University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Beauty, brains, and bylines: comparing the female journalist in the fiction of Sherryl Woods and Sarah Shankman

(USC Thesis Other)

Beauty, brains, and bylines: comparing the female journalist in the fiction of Sherryl Woods and Sarah Shankman

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

BEAUTY, BRAINS, AND BYLINES: COMPARING THE FEMALE JOURNALIST IN
THE FICTION OF SHERRYL WOODS AND SARAH SHANKMAN
by

Amanda Marie Rossie

________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(JOURNALISM)

May 2009

Copyright 2009 Amanda Marie Rossie

 
ii

Epigraph

“Women journalists present a paradox. Their presence as professional writers and
presenters of news is now commonplace, yet they continue to be marked as ‘other,’ as
‘different’ from their male colleagues. In print news, official rhetoric proclaims that a
journalist’s gender is irrelevant. However, while maleness is rendered neutral and male
journalists are treated largely as professionals, women journalists are signified as
gendered: their work is routinely defined and judged by their femininity.”
—Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism

 
iii

Dedication
For the One who led me here.

 
iv
Acknowledgments

I never really knew how much work would go into a manuscript like this until I
was knee-deep in research, ideas, and library books. When I was losing my way in
rambling thoughts and run-on sentences, my advisor and committee chair, Joe Saltzman,
was there for me, calming my fears over sushi and green tea. I will always be grateful to
him for not only taking me under his wing during my very first week at USC but also for
continuing to believe in me during my two years at the Annenberg School for
Communication, even when it was hard to believe in myself. His Image of the Journalist
in Popular Culture (IJPC) seminar and database proved to be my saving grace, and this
thesis would not be in its present form without Joe’s knowledge and resources (and his
wife Barbara’s intense and helpful line edits!).
Next, I need to thank my family, especially my parents Gilbert and Carol Rossie,
for sacrificing so that I could be in this position in the first place. I know that graduate
school is a privilege that, in my case, cost not only dollars but also distance. Making them
proud has been one of my biggest achievements, and I hope that I can continue to do so
long after I leave sunny Southern California.
I also want to thank my grandparents, Larry and Frances McKinney, who, through
their constant support, devotion, and thoughtfulness have been a faithful reminder of the
true meaning of love. You are constant fixtures in my life, and I would be lost without
you.
Furthermore, I want to thank my best friend, Samantha Sheppard, who served as
my copy editor, my camerawoman, my sounding board, and my support system
 
v
throughout these last two years. Without you I’m not sure if I would have survived
California on my own. Thank you for putting up with me.
In addition, I would like to mention briefly all the professors, past and present,
who had a hand in forming the scholar I am becoming: Robert Stutts, Laura Crary, Lea
Williams, and Sarah Banet-Weiser. Thank you for your patience.

 
vi
Table of Contents
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
Abstract viii
Introduction: Fiction, Feminism, and the Media: 1
Why They Matter
Introduction Endnotes 6

Chapter One: Character Biographies 7
Samantha Adams: “Renowned Girl Reporter” 7
Amanda Roberts: “I don’t make the news. I just report it.” 9
Chapter One Endnotes 11

Chapter Two: Stereotypes: Victims and Victors 13
The Sob Sister 15
The Stunt Reporter 17
One of the Boys 22
The Victim 24
Chapter Two Endnotes 30

Chapter Three: One is the Loneliest Number 33
Chapter Three Endnotes 40

Chapter Four: Front Page Girls: Attire, Ethics, and 41
Investigation
Attire 41
Ethics 46
Romancing the Source 47
Misrepresentation and Surreptitious Newsgathering 48
Reporter-Detective Conflict 50
Chapter Four Endnotes 55

Chapter Five: Publicity From Publication: Public Voices, 57
Public Bodies
Chapter Five Endnotes 60

 
vii
Chapter Six: Caught Between Love and a Hard Place 61
Scorning the Traditional: Marriage and Motherhood 62
Chapter Six Endnotes 65

Chapter Seven: Impossible Women in an Impossible South 66
Resisting Southern Mythologies of Womanhood 68
Building Impossibilities: Color-Blind Racism in a 70
Raceless South
Chapter Seven Endnotes 73

Conclusion 74
Conclusion Endnotes 79

Bibliography 80

Appendix: Novel Summaries 82

 
viii
Abstract

This work examines the image of the female journalist in two series of novels by
authors Sherryl Woods and Sarah Shankman. Tracing the image of the female journalist
from its historical roots to its appearance in late twentieth-century fiction, this study uses
the two main protagonists as a guide. Focusing on major stereotypes like the sob sister,
stunt reporter, victim, and “one of the boys,” this work contextualizes her image
alongside her real-life popular culture counterparts. Close examinations of the characters’
relationships with men, newsgathering ethics, and publicity they experience as successful
female reporters working in a predominately male profession are crucial to the larger
picture to which these images contribute. The authors’ attempts at reproducing accurate
representations of females within the newsroom and portraying progressive, liberated
representations of womanhood are also considered. The final chapter analyzes the series’
raceless Southern settings as both a historical impossibility and the creation of a utopian
society that propagates racism without “racists.” 
 
1
Introduction:
Fiction, Feminism, and the Media: Why They Matter

Women’s history is a complicated business, hardly a story to be told in terms of winners
and losers, great men, or progress forward, as in a women’s context all the usual
benchmarks may have differing and contested definitions. This is certainly true in telling
the story of women in the profession of journalism.

-Patricia Bradley and Gail Collins, Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality

The profession of journalism has not always held open its doors, ready and
willing to accept reporters committed to revealing the full story. In journalism’s early
years, female reporters were not given admission to journalism schools and were only
allowed inside newsrooms to write about unimportant “soft” news that would never find
its way to the front pages. The image of the female reporter in popular culture, however,
has not followed suit and has opened the doors to fictional women who yearn to report
the news. Deemed “reporter-fiction,” this literature abounds with images of women
participating in the field of journalism as copy editors, print reporters, and broadcasters.
Yet, these images, which are often unrealistic, stereotypic, and detrimental to readers’
expectations are often misconstrued as “progress.”
When readers turn toward these myriad fictional accounts, they often see reified
age-old stereotypes and misnomers. They read about female news anchors who are
portrayed as attractive blondes with busty sillhouettes and dim wits; they see female
reporters who want to cover fashion and lifestyle, not politics or business; they see
female journalists who nurture a passion for writing only to give it up for marriage soon
after. Moreover, all of these female journalists are placed against a backdrop of male
success and newsroom subordination. All of these mass media images have a massive
 
2
effect on the collective female consciousness and its function as a “daily reminder of the
unstable ground on which notions of gender, sexuality, and even nationhood are built.”
i

Like many other organizations, “the institution and profession of journalism has
been structured by gender.”
ii
As image makers and movers and shakers, the media have
succeeded financially while making newsrooms “boys only” clubs. These gendered
restrictions keep the glass ceiling intact, thereby preventing women (until recently) from
receiving promotions, power, and a say in the news content. Indeed, the gendered
systems of media power uphold a male-oriented news agenda that has and will continue
to shape the way the public views the world and their place in it.
Women’s inability to define news and move issues of importance to
women onto the front pages has been limited by women’s roles in society,
but also, significantly, by their positions in the media industry. Men,
primarily white men, have long dominated the newsroom editorial boards
so not only have they shaped news from outside of the industry but
defined it from within.
iii

Until women are able to permeate the highest echeleons of power within the news
industry as editors, publishers, and executives of media consolidation, old restrictions
will remain in tact, both to the detriment of the news itself and to the communities
seeking balanced, fair, and equal reporting.
Reporter-fiction tries—consciously or unconsciously—to challenge and transform
this gendered, patriarchal media system for its female readers, providing more images of
women in journalism who have it all—degrees from the best universities, successful
careers, front-page stories, and a love life to boot. Nevertheless, as these novelists attempt
to place the female reporter as a strong and viable force within the male-dominated
 
3
journalistic world, the image of the female journalist in fiction becomes befuddled
between the realities and the representations.
The ways in which women are represented in news media send important
messages to the viewing, listening, and reading publics about women’s
place, women’s role, and women’s lives. The media…are arguably the
primary definers and shapers of the news agenda and perform crucial
cultural funcitons in their gendered framing of public issues and in the
gendered discourses that they persistently promote.
iv

The same is true for novelists, who create fictional characters and scenarios that either
seek to mimic or exaggerate the lives of real journalists. These images hold a meaning
that cannot be overlooked. The undeniable paradox of these novels originates in their
wide and varied distributions, in which these oft-unrealistic images reach many women
but set them up for failure if they believe that real female reporters and these beloved
characters have anything substantial in common.
The purpose of this text lies in the comparison of images of female reporters
promoted by the media and those found in the series of novels by authors Sherryl Woods
and Sarah Shankman. Incidentally, both authors have written a series of novels depicting
not only a female journalist as the protagonist but also set their novels in the Deep South,
which affects each woman in unique ways. Their characters, Amanda Roberts (Woods)
and Samantha Adams (Shankman), bear the burden of reflecting the realities of the times
in which they were created (1980-2000), while embodying actual change in hegemonic
gender norms, expectations, and roles for women in the journalism.
While a good deal of research has been done examining the role of women in
journalism, very little research has been completed in the area of the image of the female
journalist in fiction, particularly works set in the South during the late twentieth century.
 
4
This study attempts to fill that void by examining the changes that these novels have
undergone since Donna Born’s 1981 seminal essay “The Image of the Woman Journalist
in American Popular Fiction 1890 to the Present,” which examines the fictional images
of female reporters in five separate time periods: 1890-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1945, and
1945-1980. In her analysis, Born documents how the fiction of this time period reflects
historical events that changed women’s role in society and the workplace. Take, for
example, the female journalist portrayed in novels from 1890-1920. According to Born,
The image of the woman journalist that emerges in the fiction of this
period is that of a strong and capable woman, and reflects the ‘New
Woman’ of the early feminists’ ideal. The woman journalist is single and
young, attractive, independent, reliable, courageous, competent, curious,
determined, economically self-supporting, professional, and
compassionate.
v

From here, Born notes the burst of women into the workplace during World War II,
vi
the
ways in which the women’s romantic relationships with men change (“‘getting the scoop’
is more important to her than a love affair”
vii
), and the more recent fiction that “reflect[s]
the professional woman’s struggle to reconcile her identity and professional ambition
with the cultural stereotype.”
viii

Building upon Born’s established theories and observations, this paper strives to
forge a new perspective on the specific literature of Woods and Shankman during the
1980s and 1990s. By analyzing each series (see Appendix A for titles and summaries),
this study analyzes: (1) how the two main characters navigate and defy stereotypes; (2)
how they gather their news; (3) how they interact with others in the newsroom; (4) how
they separate themselves and their bodies from their stories and their sources; (5) how
they form relationships with men, romantic or otherwise; and (6) how the creation of a
 
5
raceless South perpetuates a subtle racism that both characters embody despite their
progressive upbringings. Moreover, the ways the characters are interrelated with each
other and history to form a more complete and justified image of the female journalist in
fiction conclude this analysis.

 
6
Introduction Endnotes

i
Lumby, 1997. p. xxiv
ii
Chambers, Deborah, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming. Women and Journalism. London: Routledge,
2004. p. 231
iii
Harp, Dustin. Desperately Seeking Women Readers: U.S. Newspapers and the Construction of a Female
Readership. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. p. 13
iv
Byerly, Carolyn M., and Karen Ross. Women & Media: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006. p. 40
v
Born, Donna. "The Image of the Woman Journalist in American Popular Fiction: 1890 to the Present."
Department of Journalism, Central Michigan University, 1981. p. 7
vi
“[E]ight million women entered the work force during World War II, increasing the proportion of
working women from 25 to 36 percent of all adult women.” Ibid. p. 16
vii
Ibid. p. 17
viii
Ibid, p. 20
 
7
Chapter One:
Character Biographies

It’s astonishing what women will do when they take to newspaper work.
—W.D. Howells

Samantha Adams: “Renowned Girl Reporter”

It is clear to readers that Samantha (Sam) Adams is not the typical Southern belle
upon her return to Atlanta from a stint working as an award-winning reporter for the San
Francisco Chronicle.
ix
Despite being born into Atlanta’s high society,
x
Sam trades in her
social privileges—and her debutante ball—for a green sports car.
xi
An only child
orphaned after her parents were killed in a plane crash in Paris,
xii
she is taken in by her
Uncle George because they “always had a special bond.”
xiii
By the age of fifteen, she had
been to Europe twice because George had “want[ed] her horizons to have no limits.”
xiv

Tall, dark, intelligent, and in her late thirties,
xv
Sam chalks up her short, dark
curls,
xvi
big brown eyes,
xvii
and general physical preservation to “good genes, lots of
sleep, eight glasses of water a day, and miles of fast walking.”
xviii
Aside from this short
description of Adams’s appearance, readers must tune into the reactions of secondary
characters to get a more well-rounded depiction. Indeed, some of the best physical
descriptions of her physique come from the male gaze: “Trying not to be too obvious
about it, [he] slid his eyes up Sam’s legs. Up to her great chest. Elegant nose…She had
huge brown eyes, and a classically beautiful face that reminded him of some star he’d
once seen in an old movie on TV.”
xix

Not only is Adams well-traveled and beautiful, she is also well-educated. She
attended Emory University in Atlanta and was named to the dean’s list.
xx
After her
freshman year, she followed her boyfriend Beau Talbot to Stanford University
xxi
and
 
