Genevieve G. McBride, Professor of History and affiliated faculty in Women's Studies and in Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is the author of the award-winning On Wisconsin Women: Working for Their Rights from Settlement to Suffrage (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). She also is the editor of an anthology on four centuries of women's history in her state, Women's Wisconsin: From Native Matriarchies to the New Millennium (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2005), recently released as an ebook (at a far lower price for students, for whom it was designed, as well as others; for all, see her Amazon author page).
She wrote 'Dear Mrs. Griggs,' conducting research into secondary sources on histories of women, Milwaukee, the Midwest, and the media for context in understanding the columnist's life, early years, and colorful career in Chicago, as well as the letters by readers of her column. She also has authored many works on Milwaukee, reform movements, and the African American press, including the foreword for A Milwaukee Woman's Life on the Left: The Autobiography of Meta Berger (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2001); the chapter "Helpmeets, Hausfraus, Hellions, and More: The Missing Majority in Milwaukee History,” in Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past (University of Illinois Press, 2009); the chapter “‘Forward’ Women: Winning the Wisconsin Campaign for the Country’s First ERA, 1921,” in The Quest for Social Justice III: Morris Fromkin Memorial Lectures, 1992-2002 (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2005); and the chapter on “The Progress of ‘Race Men’ and ‘Colored Women’ in the Black Press in Wisconsin, 1892-1985,” in Henry Lewis Suggs, ed., The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865-1985 (Greenwood Press, 1996). McBride was an editor at the Waukesha Freeman, the Milwaukee Courier, and the Milwaukee Star and also worked at the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Milwaukee Journal. Born and raised in Milwaukee, where her parents also were journalists at the Journal and Sentinel, Gen grew up reading "Mrs. Griggs." |
|
Stephen R. Byers, just-retired Assistant Professor of Journalism at Marquette University, was entertainment editor of the Milwaukee Journal, when he worked closely with Ione Quinby Griggs. He also had been a columnist, reporter, and editor of other sections at the Journal, and also had worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago and at several Indiana newspapers. He conducted some of the research into the colorful Chicago years and career of Ione Quinby, and he especially conducted extensive quantitative analyses of both her bylined reportage in the Chicago Evening Post, for more than a thousand stories, and of her column in the Milwaukee Journal--sampling from more than fifteen thousand columns, for a yield of many hundreds of readers' letters. He then categorized both by issues in coverage and in letters to structure this study and supervised our many student assistants and coders from both campuses: John M. Caspari, Catherine S. Caspari, and Chelsey Pfiffner-Paschall, all of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Jingyu Bao, Mandi Lindner, Molly Greenwood, David Kordus, Adam Loferski, and Ishwarya Shankar, all of Marquette University. (Student employment was made possible in part owing to grant support, for which we are grateful, from both of our campuses and from the Journal Foundation of His father also was a journalist, a sports editor in Indiana. Decades ago, Steve also authored his first book, Touchdown--still available--on negative as well as positive aspects of football. (And anyone who knows this Hoosier knows that he could write the book on hoops . . . next?) |