The Stigma of the Sob Sisterhood

 469 words 

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THE term “sob sisters” has always struck me as a curious one. What made the sisters sob so much? Did they have brothers of the same maudlin, emotional disposition? But if we delve into the origins of the expression and give it some context it all boils down to a story about journalism and old fashioned sexism. The term gets its genesis from a famous criminal trial in 1907 in the US, celebrated as the “‘First’ Trial of the Century”. This was a murder trial involving a kind of deadly ménage à trois…an immoral and odious multimillionaire named Henry Kendall Thaw killed Stanford White, a notorious womaniser similarly uninhibited by his lack of a sense of probity and moral fibre who Thaw suspected of raping, or at the very least deflowering, his wife Evelyn Nesbit. 

What broke new ground on the reportage of this curious three-cornered trial was that four female journalists–Ms Patterson, Ms Dix§, Ms Black and Ms Greeley-Smith—got to report on it at a time when working women journos were as rare as Bahama Nuthatches. The reason the four newswomen got the gig was that their editors wanted them to present “the woman’s perspective” of the trial. This tended to put them in a no-win situation in the masculine world of journalism, as male reporters were quick to dismiss their contributions to reporting the event as being overly sympathetic and prone to using the language of sentimentality. One of the attending male reporters, Irving Cobb, coined the term “Sob Sisters” to describe them (‘The “Sob Sisters” Who Dared to Cover the Trial of the Century’, Erin Blakemore, 10-Nov-2017, www.daily.jstor.org)

To the chagrin of newswomen forever-after the derogatory term Sob Sisters caught on immediately✪, and came to be applied to female journalists generally, with the clear implication that women reporters were not really professionals (unlike their counterpart male hacks) and that they “manufactured tears for profits” (Jean Lutes, Front Page Girls, (2006)). “Sob Sisters” with its  gendered stigmatising—also known by other colourful epithets like “Pity Platoon” and “Sympathy Squad”–has had an echo for much of the history of American cinema…woman reporters on the screen have tended to be marginalised, shown as less than serious players in the news reporting game, often as sexy accessories in high heels or as handmaidens to the main action, the exclusive domain which belongs as if by fiat to the ace male “newshound” (‘Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist In Movies and Television 1929-2007’, The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, www.ijpc.org). 

Girl reporter “Martha Daley” in Henry Aldrich, Editor makes the scoop, gets patronised doing it and is ultimately usurped of the credit for it by her (male) editor

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§ Dorothy Dix later became the archetypal example of the newspaper “agony aunt”

✪ and by extension, someone who proffers a story or explanation to try to evoke self-sympathy is said to be telling a “sob story”