8
remained a student there, despite their hard breakup and his relocation to New York to be
with his new love. Reacting poorly to the breakup, Adams went through a time in which,
“she’d joined anything that would give her license to smoke dope and drink Southern
Comfort, yell at the police and throw smoke bombs.”
xxii
While on the rebound at
Stanford, Adams married a “bearded draft resister”
xxiii
whom she later divorced.
Adams’s return to her home in the South forces her to answer questions she had
been denying during her stint in California. “During the years away when people asked
her… ‘Why did you leave the South?’ she’d answer flippantly… ‘Because of a summer
romance. Because of a broken heart.’ She’d said that for years and years and years, long
past the time, perhaps, when she should have forgotten.”
xxiv
To forget about her broken
heart, Adams partakes in a downward spiral of drinking and partying. When her drinking
borders on alcoholism, she enlists in an Alcoholics Anonymous program that leads her to
her love of Perrier.
xxv

After many promiscuous one-night encounters with men, she meets San
Francisco’s chief of detectives, Sean O’Reilly, and falls in love. But when he is killed by
a drunken driver, Sam cannot help but see the irony “that she, who had almost killed
herself with booze during her twenties but had been sober for almost ten years, should
lose the man she loved to a drunk driver.”
xxvi
Still reeling from O’Reilly’s death, Adams
takes a prestigious job with Atlanta’s major newspaper, the Constitution. “Sam’s series
on a serial killer in San Francisco had won her journalistic prizes, had earned her the
reputation that had gotten her this cushy job with the Constitution, naming her own
stories, answering only to the managing editor.”
xxvii

 
9
With a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism under her belt, Adams makes
her own rules, picks her own stories, and spends as much time away from the newsroom
as possible. Notorious for her directness,
xxviii
insubordination, independence, wit, charm,
and ability to write front-page stories about murder, crime, and scandal, Adams is not
your typical girl reporter—she’s better.
Amanda Roberts: “I don’t make the news. I just report it.”
While very few details are offered up about 28-year-old
xxix
Amanda Roberts’s
physical appearance other than a quick mention of her gray eyes
xxx
and “delicate blonde
eyebrows,”
xxxi
author Sherryl Woods spares no details about this female reporter’s
personal and professional background: “Amanda Roberts had grown up in Manhattan,
she’d gotten her journalism degree from Columbia and her law degree from Harvard, and
she’d had every intention of building a career as one of the best investigative reporters in
the country.”
xxxii
To say she is qualified is an understatement.
But when her husband, Mack Roberts, is offered a professorship at the University
of Georgia, Roberts relocates her life and journalism career to the rural South, where her
prize-winning
xxxiii
work on the police beat in New York
xxxiv
is of seemingly little use. In
fact, “She was a type A personality living in a type B environment.”
xxxv
Despite this
drastic change in scenery, Roberts takes a job reporting for the Gazette, a small weekly
Georgia newspaper where she finds herself writing about bake sales and quilting parties
instead of robberies and murders. In New York, she “had worked for tough editors,
obnoxious editors, alcoholic editors, and brilliant editors who could fine-tune a story,
snipping out the excess with the precision of a skilled surgeon.”
xxxvi
But at the Gazette,
 
10
Roberts is the only full-time female reporter working for editor Oscar Cates, a small-
town, Southern boy who becomes more like her father than her editor.
Bad news befalls Roberts when she discovers that her husband is having an affair
with one of his students. She asks for a divorce,
xxxvii
opening the door for former New
York detective (and her love interest) Joe Donelli in the process. She tells Donelli,
I’ve always known what I wanted out of life. I worked damn hard to get
where I was as a reporter. I was respected. I was in control. I always felt
secure about my personal life, too, until Mack walked out. It was really the
first thing to ever really go wrong for me. It shook me to see how easily
that control could slip away.
xxxviii

Regaining control of her career and her love life, Roberts is hired by Atlanta’s newest
magazine, Inside Atlanta,
xxxix
where she is able to cover crime in the South’s big city and
earn the magazine a good reputation in journalistic circles. She marries Donelli, and the
two adopt Pete, a homeless teenager whom Roberts met during one of her investigations.
In the final novel, Roberts discovers that she is pregnant and though first taken by
surprise at the thought of her new role as a biological mother, she becomes accustomed to
the idea by the end of the series.
Suddenly, the female reporter who wanted nothing else but to move northward
begins to love the South; the woman who “prided herself on needing no one,”
xl
finds her
match in another, and the journalist who thought nothing big or bad ever happens in the
small-town South earns accolades with her features about deceit, betrayal, crime, and,
most of all, murder.

 
11
Chapter One Endnotes

ix
Shankman, Sarah. First Kill All the Lawyers. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1988. p. 13
x
Sam is a member of DAR and the Daughters of the Confederacy, elite Southern social groups. Ibid. p. 22
xi
“‘She finagled me out of a little green sports car in lieu of a debut,’ said her uncle. ‘It hasn’t gotten any
better since.’” Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 20
xii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 20-21
xiii
Ibid. p. 20-21
xiv
Ibid. p. 22
xv
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 33
xvi
Ibid. p. 26
xvii
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 79
xviii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 26
xix
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves 1990. p. 2
xx
Ibid. p. 23
xxi
Ibid. p. 23
xxii
Ibid. p. 45
xxiii
Ibid. p. 31
xxiv
Ibid. p. 31
xxv
“Nothing had grabbed her attention before. Shattered glass, lost shoes, rolled cars, broken friendships
and promises, hangovers, dry heaves, hallucinations, blackouts—none of it had jerked her up and made her
face that she was an alcoholic. She couldn’t handle the booze, it was running her life, and that was a
problem…That had been her first step on the long road back.” Ibid. p. 50-51
xxvi
Shankman, Fist Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p.28
xxvii
Ibid. p. 32
xxviii
Ibid. p. 57
xxix
Woods, Sherryl. Reckless. New York, New York: Warner Books, 1989. p. 86
xxx
Ibid. p. 47
xxxi
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 223
xxxii
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 5
 
12

xxxiii
Ibid. p. 40
xxxiv
Ibid. p. 5
xxxv
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 12
xxxvi
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 2
xxxvii
Ibid. p. 6
xxxviii
Ibid. p. 198
xxxix
Ibid. p. 224-225
xl
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 184
 
13
Chapter Two
Stereotypes: Victims and Victors

Images don’t stand alone—they constantly quote from other images, lending them a
layered, half-seen dimension. For another, images don’t stop at their own visual
borders—they’re affected by what frames them. How we read an image, in other words,
depends largely on where we see it, when we see it, what preconceptions we bring to it
and what we know about it in advance.

—Catharine Lumby, Bad Girls: The media, sex & feminism in the 90s

Journalism and stereotypes are more closely linked than one might assume.
According to Gender Communication author Laurie P. Arliss, the term stereotype was
coined by a journalist in the 1920s who was
attempting to describe how members of a given society create shared
‘mental pictures.’ These pictures were believed to serve those who shared
them in two ways: (1) by providing a shortcut for dissecting the
continuous world into identifiable categories and (2) by providing a
comfortable sense that the status quo was intact.
xli

Although the feminist movement introduced new meanings of womanhood into public
discourse, the status quo continues to define femininity as thin, white, passive, soft-
spoken, aspiring to marriage and motherhood, physically weak, uncompetitive, irrational,
and emotional. And while the modern woman might brush aside these expected
behaviors, the stereotypes remain just that—expected of her. Without a performance of
stereotypes of femininity, she is seen as lacking, as unnatural, as anti-woman. These
stereotypes serve the dominant ideology and produce unreasonable expectations for
feminine behavior.
Indeed, “stereotypes may be more influential than we would like to imagine…[I]t
is tentatively proposed that sex stereotypes provide a template against which all male and
female behavior is initially judged.”
xlii
These stereotypes, which form distinctive social
 
14
categories, play an important role in guiding what is considered right and wrong behavior
for men and women, group formation, and even self-confidence. Sex-based dualisms
uphold a power structure that makes male-associated characteristics superior: “[T]he
stereotype of femininity is considerably less desirable than the stereotypic image of
masculinity, particularly in a capitalistic society that covets strength, rationality, and
competitiveness—and distributes power accordingly.”
xliii

Sociologists believe that gender roles carry “a set of expectations about
appropriate behavior in a social situation,”
xliv
and the mass media play a crucial role in
reinstating and reinforcing these expectations to the public. Popular media, including the
fiction presented here, “continue[s] to frame (in every sense of the word) women within a
narrow repertoire of types that bear little or no relation to how real women live their real
lives.”
xlv
Typecast as mothers or whores, butch or femme, girls-next-door, overemotional,
tomboys, and bitches, women are placed within narrowly defined categories that prevent
them from being whole.
Authors Carolyn M. Byerly and Karen Ross explore the idea of media
representation and stereotyping in their book Women & Media: A Critical Introduction.
They write: “The ways in which women are represented in news media send important
messages to the viewing, listening, and reading publics about women’s place, women’s
role, and women’s lives.”
xlvi
Women’s representation in fiction is also important to
examine because in novels, women can be all of the stereotypes or none at all at the whim
of the author. Female reporters can achieve Pulitzer Prizes, answer to no one, and see
their byline on the front page at least once a week; or they can be hyper-sexualized,
passive, incompetent journalists who stick to what they know—fashion, lifestyle, and
 
15
romance. It is this counter-culture womanhood set against a backdrop of traditional
feminine stereotypes in the works of Woods and Shankman that makes the image of the
female journalist in fiction compelling and challenging.
Authors Woods and Shankman place their characters in a position to navigate
through and around dominant stereotypes of femininity personally and professionally. As
journalists who wield power and a public voice, they are instantly victorious over many
of the limiting stereotypes of femininity, which expect women to be soft-spoken, docile,
and limited to the domestic sphere. However, the conservative and history-riddled
Southern setting of the novels keeps old stereotypes alive within the texts and jeopardizes
the novels’ modernized images.
This chapter explores the major stereotypes the fictional Roberts and Adams
encounter throughout the course of their journalistic careers. The two women are judged
against four major stereotypes of the female reporter from the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries—
the sob sister, the stunt reporter, “one of the boys,” and the victim. The function of these
stereotypes will be placed into historical context, thereby clarifying the ways in which
Adams and Roberts are both victims and victors of stereotypes.
The Sob Sister

By bringing a blush of authorship into the courtroom, the sob sisters inevitably engaged
fundamental questions about how the public sphere was constituted and who should be
allowed to operate within it.
–Jean Marie Lutes, Front-page Girls

The term sob sister refers to a “female journalist who specialized in sentimental
or human interest stories, or, more generally, a woman writer ‘who could wring
tears.’”
xlvii
Later, sob sister,
xlviii
which was in common usage by 1910, became a
 
16
derogatory term for any female reporter
xlix
whose reports were “expected to express the
conventionally emotional responses of women, documenting not just the news but the
femininity of its teller.”
l
When publishers discovered that female readership was down,
they hired more women in hopes of reaching out to a disengaged female audience, and, in
turn, “Women readers and audiences were wooed by female journalists with a new kind
of news that related to their lives.”
li
While the emotional, human-interest stories written
by these women did eventually increase female readership, female journalists have taken
great strides to shake this harmful stereotype that “recast[s] trailblazing professionals as
gullible amateurs.”
lii
While the term sob sister has continued to pigeonhole women
reporters into covering “soft” news—“‘human interest’ stories, features and the delivery
of a magazine-style of journalism
liii
—real

women reporters have blazed a trail so that
fictional depictions of female reporters like Roberts and Adams can exist. Neither
character refuses to be cornered by their respective editors into covering traditional
“women’s news,” and the alternatives prove fruitful for their news careers.
When Roberts first arrives at the Gazette, her editor, Oscar Cates, “had her
covering shopping mall dedications and ice cream socials over a three-county area,
instead of corruption in government, corporate insider trading, or organized crime.”
liv

But, when he sends her to a local department store to cover a cooking demonstration, the
chef is murdered on stage and Roberts finds herself in a position to investigate the
murder.
lv
The irony of the situation is made apparent: “If Oscar had any notion that his
crummy little feature assignment was going to turn into front page news, he’d have been
[t]here himself, leaving Amanda in the office to write yet another breezy roundup of
quilting circle activities.”
lvi
Later, when Cates sends her to cover a home preservation tea,
 
17
pulling her off a murder story she had been investigating for a center spread in Inside
Atlanta magazine, Roberts takes matters into her own hands.
lvii
She defies Cates and
writes the murder story anyway, earning her editor’s praise for objectivity and accurately
capturing the source’s pain.
lviii
But even in the most sincere, vulnerable moments with
sources, “Amanda consider[s] her work serious, well-researched investigative journalism.
She despise[s] sensational pulp”
lix
and goes to great lengths to keep her byline away from
the over-sentimentality that historically plagued the women’s pages.
Like Roberts, Adams rarely covers soft news and manages to circumvent leisure
stories. Adams comes to Georgia’s Constitution with a famed reputation for covering
serial killers, murders, and city crime, and she stands up to her editor to secure her
reputation as a hard news reporter:
I know you call the shots here, Hoke, but in case you’ve forgotten, life-
style, entertainment, and froufrou aren’t my regular beat. Remember me?
The reporter who specializes in blood, gore, bad guys shooting up the little
girl behind the counter in the fried chicken joint because she ran out of
dark and crispy, didn’t get their change back fast enough?
lx

While at the paper, Adams enters strip clubs, elite boys-only clubs, and the offices of
high law enforcement officials to get her stories. Toliver never assigns her traditional
feature stories (partly because he never assigns her stories at all), but he also does not
encourage her hard-hitting story ideas. Adams also never receives support from her
family, especially Peaches, her stand-in mother and her uncle’s housekeeper:
PEACHES: I don’t know what you want to be poking around in such
troublesome things anyway…Why can’t you write about nice things?

