funeral were

Herbert Hoover Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964) was an American politician who served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 and a member of the Republican Party, holding office during the onset of the Gr ...

, James Harbord, and

Newton W. Gilbert Newton Whiting Gilbert (May 24, 1862 – July 5, 1939) was an American politician from Indiana. Career He was the 25th lieutenant governor of Indiana, a member of the Indiana State Senate, a representative in the United States House of Represe ...

. Other prominent attendees were

Walter Lippmann Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the te ...

, Kathleen Norris, Frank Munsey, Melville Elijah Stone, and Thomas W. Lamont."Funeral of Mrs. Egan; Many Prominent Men Attend Services for War Correspondent"
''New York Times'' (January 21, 1925): 21.

References

External links

*David Hudson
"‘A woman so curiously fear-free and venturesome’: Eleanor Franklin Egan reporting the Great Russian Famine, 1922"
''

Women's History Review ''Women's History Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of women's history published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is June Purvis (University of Portsmouth) and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is deputy editor. Abstracting and indexin ...

'' 26(2)(April 2017): 195–212. *David Hudson
"'Having Seen Enough': Eleanor Franklin Egan and the Journalism of Great War Displacement"
in Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, eds., ''Aftermaths of War: Women's Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923'' (BRILL 2011): 375–393. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Egan, Eleanor 1879 births 1925 deaths American women journalists American women in World War I 20th-century American people