ADAMS: One doesn’t investigate things that are nice…Next thing you
know, Peaches, you’re going to be telling me that my place is in the
home.
lxi

 
18
Throughout series, it becomes clear that Adams must deal with criticism, not only from
her editor, but also from family members who want her to cover more conventionally
feminine subjects and, thus, steer clear of the danger that comes along with covering
scandals, murders, robberies, and kidnapping. Shankman’s fiction reflects the current
pressures that “still exist for women to write according to a perceived type, a logical
demand from an industry that finds profit in dipping into the culture’s easy
stereotypes,”
lxii
while simultaneously providing readers with a character who sneakily
circumvents the journalistic trap set out for women since their entry into the profession.
In She Walks In Beauty, the last novel of the series, Adams still refuses to be cast
as a sob sister, proving to be a woman of integrity. When the Constitution begins to take
a turn toward the sensational, Adams turns in her resignation right after filing her story
from the Miss America pageant she is sent to cover in Atlantic City:
Despite a raft of good people still on staff, the Constitution wasn’t what it
was when they’d enticed her away from the Chronicle. Its slant had
suddenly shifted away from a flirtation with serious journalism back to
pop reporting with large pretty pictures done up in four color—rather like
television. Sam was confused.
lxiii

Refusing to settle for sob sister journalism, Adams keeps her career as a serious journalist
intact by resigning. Though it is not clear what Adams’s next step will be, the reader must
assume that her future in journalism involves a more serious news outlet.
The Stunt Reporter

[N]o matter how ‘straight’ their news, how ‘rigid and conservative’ their style, and how
much ‘dignity and honor’ they invested in their stories, they could not achieve the
disembodied anonymity of the objective journalist.
–Jean Marie Lutes, Front-page Girls

 
19
The female stunt reporter is perhaps one of the most dramatic, yet poignant
portrayals of a female journalist. Historically, stunt reporters literally placed themselves
in the midst of the story, going to any lengths necessary to get the inside scoop. Their
bodies became part of the news as they enrolled in mental hospitals (Nelly Bly, for
example), invaded drug dens, became employees for corrupt corporations, sought out
doctors who might perform an illegal abortion, and faked illnesses to gain entrance into
hospitals.
lxiv
“By adopting the hysteric’s hyper-female, hyper-excessive body, she created
her own story and claimed the right to tell it in her own way.”
lxv
While the image of the
stunt reporter has been condemned as exaggerative, dangerous, unprofessional, and
unethical, both Adams and Roberts qualify as modernized versions of this historical
stereotype. They “boldly challenged the value of experts’ neutrality, insisting instead on
the significance of their own bodies as sources of knowledge.”
lxvi
Undeniably, these
women exude an expert stunt girl demeanor even though “stunt reporters have been
viewed as an awkward, even embarrassing phase of sensation journalism, out of sync
with the professionalization that was transforming news writing in the final decades of
the twentieth century.”
lxvii

Both Adams and Roberts get the to the heart of stories by inserting themselves
directly into the action. Mimicking the real-life stunt reporters who came before them,
these two women “[Act]…as the sensation heroines of their own stories, they [redefine]
reporting and [use] their bodies not just as a means of acquiring the news but as the very
source of it.”
lxviii

In Woods’s series, Roberts is constantly at the center of the unfolding action, even
when she knows her actions are not appropriate journalism procedure. For example, she
 
20
enrolls in a cooking class to scope out a suspect for a murder case she is writing a story
about. Woods writes: “Journalistically speaking, Amanda supposed that wasn’t very
ethical, but it was practical. At the moment, she was able to live with the practical.”
lxix

Outdoing her competition, Roberts becomes creative rather than reactionary in order to
get facts that no one else can get. Her presence is part of the development of the news,
whether she intended it to be or not. Moreover, Roberts inadvertently becomes the object
of anger for sources who do not want to be identified, criminals who want their illegal
activity kept secret, and dangerous people who are the gateway to real informants. In the
process of getting stories, she is threatened mortally or legally but always comes out at
the right end of trouble. Roberts admits her tendency
to plunge into the middle of things regardless of the danger. It made for
great copy, but it had also resulted in a few hair-raising incidents, not the
least of which had been having her car bombed in New York and being
shot at a few months earlier right there in Georgia.
lxx

More stunt-ridden examples abound as she is framed for stealing a Civil War artifact and
then imprisoned by the crooked sheriff who wants to throw her investigation off track.
lxxi

And while Roberts does not always purposely insert herself into a situation to get a story
like the stunt reporters of the past, she indirectly becomes part of the story, creating the
very news she intends to report and putting herself in physical danger. Her editor Cates,
assistant Jenny Lee, and boyfriend Donelli worry for her safety because of her reckless
behavior. Lee admits that despite her admiration for her tenacious reporting, she is
starting to agree with Cates and Donelli that “There are times when you are entirely too
reckless for your own good.”
lxxii
Roberts’s investigative style is always coupled with
reminders from family, friends, and employers that she is, in fact, mortal.
 
21
Like her fictional counterpart, if Adams is not reporting the news, she is making
it. Her knack for troublemaking (and news-making) is foreshadowed when she goes to a
small Georgia town to complete interviews for an upcoming story. An intuitive waitress
at the local diner sums up Adams’s presence, saying, “Looks to me like you’re here to stir
things up,”
lxxiii
and Adams does just that. Suspecting the town’s sheriff to be dabbling in
shady land deals and drug trafficking, she lies about her identity and goes straight to his
office herself. She gets the story but is abducted, sexually harassed, and almost killed by
Sheriff Dodd in the process. In another scene, Shankman describes Adams’s first few
weeks at the Constitution as a news-maker rather than reporter: “she’d cozied up to and
disarmed a shooter in a shopping-center parking lot the second week after she’d moved
back to Atlanta,”
lxxiv
saving a man’s life. This is not the life of the average reporter but
rather the semblance of a modern-day stunt reporter who places herself in the midst of
news to get the news.
Adams and Roberts, like turn-of-the-century newspaperwomen, are “thoroughly
entangled in conventional notions of womanhood” while “enacting a daily drama” where
“they [appear] both defiantly public and defensively feminine.”
lxxv
Taking center stage in
their own stories, Adams and Roberts “[renovate] the conventions of nineteenth-century
sentimentality to suit the rapidly evolving mass media and [develop] controversial new
models of self-reflexive authorship that [involve] not just reporting the news but
becoming the news.”
lxxvi

 
22
One of the Boys

Some women try to ‘beat the boys at their own game’ by adopting assertive and macho
styles…[W]omen have attempted to challenge masculine newsroom cultures that
masquerade as neutral professionalism…
lxxvii

—Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism

The entrance of women into the newsroom disrupted and complicated what had
formerly been an all-male bastion. “Women in the newsroom had to face the realities of a
profession that did not want them there in the first place, craft traditions that served to
encourage stereotypes, and an acceptance of themselves as workers in a culture that said
they should be at home.”
lxxviii
In order to make their professional transition smoother,
female reporters often adopted the mentality of their male co-workers. In essence, they
became “one of the boys.” To infiltrate into traditionally male beats such as business,
politics, crime, and sports, female reporters have had to navigate gender role expectations
in order to achieve male-proscribed success. Because “Journalists gain status in their
work by acting ‘professionally’ and by exhibiting certain predefined traits of their
‘professional community,’”
lxxix
female reporters have had to take on more “masculine”
qualities in order to gain respect in the newsroom and acceptance by the majority.
As “gender is used to assign social status”
lxxx
in the workplace, women who want
to break out of the soft news “ghetto,” as it has been called, have had to grapple for
respect:
Journalism’s ‘competitive culture’…draws attention to the fact that story
assignment is not cooperatively worked out, but struggled over. In such a
setting, females have difficulties not only getting their story ideas
approved but also…in being assigned to high-profile beats and interview
assignments.
lxxxi

 
23
Even issues as minute as language and decorum were among male reporters’ initial
concerns when women first entered the workplace because they believed “a feminine
sensibility would require men to be careful about their personal habits and language.”
lxxxii

These gendered barriers, however, are not fully realized in the works of Woods and
Shankman. For example, Adams’s editor soon discovers that her harsh language
surpasses that of most of his male employees and even asks Adams to tone it down. He
asks, “Is that how you earned your praises at the Chronicle? Saying things like ‘spill it’?
That kind of talk may go over big in San Francisco, but you’re going to have to develop a
more ladylike style if you ever expect to make it in Atlanta.”
lxxxiii
Perhaps it is the novel’s
Southern setting that restricts Adams to a more genteel vocabulary, but Shankman makes
it clear that Adams would fit in well in any other big city newsroom despite her gender.
Also, Adams takes on a masculine form of her name, going from Samantha to a more
gender-neutral Sam. Over the course of the series, she rejects her femininity in many
small ways—like changing her name and talking tough—as a symbol of sacrifice for
newsroom integrity. Adams uses newsroom lingo as competently as any man, and her
gender-neutral byline does not allow readers to question her work on account of her
gender.
In Woods’s novels, Roberts is first separated from “the boys” through brief
biographical descriptions that reinforce her femininity. Detaching her character from the
stigma of alcohol abuse and chain smoking attached to male reporters, Woods creates a
character whose only vice is sugar.
lxxxiv
But, aside from that, Roberts quickly aligns
herself with her male competition both on a newsroom and national level. She does not
“indulge in feminine wiles”
lxxxv
and, instead, takes pride in her “instinctive reaction…to
 
24
fight back. She hadn’t gotten to where she was in life by being meek. She took chances.
She accepted the consequences.”
lxxxvi
She exerts an autonomy and presence in newsroom
interactions that mirror the privileges formerly only given to the best male journalists,
and she chooses her own stories, which are far from “soft.” In one scene, Roberts defends
her story choices to a co-worker:
I do not indulge myself when I select my stories. I choose topics that I feel
are important to this community. Admittedly, some of them are dark, but
the world’s not always made up of afternoon teas and coming out parties. I
occasionally tread on some very powerful toes, a practice that has made
Inside Atlanta widely respected in journalistic circles.
lxxxvii

Roberts hereby denounces sob sisterdom and soft news for darker, harder stories, while
claiming male beats for her own. Reminding her co-workers that she is “not some
Southern flower who’s likely to wilt at the first sign of danger,”
lxxxviii
Roberts transforms
into “one of the boys” in order to gain credibility, access, and trust.
The Victim

[T]here were always men who were willing to wreak havoc on the bodies and happiness
of others, whether they were fighting for a cause or were only in it for themselves.

—Sarah Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers

The victim stereotype, above all others in these series, steals power away from the
female reporters and places them at the whim of their male aggressors. While the sob
sister, the stunt reporter, and “one of the boys” allow the fictional female journalist to
write about what she wants, to insert herself into any situation she chooses, and to behave
any way she desires, the victimized female journalist is robbed of choice. Images of
women as victims are used frequently in Woods’s and Shankman’s portrayals of their
characters, and as such, deserve “a little further scrutiny, since it says something very
 
25
powerful about women’s agency and women’s role in society.”
lxxxix
Often, women are
subjected to violence in their daily lives and are then re-victimized by the subsequent
news coverage. Alternatively, the novels examined here portray female journalists who
are victimized and are then subsequently forced to write the news and leave themselves
out altogether.
One of Adams’s most intense run-ins with violence and victimization comes in
the form of an ex-convict named Skeeter whom she helped put behind bars:
Skeeter was stark raving crazy. The rapist/murderer had killed three
women in Atlanta before Sam’s series on him in the paper pushed enough
victims forward. Like most madmen, Skeeter needed someone to blame.
He’d picked Sam. ‘I’ll get you, you bitch!’ he’d screamed at her as they
dragged him out of the courtroom after his sentencing. ‘Melodramatic,
don’t you think?’ Sam had flapped her lips…hoping her nonchalance
would hide their trembling.
xc

On the lam from the law months later, Skeeter almost makes good on his promise of
violence. Hiding in the backseat of Adams’s car, he kidnaps her, ties her to a tree deep in
the woods, and throws knives at her from a distance to enact his revenge. Saved at the
last minute, Adams barely escapes Skeeter’s plot to get even. Adams’s near-death
encounter with Skeeter is only one among many, including a run-in with a country
sheriff. When she goes to Sheriff Dodd’s office at the start of her investigation into his
involvement with shady land deals, he asserts his physical dominance and tries to
intimidate Adams through sexual assault: “He brushed his hand against hers as he gave
her the cup and was in no hurry to remove it. She was suddenly aware of being alone in
the room with this man. She wondered if he’d locked the door when he closed it.”
xci
Her
intuition about Dodd proves true but unhelpful in a later situation, where she finds herself
hostage in her own car with Dodd as the unruly and aggressive passenger. Pointing a gun
 
26
to her head, Dodd demands that she drive far into the countryside, and, once
incapacitated, he tries to enact his rape fantasy. “He lowered his face until it was almost
touching hers. ‘It makes me hot when you move like that.’ He reached down and jerked
up her skirt. ‘Now, this part isn’t going to hurt.’”
xcii
She is, once again, saved at the last
minute with both her life and her integrity intact.
Victimization, nevertheless, is not limited to the novels’ outlaws but also comes
from the men the characters trust and respect. For instance, on her first day on the job,
Adams reports to her editor’s office where he welcomes her, saying, “Dammit, there are
so many frigging reasons I can’t sleep with you.”
xciii
Sam tolerates this sexual
harassment, even though she finds the comment unacceptable:
She’d been called names by better men than Toliver, and she knew they
were resorting to the tactic because she made them nervous. For just about
the time their eyes fell to her breasts or her legs and their fantasies
began…she’d start with her never-ending questions, which made some of
them visibly twitch.
xciv

While the reader can see how Adams tries to navigate around the sexual remark, she does
so at the expense of her honor and dignity by trying to justify her editor’s behavior at
their very first meeting. By not speaking out against this inappropriate workplace
interaction, Adams becomes disempowered and broken down to the sum of her parts.
Depictions of Adams’s sexual victimization immediately transform her from a self-
assured reporter into a passive, sexualized body.
Roberts also becomes a victim throughout her series, and most of her encounters
are perpetrated by anonymous male figures—masked men, men lurking in the dark, or
men who try to commit violence from a distance using weapons or threatening letters.
The first example occurs when Roberts is in the newsroom after hours looking at
 
27
photographs related to a current story. Suddenly, she is hit over the head by a blunt object
from behind and knocked unconscious.
xcv
Falling to the floor of the newsroom’s photo
lab, Roberts is made vulnerable in an alleged safe space. A newsroom attack like this one
sends a frightening message that women can be violated at any time, anywhere.
Roberts also becomes a victim both during her investigations in the field and in
her personal life. For example, after an intense workout, Roberts is almost smothered to
death in the steam room at her local gym, which was the site of a similar murder that
Roberts witnessed and is in the process of investigating:
[T]he big, wraparound towel dropped over her head. Its thick, absorbent
material shut out the light, and, worse, cut down her oxygen supply…She
struggled, tearing at the towel, kicking out at the unseen attacker. Some
blows actually hit their target, but the person was larger and stronger than
she…She cursed her stupidity in letting down her guard for even a single
minute…Finally, with a last ragged gasp, she fainted.
xcvi

Roberts’s investigations, whether active or not, follow her into her personal life, and
ironically, almost cost her her life.
In another novel, Roberts finds herself on the top of a former white supremacist-
turned-politician, George Tolliver’s hit list. When she discovers a clandestine meeting of
the local neo-Nazis will be taking place, she positions herself underneath a window to
listen. To her surprise, she finds herself and her current investigation into the local white
supremacist community to be the topic of the angry meeting. Fearful that her
investigative reporting might ruin Tolliver’s chances of winning the political race, the
supremacist group orders a few of the members to “Find the Roberts woman and take
care of it.”
xcvii
Stunned, Roberts cannot believe that “She had just listened to a man, a
prominent politician, order her execution.”
xcviii

 
28
Finding herself in many near-death encounters makes Roberts nonchalant about
death threats, menacing phone calls, stalkers, and attackers. In fact, these frightening
situations affect those around her, particularly Donelli, more than they affect Roberts
herself. The following passage, however, gives insight into the motives behind Roberts’s
negligent behavior—she is dedicated to journalism’s noble cause no matter the risks:
DONELLI: Amanda Roberts, you are motivated by your obsession with
investigative journalism. You like the chase, the hunt, the intrigue. You
can’t stand dangling threads, any more than you can stand dangling
participles…

ROBERTS: That is not true! I’m not some sort of danger junkie. I only put
my neck on the line to get the facts, when I think it’ll help to effect a
change.
xcix

Even though Roberts and Adams experience verbal, physical, and sexual violence
throughout the course of their careers, they are reduced to an image of pain in the end.
The words used to describe Adams’s sexual encounter with Sheriff Dodd, along with the
vivid account of Roberts’s near-death encounter at the gym, point to a fascination with
seeing women as victims. “Women thus appear to be at their most interesting when they
are in most pain, when they experience most suffering.”
c
Thus, the image of a strong
woman made weak at the hands of men moves beyond fantasy to become an expectation
for readers. Through a textual commodificaton of the characters’ breasts, legs, face, and
other body parts, these women “are actually being reduced to less than the sum of [their]
body parts.”
ci
This reporter-fiction is not reinventing the image of the female reporter or
providing readers with a new perspective on non-violent male/female relationships.

 
29
Instead, Woods and Shankman “[perform] an affirmatory and confirmatory function in
(re)articulating the rules of the game to which we are all supposed to subscribe”
cii
—
violence against women.

 
30
Chapter Two Endnotes

xli
Arliss, Laurie P. Gender Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991.p. 12
xlii
Ibid. p. 24
xliii
Ibid. p. 16
xliv
Robinson, Gertrude J. Gender, Journalism and Equity: Canadian, U.S., and European Perspectives.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2005. p. 10-11
xlv
Byerly and Ross 2006. p. 18
xlvi
Ibid. p. 40
xlvii
Ibid. p. 65

xlviii
“Pioneer female journalist Ishbel Ross tells a story about the origin of the term sob sister that has been
picked up by many commentators. She claims the derogatory name dates from the 1907 trial of millionaire
Harry K. Thaw who was accused of killing architect Stanford White for being his wife’s lover. Four
female journalists covered the trial – Ada Patterson, Dorothy Dix, Winifred Black and Nixola Greeley-
Smith. Male reporters believed that the only reason the four women reporters were there was to give the
woman’s point of view, accusing them of sympathizing with the adulterous wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw. One
male seeing the four at the press table, nicknamed them “sob sisters” and the name stuck.” Saltzman, 2003.
xlix
Byerly & Ross, 2006. p. 65-66
l
Ibid. p. 3
li
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 9
lii
Lutes 2006. p. 66
liii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 1
liv
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 6
lv
Ibid. p. 2
lvi
Ibid. p. 2
lvii
Ibid. p. 148
lviii
Ibid. p. 224
lix
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. P. 17
lx
Shankman, She Walks in Beauty, 1991. P. 1
lxi
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 19
lxii
Byerly and Ross 2006. p. 268
lxiii
Shankman, She Walks in Beauty, 1991. p. 4
 
31

lxiv
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves 1990. p. 13
lxv
Ibid. p. 13
lxvi
Ibid. p. 38
lxvii
Ibid. p. 13-14
lxviii
Ibid. p. 14
lxix
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 126
lxx
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 17
lxxi
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 178
lxxii
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. p. 52
lxxiii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 162
lxxiv
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 24
lxxv
Lutes 2006. p. 4
lxxvi
Ibid. p. 5
lxxvii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 104
lxxviii
Bradley, Patricia, and Gail Collins. "Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality." In Visions of
the American Press, edited by David Abrahamson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005. p.
xix
lxxix
Robinson 2005. p. 11
lxxx
Ibid. p. 20
lxxxi
Ibid. p. 87
lxxxii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 117
lxxxiii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 15
lxxxiv
Woods, Hide and Seek, 1993. p. 2
lxxxv
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 146
lxxxvi
Ibid. pp. 69-70
lxxxvii
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 66-67
lxxxviii
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 58-59
lxxxix
Byerly and Ross 2006. p. 42
xc
Shankman, She Walks in Beauty, 1991. pp. 6-7
 
32

xci
Woods, Stolen Moments, 1990. pp. 165-166
xcii
Ibid. p. 208
xciii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 33
xciv
Ibid. p. 37
xcv
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 206
xcvi
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 144
xcvii
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. p. 232. George Tolliver bears no relation to editor Hoke Toliver featured
in Shankman’s novels.
xcviii
Ibid. p. 232
xcix
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 108
c
Byerly and Ross 2006. p. 43
ci
Ibid. p. 37
cii
Ibid. p. 39
 
33
Chapter Three:
One is the Loneliest Number

[T]here is something unreal about her: she has no living relatives, she travels alone, she
lives alone, and the world she lives in seems to have no relation to the real world.

—Donna Born, The Image of the Woman Journalist in American Popular Fiction

Unlike men who build friendships and “family” in a newsroom setting, the
women of Woods’s and Shankman’s novels are often depicted as being alone. Fumbling
over one obstacle after another, aspiring female reporters have had to battle “the male
culture in newsrooms, family-workplace conflicts, a weakening economy (which means,
among other things, fewer jobs) and male chauvinism among the very top executives—
owners, presidents, publishers.”
ciii
For both men and women,
Journalism wreaks havoc on most personal relationships…Journalists
usually end up alone in the big city without a family. Divorce rates…are
astronomical. The only marriages that seem to work involve a man and a
woman who are both working journalists. The only friends most
newspeople have are the people who work with them.
civ

The higher women climb up the career ladder, the more alone they find themselves. Male
colleagues doubt her intelligence, her skill, and her ambition. In the newsroom, “the
woman is clearly inferior to the male, as evidenced either by ‘usual’ incompetence or by
‘unusual’ ability for a woman and by the rarity of women in the profession. Frequent
reference is made to the ‘only one.’ She is the ‘only’ woman reporter at the paper.”
cv

Female colleagues, when they exist, see her as competition or an enemy, never an ally,
because they have taught themselves to work alone and to depend on no one to assure
that their work is done accurately.
Another historical obstacle that has held women back from getting journalism
degrees at the same rate as men is education, or lack thereof. The best journalism schools
 
34
did not allow women to enroll until years after they were created. When women were
finally allowed a journalism education (post-Watergate), it was inferior to the training
received by their male counterparts. Even textbooks and resources for journalism students
were written by and for men.
cvi
This type of discrimination put women at a disadvantage
from the start of their careers:
[W]omen were trained within a specific, narrow category of ‘women’s
journalism,’ configured by the curriculum, textbooks and the attitudes of
lecturers as marginal, if not subordinated. The fact that women were
taught to write specifically as women and for women perpetuated the
myth that to be a ‘real’ journalist, dealing in hard news, you had to be
male.
cvii

These obstacles facing aspiring female journalists do not end with the conferment
of a degree. Issues of inequality—pay, treatment, beat assignments, etc.— still surface for
women in the field today. And, unlike her male counterparts, women must make
babysitter and daycare arrangements as well as fight the societal guilt placed on her for
leaving her child for her work. Suddenly, the journalist/mother/wife is not the picture of
the ideal worker—seen as men who are available on a whim, can travel with few
arrangements, and can work late nights and long weekends without a second thought—
but rather as a nine-to-five worker who has priorities at home that cannot be delayed. As
a result, female reporters are primarily absent from the “pub tradition,” which is far more
than a stress reliever. Rather it
extends the already long working day into the wee hours of the night and
thus equates a reporter’s ‘competence’ with total availability…drinking
bouts, where the ‘old boys network’ is created and sustained. The
evidence shows that this network informally influences work assignments,
affects promotions and also creates gendered work-role expectations.
cviii

 
35
After work, the journalist/mother/wife cannot go to the local bar and grab a drink with the
other male reporters because she, unlike her colleagues, has a second shift to get home to.
Attempting to piece together their varied roles, female reporters try “to reconcile
professional excellence with success as a woman, to find personal fulfillment both in the
profession and in a personal relationship.”
Roberts constantly attempts to reconcile her role as an independent investigative
reporter, a newly single woman, a new face in a new in town, and far from her parents.
Though Roberts does spend a majority of time alone, it is not new: “She had always
worked alone. This was no time to be changing that successful pattern.”
cix
Her editor,
Cates, and even the publisher of the magazine, Joel Crenshaw, leave Roberts alone to do
reporting on her own terms.
cx
At work, Roberts is even cornered off away from the other
reporters in her own private office where “she had access to news stories on file from a
wide range of sources, all indexed, all available in hard copy at the push of a button.”
cxi

Her status as the only female reporter, and her relative success at being a newsroom
anomaly, grant her privacies that further isolate her from all of her co-workers, except
one, her secretary Jenny Lee. Their interactions, while friendly, seem more like a
mentorship than a friendship among equals. While this female friendship is beneficial
(Roberts dispenses relationship advice to Lee in return for copies, faxes, phone calls, and
note-taking), it is hardly a partnership of equals.
Roberts is the only female reporter on staff until the final novel of the series,
where she meets her match in assignment editor Carol Fields. Readers see for the first
time in the nine total novels how Roberts co-exists in the newsroom with another woman,
and their first meeting does not go well. With just one look, Roberts pits Fields as her
 
36
competition rather than a potential ally in an all-male newsroom: “Amanda took a
surreptitious peek at Carol Fields on her way across the newsroom. She could tell at once
that they were going to have problems.”
cxii
This first interaction become hostile when
Fields orders Roberts to write stories that will draw in high-end advertisers, thereby going
against Roberts’s no-frills approach to reporting. The presence of another woman not
only impedes Roberts’s reporting style, but also places both women in unfamiliar
territory. They are not the “only ones” in the newsroom anymore, and their dominant
personalities collide and reinforce the idea that women cannot compete without becoming
enemies.
At home, Roberts tries to merge her bachelorette lifestyle with her role as a new
wife. Her marriage forces Roberts to truly reconcile and balance the two major loves of
her life: Donelli and journalism. Woods writes:
Roberts had always thought of herself in terms of her toughness and
independence. Thank heavens she’d realized in time that that didn’t mean
she had to go through life alone. For the first time in years, wrapping up
her story wasn’t the primary thing on her mind as she headed home.
Tonight, all she wanted was to be in her husband’s arms…
cxiii

This scene is crucial to Roberts’s character development. It is arguably the first time the
reader sees a reconciliation of the personal and professional for Roberts who, until now,
chose to go through life alone.
Adams is also the “only one” at the Constitution—the only one who works her
own hours, makes her own appointments,
cxiv
and does things her own way. Her editor
even questions his star reporter’s freedom in a profession that relies on a chain of
command:
 
37
TOLIVER: You think because you won all those prizes and the Big Boy
hired you at an annual fee bigger than a high-class hooker’s—and with
more perks—you can just go off and do what you want?

ADAMS: She smiled. That’s the way my contract reads, boss.
cxv

Adams’s past successes have made her the only one in the office exempt from editorial
control, and these visible privileges cause resentment among her colleagues
who had to work within the system, answering to the assistant city editor,
coming into the office every day, taking assignments rather than playing it
by ear and sniffing out their own stories, then following them to the
ground. If she were on their side of the fence, she’d hate her guts, too.
cxvi

Adams cannot form newsroom alliances or friendships because of these distinct
privileges that threaten her colleagues by placing them in direct competition with the only
woman in the newsroom.
Readers see an opportunity for teamwork when Adams meets Harry Zack, a
young insurance investigator who is investigating the death of one of his company’s
clients. But when Adams and Zack step on each other’s toes while interviewing the same
sources, her desire to dominate and control all the elements of the investigation shows her
unfamiliarity and unwillingness to work with another. When Zack refuses to share some
recently gathered information with her, she responds, “Fuck him. She was way ahead of
him anyway…She could handle this like she handled everything else. By herself, thank
you.”
cxvii
Though Adams recognizes this part of her personality to be a “flaw,” always
dealing with investigations alone has enabled her to succeed and thrive within a
competitive journalistic culture. Adams clings to the one thing that got her to the
Constitution in the first place—calling her own shots—and she recognizes that “there
were just some times she couldn’t be a team player.”
cxviii

 
38
Although Adams’s solitude is a conscious choice during investigations, there is
one type of loneliness that she does not choose—familial. Orphaned as a child by the
death of her parents in a plane crash, the only semblance of family Adams has ever
known is created by her uncle and his housekeeper. After being dumped and abandoned
by boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, Adams constantly fights feelings of familial
loneliness and abandonment. She finds support from a friend named Kitty Lee who lives
in Louisiana and has no affiliation with journalism whatsoever;
cxix
but, she is able to
provide a distant support system for Adam who has no professional allies except for her
editor.
Overall, the two characters comprise an image of the female journalist in fiction
who is proud of her independence, although she might not be proud of how she got it—
whether through heartbreak, death of family members and lovers, abandonment, or
friendlessness. On the other hand, her solitude and desire to do things her own way bucks
traditional stereotypes of femininity that say women should be meek, passive, and told
what to do in both the public and private spheres. Her higher education pedigrees—
Roberts received a journalism degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard, and
Adams graduated from both Emory and Stanford universities—aligns her with the top
men in the field, or perhaps surpasses them. (Both Roberts and Adams certainly have a
better education than their editors.) Her education makes her overqualified for the stories
her editor wants her to write and intimidates and emasculates her male co-workers.
The mythology of the lonely journalist persists in these novels even though both
characters try to strike a balance through their personal relationships with family and
lovers. Roberts and Adams “embody…what it means to be a journalist…alone, cynical,
 
39
hardworking, ready to do anything for the paper or news program even if it means giving
up a personal life.”
cxx
Professional and personal reconciliation does occur, adding yet
another layer to “the dichotomy of the female reporter—she is considered an equal by
doing a man’s job, a career woman…arguing toe-to-toe with any male in the shop,
holding her own against everyone and everything,” yet she permits herself to be
vulnerable to a love that changes her priorities and reshapes her definition of success.
Roberts and Adams finally understand that they do not have to sacrifice everything to be
the “only ones.” Even as they burst through the glass ceiling to find they are alone at the
top of their newsroom hierarchies, they are not journeying through life alone.

 
40
Chapter Three Endnotes

ciii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 83
civ
Saltzman, 2002. p. 184-185
cv
Born 1981. p. 14
cvi
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 72
cvii
Ibid. p. 81
cviii
Robinson 2005. p. 87
cix
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 53
cx
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 57
cxi
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. p. 137
cxii
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 63
cxiii
Woods, Wages of Sin, 1994. p. 250
cxiv
Sam to George: “[J]ust because I work my own hours, George, doesn’t mean that you should make
appointments for me!” Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 25
cxv
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars, 1989. p. 38
cxvi
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 38
cxvii
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars, 1989. p. 203
cxviii
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves, 1990. p. 296
cxix
Kitty Lee was Sam Adams’s roommate at Stanford University. Adams meets up with Lee in Now Let’s
Talk of Graves for a Mardi Gras celebration gone wrong. Overall, Lee appears to support Adams’s
demanding journalism career. Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 1990
cxx
Saltzman, 2002. p. 185
 
41
Chapter Four:
Front Page Girls: Attire, Ethics, and Investigation

They offered themselves as mediators between their readers and the city, deliberately
embracing situations in which the female body was likely to be viewed as suspect,
oversexed, out of control.
—-Jean Marie Lutes, Front-page Girls

Despite the heavy influence of romance and mystery genres in each series, a great
deal of time is spent describing Adams and Roberts on the job. Detailed descriptions of
each woman interviewing sources, commuting to and from interviews, or putting in late
hours at home create a foundation upon which each character builds her reputation in
journalism. Newsgathering also becomes the stimulus for most of the major plot events.
Roberts’s and Adams’s love interests come, most often, secondary to their deadlines.
Donna Born writes, “The stories deal primarily with the problems and concerns of their
professions: becoming a journalist, interviewing or investigating and doing the research
for a story, making professional decisions, and reconciling the image of a journalist with
the traditional image of woman.”
cxxi
This chapter analyzes three major aspects of the
characters’ newsgathering process: their attire and how that affects their image; their
methods of newsgathering and ethical violations they make, and, finally, the ways they
integrate and co-op the privileges of two separate professions—reporter and detective.
Attire

Looks should neither attract nor distract. Ideally, a reporter’s appearance should just be
pleasant enough to be disregarded…I have decided to quit apologizing for my looks,
which have played both a positive and negative role in my career. I have my own theory
that attractive people in the industry are considered bad journalists; average looking
reporters are automatically given more credence.
—Jessica Savitch (1982)
cxxii

 
42
In Born’s examination of the image of the female journalist in fiction from 1890
to 1980, she writes:
Evidently women’s dress revealed a great deal about their abilities as
journalists. In the fiction of this period is first seen the problem that
confronts the woman journalist through the fiction from 1890 to the
present day: how does the woman reconcile the demands of her profession
with the demands of the cultural stereotype?
cxxiii

Indeed, a woman of this time was expected to dress according to her femininity, but
journalism’s job requirements are not conducive to this type of attire. Dresses and high-
heeled shoes are not appropriate for hitting the streets, chasing down sources, or being
taken seriously as a female reporter. The goal for the characters that comprise Born’s
analysis was to be sexy, stylish, but still professional all at once. Later, as the women’s
movement introduced more rights and freedoms into the lives of American women, they
began to redefine their closets, thereby influencing dress expectations in the workplace.
Clothing sends a message, and certainly, what a female reporter chooses to wear can
affect a myriad of factors—workplace interactions, first impressions, garnering respect
during interviews with sources, and her reputation within her community. Judgments are
made about a woman’s sexuality, self-confidence, and identity based on attire, which is
why it is important to note that neither Woods nor Shankman place great emphasis on
their character’s outward appearances. But, in the few scenes that do provide descriptions
about their attire, it becomes clear that these women stray from wearing feminine attire
and choose instead, clothes with a masculine twist. For example, when Adams meets her
uncle at her favorite Atlanta bar known for catering to the city’s high-class businessmen
in nice suits, she enters with her own version of the male tuxedo:
 
43
George stared down at Samantha’s bow tie. It was one of those not-quite-
a-tie-not-quite-a-scarf affairs that women dressed for success wear, but a
big green-and-black polka-dot one that was great with her silk blouse,
antique black tuxedo jacket, and a pencil-slim white linen skirt. ‘You look
wonderful, my dear, but what are we going to do with you?’
cxxiv

Her uncle’s bemused reaction to Adams’s outfit symbolizes the very thin line of gendered
power she is walking on. A woman like Adams sees her male-inspired ensemble as a
symbol of success, but, in the male-dominated space, her clothing signals to the bar’s
male patrons that she is a competitor who is not afraid to overstep recognized codes of
conduct assigned to women and to assert herself with power and confidence.
In the bar, Adams’s clothes present her as an equal in what might be an
intimidating space for women. But, in another scene, her attire takes on a completely
different meaning by hyper-sexualizing her body. While having a serious conversation
with her editor, Adams’s silky green blouse takes her editor’s focus off the topic at hand:
TOLIVER: [Y]ou Commie-pinko bra-burning vegetarian lesbian Pravada-
stringer.

ADAMS: I am not a bra-burner.” Hoke leaned forward on his elbows with
a loosey-goosey smile, making her aware that her green silk blouse was
just a little too snug.

TOLIVER: No, you aren’t, are you?
cxxv

Without her masculine attire, Adams’s body becomes a playground for sexual innuendo
and objectification. The dialogue about the cling of her green blouse and the way it hugs
her feminine form opens the door for sexual harassment. Toliver’s “loosey-goosey smile”
not only makes Adams feel uncomfortable about her own body but also gives validity to
the argument that women should embrace a more masculine workplace wardrobe in order
to garner respect and divert attention toward intelligence rather than body parts.
 
44
Adams’s counterpart, Roberts, has a casual wardrobe that fits her down-and-dirty
personality and reporting style, though it does not bode well with newsroom decorum.
When she meets the new female assignment editor, Carol Fields, for the first time,
Roberts’s clothing choices are compared to more conservative, formal, and old-fashioned
rules for work attire. For the first time, readers see Roberts compared to a woman quite
her opposite:
[Amanda] wasn’t sure she could relate to anyone who didn’t have a single
blonde hair out of place and who dressed in an expensive black power suit
and Tiffany-caliber gold jewelry to run a small, previously friendly,
informal magazine newsroom. The assignment editor’s expression as she
surveyed Amanda’s wind-tossed hairstyle, jeans, silk shirt, and blazer
indicated a similar dismay, though obviously for the opposite reason.
cxxvi

After Fields, a former feature writer at another magazine, introduces her to the
magazine’s new dress code, Roberts confronts her about the decision to make “real”
reporters dress in formal attire:
ROBERTS: Tell me, Carol, when was the last time you reported a story?...

FIELDS: I spent ten years as a reporter before becoming an editor…

ROBERTS: Covering what? Police? The courts? Breaking news?
Washington, perhaps? Patches of color flared in the other woman’s
cheeks.

FIELDS: Actually I was in the feature section of a daily paper in
Birmingham.

ROBERTS: Ah, I see. Amanda closed in for the kill. Then most likely you
almost never had to climb over a fence to chase a source or run half a mile
to get away from a crazed murderer, she said. Perhaps in features you
could afford to dress in what you refer to as professional attire. No doubt
the kind of people you interviewed dressed in power suits of their own. I
prefer to dress in clothes that will not impede my progress or intimidate
the daylights out of my sources.
cxxvii

 
45
In this scene, meanings are attached to the clothing, and the women who wear them. For
Roberts, stiff black suits, gold jewelry, and high heels are not sure-fire signs of a good
reporter; she is the antithesis of Fields, donning her silk blouse, blazer, and blue jeans that
help her to be both comfortable and productive. Roberts’s concerns about what
constitutes “professional” attire point to several workplace distinctions between beat
reporters and feature writers, source-conscious versus self-conscious reporters, and
reporters who inherently produce better work because they are not afraid to literally get
dirty on the job.
Perhaps Adams and Roberts might agree with Born’s observation that the way a
woman dresses does reflect on her ability as a journalist, or at least the way she is
perceived in the profession. In both characters’ attempts to negotiate and balance
expectations of female attire with the requirements of newsroom attire, they experience
either sexism or criticism. (It can be argued that both sexism and criticism are ways to try
to force these unruly women back into their place.) If the women wear power suits, they
are either too formal or dressed inappropriately for their reporting style, thereby making
them uncomfortable in the field. On the other hand, more feminine attire distracts from
their reporting and shifts the focus to their sexualized bodies. Adams and Roberts use
clothing protectively, covering themselves from inappropriate glances and comments that
take the focus away from their reporting and put it on their bodies. The clothing described
in these novels is a manifestation of the characters’ desires to strike a balance between
gendered character traits in which these beautiful women balance their striking features
with masculine clothing in order to succeed.

 
46

Ethics

[A]mbitious, ruthless, ice-cold, shrewd, unscrupulous, power hungry, willing to do
anything for a story—but she is also femininely charming, beautiful, manipulative,
calculating, and “well-stacked,” a combination that got her “everywhere.”

—Donna Born, The Image of the Woman Journalist in American Popular Fiction

In order to adequately perform its major duty as a check on powerful institutions
and people, journalism revolves around an axis of ethics. The Society of Professional
Journalists, the nation’s most recognized and respected journalism-related organizations,
has a Code of Ethics that is
voluntarily embraced by thousands of journalists, regardless of place or
platform, and is widely used in newsrooms and classrooms as a guide for
ethical behavior. The code is intended not as a set of "rules" but as a
resource for ethical decision-making. It is not — nor can it be under the
First Amendment — legally enforceable.”
cxxviii

Some of the major ethical tenets covered by SPJ’s Code of Ethics such as seek truth and
report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable
cxxix
are considered in this
analysis. Because Adams and Shankman are fictional characters, they are allowed to
operate by a set of rules that would be deemed inappropriate outside of the reader’s mind.
In fiction, reporters do not have to attain their information ethically, and the fictional
worlds created for these characters thrive on their ethical transgressions to keep interest
piqued, readers on their toes, and the plot advancing. This chapter is divided into three
major subgroups that relate to the characters’ ethical behavior: romancing the source,
misrepresentation, and the reporter-detective conflict.

 
47

Romancing the Source
One of the biggest transgressions a journalist can commit is cultivating
unprofessional relationships, friendships, and romances with sources, and no character is
more guilty of this than Roberts. According to SPJ’s Code of Ethics, journalists should
avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived; remain free of associations
and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility; refuse
gifts, favors, fees, free travel, and special treatment, and shun secondary
employment, political involvement, public office, and service in
community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
cxxx

Remaining completely objective, neutral, and unattached are the easiest ways to keep out
of trouble and uphold a publication’s reputation. There is a sense of accountability that
exists between reporters and editors that is built on trust. This dynamic is expressed in a
short scene in which Roberts’s editor makes sure he and Roberts are on the same page
before she races out the door to cover a murder:
CATES: What is one of the first tenets of good journalism? he asked in a
professional tone…

ROBERTS: Objectivity, she said.

CATES: Objectivity, he repeated, obviously pleased that she recalled the
concept. No preconceived notions. No emotional ties to the story. No
conflict of interest. Right?

ROBERTS: Yes.
cxxxi

Despite her training on “objectivity,” Roberts is accused by both her editor and boyfriend
Joe Donelli of violating ethical codes of conduct by leading her sources on romantically
or with the prospect of friendship in order to get information for a story. When
confronted about the impact this behavior might have on her integrity, Roberts responds,
 
48
“I’ll get cozy with whomever I damn well please.”
cxxxii
She is sassy, defiant, and
defensive in response to having her integrity questioned.
After another interview, Donelli, who is watching from nearby, questions
Roberts’s intentions with her male source: “[Y]ou were supposed to be getting
information, not getting into bed with the guy…” to which Roberts responds that she was
just “Trying to get some answers.”
cxxxiii
Whether Roberts knows she is giving mixed
signals is unclear, but from the perspective of a bystander, Roberts’s behavior is
inappropriate and misleading. Arguably, Roberts knows the consequences of betraying
the public’s trust by forming an inappropriate relationship or leading on a source, but she
defends herself, and her intentions:
When I’m caught up in the story, I damn well care about the people
affected, whether it’s society as a whole or one individual…It’s my way of
fighting injustice and sometimes, I’ll admit, I play dirty. I hope to God you
can live with that, because I don’t think I could ever change.
cxxxiv

In her admission to playing “dirty,” Roberts shows no signs of apology nor does she act
as if her career and reputation are in danger. For Roberts, crossing boundaries of
“acceptable” reporter-source relationships are a part of her job that her employer and
boyfriend will have to accept because she will change for no one.
Misrepresentation and Surreptitious Newsgathering
Misrepresentation and covert newsgathering are two main violations of
journalistic integrity. The SPJ Code of Ethics advises reporters to “Avoid undercover or
other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open
methods will not yield information vital to the public. ”
cxxxv
Yet, both Roberts and Adams
frequently misrepresent themselves to gain insight or information while on the job.
 
49
Roberts, for instance, misrepresents herself on the phone to a source’s secretary
cxxxvi
in
order to get a callback. Adams misrepresents herself to Sheriff Dodd, claiming her name
is Susan Sloan, a married woman looking for a tax auction, in order to get into his office
and investigate the sheriff’s rumored illegal activity.
cxxxvii
On another occasion, Adams
enters a local Atlanta strip club to find out about some of its underage workers. She lies
to the employee about her identity, calling herself Sheryl Bach, an ad representative for
The Peachtree Ad-Visor. She even presents a fake business card.
cxxxviii
Adams also lies to
the mother of a murder suspect to gain access to her home and ask questions. This time,
Adams uses the alias Dana Edwin and goes heavy on the Southern accent to intensify the
deception.
cxxxix

Aside from lying about their true identities to get an angle for a story, Roberts and
Adams also betray their sources’ trust by obtaining information without their knowledge
or consent. Although Roberts claims that she is not a “sneaky reporter”
cxl
and touts her
“journalistic obligation to protect her sources,”
cxli
her actions sometimes prove otherwise.
In one instance, she sneaks into a suspect’s home and slips copies of real estate
documents pertinent to her story into her purse.
cxlii
On another occasion, she uses a credit
card and bobby pins to break into a suspect’s office,
cxliii
and, after finding suspicious
evidence against him, hides a tape recorder in her purse during their next interview.
cxliv

Adams engages in similar behavior by breaking into a suspicious home using her Saks
Fifth Avenue credit card
cxlv
and promising her source a job with the Constitution in return
for a list of possible suspects who run an illegal strip club featuring some of Atlanta’s
most prominent underage debutantes.
cxlvi

Roberts even goes so far as to break and enter in a last-ditch effort to find out
 
50
information. Justifying her actions, she tells her wary secretary that she is not going to
steal things, just “check things out.” Woods writes, “It was a fine distinction, but she
thought a rather important one. She doubted the police would agree.”
cxlvii
Later, when her
editor finds out, Roberts receives a slap on the wrist followed by complete disregard:
CATES: Reporters don’t break and enter. At least my reporters don’t. is
that clear?...So, what’d you find? Amanda bit back a grin. Despite the
dutiful lecture on ethics, Oscar occasionally displayed the sensibilities of
a tabloid journalist who was only one step above digging for clues in
celebrity garbage. If he was aware of the dichotomy, he’d never
acknowledge it.
cxlviii

In truth, neither Roberts nor her editor acknowledges her ethical violations beyond this
point. There is no punishment or any repercussion on Roberts’s career, and this behavior,
which is absolutely not condoned in real newsrooms, is glossed over in a “business as
usual” manner. Rather than being subjected to the laws of the government or the
newsroom, Roberts takes her information and continues on with her front-page article.
The dichotomy of these portrayals—the sneaky, ruthless reporter and the law-abiding,
ethical reporter—constructs images that are empowering and degrading all at once. This
“contradictory portrayal of the journalist as part hero, part scoundrel can be found in
American popular literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,”
cxlix
and is a
definite element in the fiction of Woods and Shankman.
Reporter-Detective Conflict

Let me remind you that I am not a private investigator. I am an investigative reporter.

—Sarah Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers

 
51
Roberts and Adams share one of the most common characterizations of fictional
reporters: the reporter as detective. This characterization has evolved into a popular
image for fictional reporters because
both the journalist and the detective are curious inquirers trying to solve a
mystery, whether it be a crime or a complex, unknown story. They are
both trying to piece together the various aspects of a puzzle, to come up
with a reasonable conclusion as to what happened, where it happened, and
to whom it happened, combined with the more difficult aspects of the
story or case—how it happened and why it happened.
cl

By this description, and by the fiction featuring reporters, it is easy to see how the
two distinct images of reporter and detective have been melded and assimilated into a
single image. Just because this image is popular, however, does not mean that it is not
problematic or accurate. Often, the characters align themselves with the expectations of
each profession without undergoing the required training. What makes this fusion more
fascinating, however, is the natural tension that exists between reporters and detectives
who are often at odds with each other throughout the course of each series.
In one novel, for example, Roberts characterizes the relationship between
reporters and detectives as one of instinctive repulsion: “Detectives and reporters were
natural enemies. She could sense the presence of one the way a deer could sniff the scent
of a hunter.”
cli
At the root of this constant conflict is information and confidentiality. The
reporters fight the detectives, and vice versa, for the information needed to solve the
crime at hand and/or write a hard-hitting investigative story. Often, Adams and Roberts
are shown withholding information from police in order to gain the upper hand in the
tenuous relationship. On the other hand, when Roberts does cooperate with an
investigation, she gets burned:
 
52
DETECTIVE: You’ve already had more access to this investigation than
I’d like. From here on out, you’ll wait for the releases and press
conferences just like the rest of the media. So much for gratitude and
cooperation. She’d turned over all of her information and what did she get
in return? A brush-off.
clii

These incidents further fuel the rivalry between reporters and detectives and make
newsgathering/fact-gathering more of a competition than a public service. But when the
tables are turned and it is the reporter who needs information from authorities,
cooperation is not reciprocated. In a particular scene, Roberts is trying to persuade FBI
agent Jeffrey Dunne to give her a piece of confidential information. He responds,
“[W]hat really irks me, Amanda, is your infantile refusal to admit that some things are
more important than the media’s right to access every piece of information in the
universe on demand.”
cliii

Besides freezing reporters out of investigations, another technique used by
detectives when going head-to-head with journalists is using the power of the law to
intimidate. For example, when Roberts confronts FBI agent Jeffrey Dunne, he threatens
to imprison her:
ROBERTS: I have evidence and, by God, I’ve got brains, which is more
than I can say for you…

DUNNE: Contrary to what you might think, I have all my wits about me. I
am also fully aware of your reputation, Ms. Roberts, and I’d like to offer
you a little piece of advice. Stay out of my investigation or I’ll slap you
behind bars. From what I’ve observed from the journalistic profession,
that might put a slight crimp into your career as well.
cliv

For Roberts, this strategy does not bode well with her sense of entitlement, which often
clouds the realization that she does not have a badge of her own. This interaction affects
Roberts’s further decisions to hand over evidence and leads to the police and is later
 
53
“convinced that it would be her duty to carry the investigation to its logical conclusion
before turning the evidence over to the authorities.”
clv
This type of above-the-law activity
becomes commonplace throughout each work.
Ironically, Roberts and Adams are often misconstrued as detectives while out in
the field. The community sees these women as “crimebusters” and “crusaders,” but they
are rarely depicted as “scandalmongers,” a title left for the law enforcement figures (often
portrayed as corrupt, bigoted, and sexist) in each novel. To their own dismay, Roberts
and Adams are asked to hold the law accountable while temporarily becoming the law,
thereby making them a professional and ethical paradox.
clvi
Such stark contradictions
between reporters and detectives create a problem for these reporters who are expected
by their fellow citizens to act as both reporters and police detectives/private eyes.
Certainly, “dividing reporters into crimebusters or crusaders or scandalmongers creates a
whole host of problems because often they are the same journalist being all three.”
clvii

Roberts’s and Adams’s reputations as investigative reporters create unrealistic
expectations from the public they serve. In Roberts’s case, two of the novels revolve
around an elderly character named Miss Ellie Mae Taylor and her unique relationship
with Roberts. As a wealthy, prominent member of Atlanta’s high society, Miss Taylor
hires Roberts to investigate personal crimes committed against her and her circle of
friends. Not only does Roberts become a mouthpiece for a private citizen, she also has to
combat Miss Taylor’s expectations that she will always solve the case, stop the murderer
in his tracks, or help police imprison the criminal. In one scene, Miss Taylor calls Roberts
before dawn and demands that she come over to her home to proceed with the
investigation:
 
54
ROBERTS: I am not a private eye.

MISS TAYLOR: You are an investigative reporter, aren’t you? If I called
those TV reporters on ‘60 Minutes,’ they’d get here quick enough.
clviii

Frustrated by Miss Taylor’s continued unrealistic expectations, Roberts realizes that Miss
Taylor does not “fully understand the fine distinctions between the two occupations”
clix

while admitting that she is not the “journalistic equivalent of Sherlock Holmes.”
clx

Despite their resistance to being categorized as detectives, both Roberts and
Adams exert detective-like abilities and knowledge. They both know their way around
the law—and its loopholes—and also know how to follow it. Roberts even attended law
school so that she could “go after the big guys, too.” She says, “I just wanted to nail them
in print with enough evidence that no court could overlook it. I figured it would help if I
understood all the rules.”
clxi
Both Roberts’s and Adams’s higher education and on-the-job
training have familiarized them with local and federal laws—for example, laws
surrounding public and private records—and protocols that might trip up other reporters.
Adams and Roberts, through their simultaneous rejection and acceptance of their
role as reporter-detectives, adopt traits that “conflict with the contemporary cultural
attitudes of women as projected in the mass media, which portrays women to be passive,
incompetent, frivolous and dependent on men for their self-fulfillment.”
clxii
Roberts and
Adams do not need men (read: the real detectives in the novels) because they have all the
tools the need to solve the case already, sans the badge. They navigate their femininity
and their press passes in a professional gray zone that posits them as neither a whole
reporter nor a whole detective, but rather a distorted hybrid of them both.

 
55
Chapter Four Endnotes

cxxi
Born 1981. p. 7
cxxii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 58
cxxiii
Born 1981. p. 8
cxxiv
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 50
cxxv
Ibid. p. 3
cxxvi
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 63
cxxvii
Ibid. p. 65-66
cxxviii
Society of Professional Journalists, 1996
cxxix
Ibid.
cxxx
Ibid.
cxxxi
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. pp. 183-84
cxxxii
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 123
cxxxiii
Ibid. p. 138
cxxxiv
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 72
cxxxv
Society of Professional Journalists, 1996.
cxxxvi
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 186
cxxxvii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 165
cxxxviii
Ibid. p. 46
cxxxix
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 87
cxl
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 7
cxli
Ibid. p. 18
cxlii
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 212
cxliii
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 275-276
cxliv
Ibid. p. 297
cxlv
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 149
cxlvi
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 118
cxlvii
Woods, Bank On It, 1993. p. 57
 
56

cxlviii
Woods, Bank On It, 1993. p. 57
cxlix
Saltzman 2002. p. 177
cl
Ibid. p. 181
cli
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 14
clii
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 223
cliii
Woods, Hide and Seek, 1993. pp. 49-50
cliv
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. pp. 113-14
clv
Woods, Reckless 1989. p. 146
clvi
“Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived; remain free of associations and activities that may
compromise integrity or damage credibility.” Society of Professional Journalists, 1996.

clvii
Saltzman 2002. p. 181
clviii
Woods, Stolen Moments 1990. p. 45
clix
Ibid. p. 130
clx
Ibid. p. 131
clxi
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. p. 121
clxii
Born 1981. p. 26
 
57
Chapter Five:
Publicity from Publication: Public Voices, Public Bodies

Women reporters were called upon to mediate a violent, contradictory narrative, and
their bodies, along with their words, helped to serve their ends.

—Jean Marie Lutes, Front-page Girls

One distinctive quality that separates female journalists from their male
counterparts is the integration of their physical bodies and the news they report. Female
journalists like Roberts and Adams find that “they are not only deliverers but objects of
news.”
clxiii
The fact that they are women in off-limits public spaces makes them
newsworthy because they represent an evolution in the representation and distribution of
news. In a social system that associates serious news coverage—murder, robbery,
business, war coverage, and high society scandal—with male journalists, Roberts’s and
Adams’s success and notoriety on male-dominated beats makes them an anomaly and a
source of publicity for their media companies. This chapter examines the ways in which
Roberts and Adams are forced to become public along with their stories. To succeed, they
must make a name for their publications and for themselves, subjecting themselves to
public scrutiny and celebrity status in the process.
While the characters sometimes face publicity that derives from their beauty,
clxiv

there are many circumstances where they become known because of their participation in
the news. Like the stunt reporters of the past, Roberts and Adams play a part in the news
in order to successfully gather it.
For men, participatory journalism was a choice; for women, it was one of
the few ways to break out of the women’s pages. Even women writers
who avoided stunts and covered unstaged ‘hard’ news, such as murders,
fires, train wrecks, and political conflicts, often found themselves in the
spotlight.
clxv

 
58

While the news they cover is unstaged, both Roberts and Adams become actors and
participants in the action leading up to the printed feature. The choice to either be
involved with the news or to be a third-party observer and reporter of the news does not
exist for these women. These female reporters enter the news “to ease the uncertainty and
alienation of urban life by using their bodies as conduits for the news, projecting
themselves into their stories and thus into their readers’ lives.”
clxvi
Because the news they
report comes from women the public trusts and knows, both the characters and their
articles are deemed newsworthy.
Another area of publicity found in each series arises from the characters’
reputations. Roberts is often referred to as a “maverick reporter,”
clxvii
while Adams comes
to be known as a “renowned girl reporter.”
clxviii
The women move through their
communities as public figures who have no anonymity because of their bylines and their
beauty.
clxix
“[N]o matter how ‘straight’ their news, how ‘rigid and conservative’ their
style, and how much ‘dignity and honor’ they invested in their stories, they [can]not
achieve the disembodied anonymity of the objective journalist.”
clxx
These women do not
even have to introduce themselves to strangers because everyone already knows who they
are, who they work for, and the successes of their past. For example, when Adams
attends a party and introduces herself to the hostess, she receives this response: “Why,
everybody knows you. What with the fantastic work you’ve done in the past year, there’s
never going to be any hiding your light under a bushel. My dear, you’re a star!”
clxxi

As an “emblem of publicity,” Adams and other female reporters are “identified
with and through the process of making public their images and words. They [function]
 
59
as both agents and pawns in this process.”
clxxii
In turn, they model “a new kind of
authorship for their readers...They [advance] a model of the woman writer as
unapologetically, even triumphantly embodied, a writer whose physical presence at an
event [becomes] an integral part of the news, a writer who [is] on display first when she
[is] gathering the news and again in the text of her reports.”
clxxiii
This emboldened style of
reporting not only publicizes the female reporter’s physical body, but also the news outlet
for which she works. To earn publicity, Roberts and Adams must make their presence
known at grisly murder scenes thought to be out of the league of female reporters and
then write an unmatchable breaking story. The sacrifice for bearing this type of news,
however, is submitting their bodies to the public gaze as “They confront the corruption
themselves, resist it, and maintain both physical and psychological integrity.”
clxxiv

 
60
Chapter Five Endnotes

clxiii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 3
clxiv
Roberts signs up for a cooking class in order to interview Jean-Claude, a French chef and potential
source. Although she tries to remain anonymous, Jean-Claude recognizes her immediately, saying: “You
are a beautiful woman, mademoiselle. How could one possibly forget such a face?” Roberts’s beauty (and
body) beat her to every interaction and location, thanks to her publicity as a successful female journalist in
a small-town atmosphere that notices the sudden appearance of a beautiful woman.

clxv
Lutes 2006. p. 2
clxvi
Ibid. p. 6
clxvii
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 60
clxviii
Shankman, First Kill All the Lawyers 1988. p. 31
clxix
“Sometimes journalists rather than remaining impartial, colorless, factual transmitters of news, become
celebrities themselves.” Abramson, 1990. p. 1
clxx
Lutes 2006. p. 42
clxxi
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars 1989. p. 27
clxxii
Lutes 2006. p. 6
clxxiii
Ibid. p. 7
clxxiv
Ibid. p. 36
 
61
Chapter Six:
Caught Between Love and a Hard Place

The independent sob sister gets what she secretly pines for…the love of an honest man.

—Joe Saltzman, Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film

No reporter-fiction is complete without a bit of romance, and authors Woods and
Shankman do not disappoint readers. Soft embraces, passionate kisses, and steamy love
scenes surface in the texts at one time or another; but, rather than turning these scenes
into bawdy affairs, they force the characters to examine the work-home balance in their
lives as they settle into monogamous relationships with men they love.
Roberts’s husband, Joe Donelli, proves to be a constant and protective presence
during her investigations. A former detective himself, Donelli knows the dangers of
criminal investigations and tries hard to be her knight-in-shining-armor in times of need.
While he respects Roberts’s love for her career, he spends much of his time begging her
to be more cautious:
[Donelli] tolerated her chosen career for her sake, but he’d made it clear
on more than one occasion that he would prefer it if she took up knitting
instead…Actually, she supposed it was not her occupation Donelli
objected to so much as the way she went about it. She tended to plunge in
the middle of things regardless of the danger. It made for great copy, but it
had also resulted in a few hair-raising incidents…
clxxv

Donelli worries about Roberts’s tendency to put herself in danger and serves as her moral
compass when she would rather be a rogue reporter. Donelli even befriends Roberts’s
editor, Oscar Cates, and tries to sway him to give his best reporter safer stories to pursue.
Eventually, Donelli and Cates form a close friendship that revolves around their team
effort to keep Roberts between the lines. When Roberts poses a story topic that could
involve potential danger, Cates asks, “What does Donelli say?” to which Roberts decries,
 
62
“Joe Donelli does not put his foot down where my career is concerned.”
clxxvi
Despite her
deep commitment to Donelli, Roberts proclaims that her love life and work life will not
mix under any circumstances. Struggling to keep her mind and heart separate, Woods
writes, “Donelli might possess a chunk of her heart, but he’d never control her actions.
Intellectually he understood that. But it still grated on his macho streak.”
clxxvii
And even
when reporting on a story threatens her life and Donelli’s manhood, Roberts will not let
her husband interfere with her career. She pleads, “I know why you want me to stop, but
I can’t. Please, Joe, don’t make me choose between my career and pleasing you.”
clxxviii

Roberts’s last statement isolates a major concern that many working wives and
mothers voice when trying to balance their time, energy, and resources between the
public and private spheres. While many women, like Roberts, finds productive ways to
manage success in the workplace and in their relationships, Adams is an example of a
woman who gives up her career to further pursue a romantic relationship. When she
meets up with her boyfriend Harry Zack in New Orleans, she decides on a whim to quit
her job at the Atlanta paper to move to Louisiana with him. In her words, “She was out of
here. Love was short. Life was long. She was gone.”
clxxix
The series ends with Adams’s
resignation.
Scorning the Traditional: Marriage and Motherhood
While both Adams and Roberts crave love and affection and give way to
monogamous relationships, they both scorn the idea of motherhood. Neither views
herself as a “domestic” woman, and time is dedicated to the persistent thought each
character has that reminds them that they are not motherhood “material.” For example,
when Adams is on the phone with Harry, she warns him: “you’d better give some serious
 
63
thought to hooking up with a woman ten years your elder, especially one who had
skipped the line where they were handing out the mommy genes.”
clxxx
Her comment
implies a few things: (1) that all men want a woman who wants to become a mother; (2)
that maternal instincts are genetic; (3) that women who choose not to become a mother
are somehow going against nature.
Roberts, like Adams, never warms up to the idea of motherhood until a positive
pregnancy test rocks her world. Just settling into her marriage with Donelli, Roberts is
finally proud of her “new domestication,” even though she is in constant fear of failing.
But when she finds out that she is pregnant (surprise!), Roberts goes from being confused
and upset by her carelessness (“I’m an intelligent woman. I have a college degree, plus a
law degree. You’d think I could do something as simple as protecting myself from
pregnancy.”
clxxxi
) to proactive:
All at once her journalistic training kicked in, her compulsive need for
information went into overdrive. She needed books on pregnancy, books
on parenting. A few days of research in a library wouldn’t hurt either. She
could track down articles on the latest information that had been published
in mass-market magazines and medical journals. She might be scared to
death, but she would be the best-informed mother-to-be in Georgia.
clxxxii

Even though her pregnancy poses immediate repercussions to her cherished career and
the ways she can safely navigate such a crime-ridden, dangerous beat, Roberts resigns
herself to making the best of the situation. Preparing for pregnancy through research and
a bit of type A personality, Roberts realizes that to her amazement, “she was no longer
fearful of becoming a parent, something that had terrified her only a few weeks
earlier.”
clxxxiii
While the readers are introduced to Roberts’s daughter, Martha Elisa
Donelli, at the very end of the last novel, they never get to see her navigate her personal
 
64
and professional duties as mother and reporter. Readers must take Roberts’s word that her
career will not take a backseat to her newborn. She says, “Okay, here’s the deal. I am not
going to stop asking questions. I am not going to quit my job. I’m not going to take an
early maternity leave…That’s final.”
clxxxiv

The rejection of marriage and maternity found in these novels signifies a change
in mentality set into motion by the Second Wave feminist movement. Refusing to
sacrifice themselves or their beloved careers for what is expected of them, Roberts and
Adams take a post-feminist stance by choosing to do what is right for them even though it
places them at odds with hegemonic standards of femininity. When Roberts discovers she
is pregnant, her first reaction is fear and regret, not uncommon among women who find
their pregnancies ill timed. Debunking the myth that you must choose either a career or
motherhood, Woods uses Roberts’s character to show readers what it is like to have to
work hard to gain that maternal instinct (in this case, a lot of research and a day or two in
the library). Marital and maternal instincts, actions, and feelings do not simply fall into
place for Roberts upon marriage; instead, she must make reasonable sacrifices to balance
her two loves—journalism and her life with Donelli.
Lastly, these two women represent the paradox female reporters must become in
order to take an active role in both private and public spheres. They become vulnerable to
the men in their lives and offer themselves as a sacrifice for intimacy and anonymity, a
status they cannot achieve through their career. While on the job, they distance
themselves from romance, which they see as a distraction or threat to their success in
journalism. To navigate between these two worlds is a difficult task and a personal
choice.
 
65
Chapter Six Endnotes

clxxv
Woods, Body and Soul, 1989. p. 11
clxxvi
Ibid. pp. 23-24
clxxvii
Ibid. p. 12
clxxviii
Ibid. p. 196
clxxix
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars, 1989. p. 33
clxxx
Shankman, She Walks in Beauty, 1991. p. 4
clxxxi
Woods, White Lightning 1995. p. 97
clxxxii
Ibid. p. 120
clxxxiii
Ibid. p. 208
clxxxiv
Ibid. p. 225
 
66

Chapter Seven:
Impossible Women in an Impossible South

Perception of the reality of both the past and the present is greatly determined for most
people by the myths which become part of their lives.

—Paul Gaston, The New South Creed
The novels’ Atlanta setting offers a site for intertextual comparison as well as for
problematizing the gendered and racial outcomes that come with using the Deep South as
the backdrop for the characters’ journalistic escapades. Although rich in a long history of
racism and sexism, Atlanta, and its surrounding areas, has also been assembled from the
mythologies of the Old South and the New South, and these mythologies construct the
worlds through which the main characters must traverse.
The Old South “has been one of the most powerful and enduring of American
myths” because “it offer[s] an explanatory rationale to maintain the collective ego”
whose lifeblood flowed through slavery, white (male) supremacy, and the glorification of
white womanhood.
clxxxv
Authors like Margaret Mitchell
clxxxvi
helped transform the
fictional setting of Gone With the Wind into a valid perception, revealing the alleged
truths of Southern life:
Increasingly, he [the Southerner] came to visualize the old regime as a
society dominated by a beneficient plantation tradition, sustained by a
unique code of honor, and peopled by happy, amusing slaves at one of the
social spectrum and beautiful maidens and chivalric gentlemen at the other
end—with little in between.
clxxxvii

But as Northern abolitionists began to threaten the morality of slavery and the plantation
system, the leaders of the New South attempted to reconfigure the South’s image as an
industrial force. As a result, spokesmen like Henry Grady—who was the managing editor
 
67
of the Atlanta Constitution during this time—“used his office and influence to promote a
New South program of northern investment, southern industrial growth, diversified
farming, and white supremacy.”
clxxxviii
Men like Grady,
expressed reverence for the civilization that had existed in the South, but
conceded that it had passed irrevocably into history, had become an ‘Old
South’ that must now be superseded by a new order. In time, the words
‘New South’ became the symbol that expressed this passage from one
kind of civilization to another.
clxxxix

Indeed, the New South did signify the rise of a new civilization that, despite its new
dreams and rhetoric of change, continued to thrive off white supremacy (in the form of
Jim Crow) and chauvinism disguised with manners. Both the Old South and New South
became, in time, “genuine social myths with a controlling power over the way in which
their believers perceived reality.”
cxc
With New South ideals in full force,
cxci
Southerners
perpetuated mythology to “perform something closely akin to the function of religion—to
unify experience.”
cxcii

The irony behind the works of Woods and Shankman inserts itself as a break
between the realities and fantasies of the New South mythology. In the novels, Adams
and Roberts navigate between the New South (the cities where their newsrooms are
located) and the Old South (the small towns outside the city where they travel to
interview their sources and solve crime). In their newsrooms, products of the New South,
Adams and Roberts are white women who have risen to the top of a competitive
journalism market. They possess power, money, and positioning within society at large.
They are Third Wave feminists who are empowered through their body and refusals of
marriage and motherhood (until they finally give in). Yet, when they travel to the
outskirts of the city, Adams and Roberts are seen as unruly and out of line. Their higher
 
68
education and extensive resumes offer an untraditional image of Southern womanhood
that threatens the men they encounter and, as a result, their lives. The Old South that both
Adams and Roberts experience while reporting shows an absence of strong women like
themselves and also makes people of color invisible—the very group that the foundation
of the Old South was built upon. These portrayals facilitate convenient erasures of
hegemonic power structures—structures that would, in fact, disallow the very existence
of women like Adams and Roberts—and eliminate nonwhite characters from a racialized
landscape. In this chapter, these invisibilities will be put into conversation with ideas
about how the progressive byproduct of the New South’s existence has, indeed, created a
color-blind racism that is evident in the lives of Adams and Roberts and also creates a
racial structure that reinforces white privilege.
Resisting Southern Mythologies of Womanhood
Adams and Roberts latch onto the progressive mentality they have acquired in
both their schooling and their work in large journalism markets like New York (Roberts)
and California (Adams). Roberts, who is not originally from the South, resists the
Southern belle mythology at every opportunity. She fears one day “[waking] up a bona
fide Southerner,” which would “break her Yankee heart.”
cxciii
Most novels mention
Roberts’s desire to flee northward and take a position of prominence at a big-city paper.
She does not want to establish a career in the South, which, for Roberts, would feel like
settling for something less than her abilities. Yet, in the end, it is love that keeps her in
Georgia and makes her content with life in the Deep South. Adams, on the other hand,
was born to parents who were influential in Atlanta’s high society. Despite her roots in
Atlanta, however, Shankman makes it clear from very early on that Adams is a
 
69
progressive woman who declines her debutante ball, refuses admission to the Junior
League, and does not pick up her “membership in the other societies to which her
accident of birth entitled her.”
cxciv
Although she has been raised to be “a Southern lady, to
be polite,”
cxcv
Adams bucks traditional stereotypes of Southern womanhood, especially
the notion that women should be meek and mild. In a conversation with her uncle
George, Adams expresses her disinterest in hiding her opinions:
Have you ever listened to the way Southern women talk?... Ending every
sentence like a question because they don’t even feel they have the right to
make a declarative statement. Wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful of
it…they know their husbands are running around on them, they know their
children are doing drugs, they just keep on pouring tea and baking cookies
and smiling. Dressing in fresh lacy underwear and smiling.
cxcvi

Here, Adams evokes Old South notions of womanhood and pits herself starkly against
them. Adams recognizes that one of the reasons she left Atlanta is because women need a
“passport” to society’s upper crust,
cxcvii
a passport she was born with but disregarded out
of principle. She also makes it clear that she does not fit into the role of the unassuming,
self-degrading, lace-wearing, tea pouring “lady.” Later, however, Adams realizes that the
South runs through her blood, no matter how strong her previous disavowals. Shankman
writes,
No matter that Sam had chosen to skip her debut in Atlanta, that she had
lived for many years in California, or that she had a liberal education and
an even more leftish turn of mind. Once a belle, always a belle with those
Deep South sensibilities—even if they were well-hidden most of the
time.
cxcviii

Perhaps the “sensibilities” Adams refers to here are not as textually well hidden as she
(and Shankman) suggest. Adams and Roberts, who both claim to be progressive,
 
70
forward-thinking women, live self-segregated lives in a racially diverse New South.
These contradictions between beliefs and actions are questioned in the following section.
Building Impossibilites: Color-Blind Racism in a Raceless South
As evidenced in both Woods’s and Shankman’s novels, Old South racist
sensibilities are ever-present, even if invisible to the main characters and their immediate
relationships. In Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind
Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, he posits a color-
blind racist ideology “which acquired cohesiveness and dominance in the late 1960s” and
that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics.”
cxcix

As Bonilla-Silva writes, there is a “contradiction between whites claiming to be color
blind and their almost totally white pattern of social interaction.”
cc
In these novels, color-
blind racism is housed in the bodies of “progressive” female journalists who travel
through impossibly raceless Old and New Souths and also exists in the authors’ rendering
people of color invisible. Not a single nonwhite character is given prominence in either
the characters’ workplace or personal lives. This utter absence of diversity validates the
presence of Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind race theory in both series.
From a close textual analysis, readers can find problems in the claim that the
characters are liberal in a post-racial Southern city. Indeed, there is much evidence that
remnants of the Old South still linger in the city’s resistance to change. For example,
Shankman makes repeated references to the South’s opposition to both large and small-
scale changes in mentality despite the large shift in demographic. She writes,
[T]he Varsity still made chili dogs. Manners still counted. And the
television preachers still had an audience, as did the fulminating racists—
 
71
in a town that was now sixty percent black and well into its second black
mayor. Ah, Atlanta.
cci

In a large city largely comprised of African-Americans, it is shocking to see that no one
in Adams’s inner circle, none of her colleagues, and not one of her interview subjects is a
person of color. The only African-American Adams encounters is an out-of-town friend
of her boyfriend, an associate rather someone with whom she has a personal friendship or
relationship. Nonetheless, Adams still considers herself extremely liberal. The same is
true for Roberts, who never interacts with any person of minority status—black, Latino,
Asian, gay, etc. The characters’ self-pronounced “progressive” mentality can be
interrogated using color-blind race theory in order to query why race is minimized in
these novels. Bonilla-Silva writes,
[W]hites, despite their professed color blindness, live in white
neighborhoods, associate primarily with whites, befriend mostly whites,
and choose whites as their mates. The contradiction between their
professed life philosophy and their real practice in life is not perceived by
whites as such because they do not interpret their hypersegregation and
isolation from minorities (in particular blacks) as a racial outcome.
ccii

Rather than being a racial outcome, as Bonilla-Silva notes, whites see self-segregation as
“natural” or biological, as a process of choice and preference rather than actions with
racist meaning behind them. Roberts admits that as a girl “Growing up in a well-
educated, politically liberal family that was virtually blind to racial and ethnic
distinctions, she’s never understood the deep-seated biases that moved others to hatred
and random violence, often directed toward individuals whom they’d never met in
person.”
cciii
But she enacts a certain nonviolent violence on the people of color she
encounters by not actively engaging with them; and Woods and Shankman do minorities
an active disservice by excluding them from novels where they should be present in large
 
72
numbers. This complete lack of minority presence slowly begins to pull apart the authors’
constructions of Adams and Roberts as progressive women and, instead, replaces them
with perpetuations of sanitized white hegemony.
In both series, Woods and Shankman create characters imbued with a political
agency that is marked by a disavowal of wealth and social privilege and the claim of
being “urban.” But, these renunciations reinscribe black invisibility and claims that these
women’s privilege is simply an “accident of birth” rather than an achieved lifestyle
through self-segregation. Woods and Shankman compile images that form a utopian
construction of the world, a place where “color” does not exist. This social imaginary,
however, privileges whiteness and reinforces a racist social structure not too far departed
from Old South ideologies. Perhaps the Old South mythology still lives on in these
novels because “The idea of the South—a particular idea of the South—has been a potent
image for both Southerners and non-Southerners, and it has been difficult to overcome,
even by those who made an effort to do so.”
cciv
In the authors’ attempts to present readers
with women who are able to rise to power in the New South while conquering Old South
ideologies, they implicitly code color-blind racism into their texts. The Southern belle
mythology is championed at the expense of diversity. If novels such as these are to be
symbols of progress, “whiteness must be challenged wherever it exists.”
ccv

 
73
Chapter Seven Endnotes

clxxxv
Smith, 1985. p. 18
clxxxvi
“Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was written to provide a new interpretation of Southern
culture from a somewhat irreverent Southern journalist.” Ibid. p. 44
clxxxvii
Gaston, 1970. p. 28
clxxxviii
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2451
clxxxix
Gaston, 1970. pp. 25-26
cxc
Ibid. p. 28
cxci
The discourse of a “New South” was introduced by Henry Grady, who was “invited to speak at the
1886 meeting of the New England Society in New York City.”
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2451
cxcii
Gaston, 1970. p. 29
cxciii
Woods, Deadly Obsession, 1995. p. 112
cxciv
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves, 1990. p. 45
cxcv
Ibid. p. 80
cxcvi
Shankman, Then Hang All the Liars, 1989. p. 178
cxcvii
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves, 1990. p. 56
cxcviii
Ibid. p. 15
cxcix
Bonilla-Silva, 2003. p. 2
cc
Ibid. p. 179
cci
Shankman, Now Let's Talk of Graves, 1990. pp. 30-31
ccii
Bonilla-Silva, 2003. p. 179
cciii
Woods, Ties That Bind, 1991. p. 147
cciv
Smith, 1985. p. 44
ccv
Bonilla-Silva, 2003. p. 184
 
74
Conclusion

Feminism was made possible by the silent seepage of images of public life into the
private, a process that began with the growth of literacy and mass culture. Feminist
politics have always been intimately concerned with connecting up these worlds.

—Catharine Lumby, Bad Girls: The media, sex & feminism in the 90s

The previous chapters are a compilation of positive and negative images of the
female journalist in fiction. At times, these images fall into cultural stereotypes and, at
others, buck traditional norms of femininity and strive to use Roberts and Adams to
redefine the image of the modern, working journalist. Falling in and out of the sob sister,
stunt reporter, victim, and “one of the boys” stereotypes, these women exemplify the
ways that
Gender is consequently ‘constructed’ in relation to a particular place and
time and more importantly in relation to the existing power relations of the
culture in question, as well as the gendered experiences one has over one’s
lifetime.
ccvi

Despite their time, place, past experiences, and gender, both Adams and Roberts
enter the field of journalism for the same reasons as their male counterparts: “because, at
bottom, it [is] considered a noble and influential profession.”
ccvii
Their motivations
behind writing stories are never doubted. They never ask for their celebrity status; rather,
it befalls them as a result of their meaningful articles and unusual rise to the top of a
male-dominated field. As reporters, they are relentless, committed, considerate, and truth-
seeking no matter the cost. Yet, like their real-life counterparts, Adams and Roberts
struggle to be taken seriously as professional journalists
ccviii
and battle to keep their
personal and professional lives in balance.
 
75
Though these characters only exist in fiction, their journalistic work within each
series of novels has an influence on real-world perceptions of female reporters. The mere
existence of fictional novels starring female reporters as their protagonists demonstrates
the progress achieved by the women’s movement over the past few decades. Fully
removed from the responsibilities and obligations to the private sphere, Adams and
Roberts become prominent members of public discourse and, through this departure,
develop a space for real women to think about themselves within the context of the media
world. In these novels, women can be reporters (or celebrities), mothers (or motherhood’s
antithesis), wives (or singles), girlfriends (or lovers), and uncommitted to men (but not
their work) in a space and time that refused these roles before. For these reasons, the
image of the female journalist in the fiction of Woods and Shankman establishes and
builds upon new understandings of womanhood in the real media world while
establishing that a change has undeniably taken place.
Despite taking a major step toward a fuller definition of womanhood, Woods and
Shankman diminish the capacity for total change by subjecting their characters to old,
harmful stereotypes and by constructing a raceless South as the backdrop for these
women’s lives. There is still great emphasis placed on the characters’ bodies, their
romantic relationships with men, and their sexuality, thereby re-creating long-standing
oppressions. The setting serves as a constant trap, reminding the characters of their daily
transgressions of the category “woman.” Vascillating between the Old South and New
South, Roberts and Adams must be two women at once in order to survive the
expectations of each world—traditional and decorous in one, freethinking and self-
sufficient in the other. However, they never have to be conscious of race, and these
 
76
whitewashed novels set the stage for hegemony to resurface and present itself as a
“progressive” post-race Atlanta—an impossibility.
Both women experience a double reading on their bodies—that of their fellow
characters in the novel and that of the reader. In essence, these women become both the
subject of the reader’s attention and an actor in the fictional world they populate.
ccix

There is invested meaning onto “the female body as a source of both the real and the
unreal, authenticity and artifice…even as they [acknowledge] the disturbing ways in
which mass-market consumerism and media technologies [are] redefining those
bodies.”
ccx

Found at a difficult crossroads of representation, Adams and Roberts join the
ranks of “Women journalists [who] face the problem they have always faced: how to
avoid collaboration in the promotion of an ideology that is not useful to the readers they
serve.”
ccxi
Among the most detrimental images are the inauthentic portrayals of women’s
power within the newsroom. Adams and Roberts possess the complete freedom to pick
their own beats (even if it means disobeying their editors’ directions), choose the hours
they work (which means rarely spending time in the newsroom), skipping the workplace
chain of command (which comes at the expense of making friends), and, in the process,
achieving great success, salary, and notoriety within the profession and community
(which, at its heart, is very unrealistic). These unrealistic depictions of these women’s
power and position within the newsroom, and the subject matters they write about, ignore
journalism’s history of burying women in the “women’s pages.” In real newsrooms
across the country during the 1960s and 1970s, there existed “distinctive male and female
ghettos of employment” that discouraged women from entering “the hard news arena or
 
77
from progressing within it, through lack of promotion prospects for women.”
ccxii
And
while women in the 1980s and 1990s were still striving to overcome these barriers, this
reality does not exist in the novels. The characters experience little adversity in their rise
to the top, and their positions of power bear little resemblance to the real world. The
likelihood of a female journalist exerting full autonomy over her career and skipping the
newsroom hierarchy altogether is, aside from the depiction of a raceless South, another
impossibility.
What can be learned from these portraits of female journalists is complicated. The
fictional female reporter is “A peculiar balance of vulnerability and courage…If the
reporter-heroine is often laughed at, she is also memorable and powerful. Self-sufficient
and fun-loving, she offers an appealing blend of sentimental realism; she is modern
without being too modern.
ccxiii
Indeed, what exists within her most is a paradox, a site of
the collision between old values and new expectations. Men see within her a compilation
of masculine qualities—determination, curiosity, aggressive reporting, success and
frequent publication on hard news beats—housed in a quintessential feminine form.
Unsurprisingly, it is the characters’ “male characteristics that allow them success within
the male profession [that] often deny them happiness as a woman”
ccxiv
on a personal or
professional level.
Perhaps fiction beyond the twentieth century will continue to explore the images
and representations of female journalists found in popular novels and begin to fill in the
gaps between fiction and the expectations of a much harsher real world. The truth behind
these fictional images lies in the reality from which these images are created, circulated,
and accepted among real women in real working environments. As employment barriers
 
78
slowly break down and more women rise to positions of power within the media industry,
perhaps they will have the authority to “prevent stereotyping, foster new thinking about
definitions of newsworthiness, and ensure balance in coverage—in terms of issues
covered and points of view included.”
ccxv
Until women are able to reach such a critical
mass, the reporter-heroines created by Woods and Shankman “may have smoothed the
way by making it easier for readers to imagine women writing in the public sphere.”
ccxvi

Overall, the novels show readers what women must give up to be successful, what
types of happiness must be sacrificed, and, by default, which types of women would be
excluded from the version of journalism depicted by the authors. Adams and Roberts are
exemplary women with impressive educational backgrounds, aggressive reporting styles,
and a tireless presence in the newsroom. If readers gain nothing else from a close
appraisal, it is the notion that journalism is still an elite profession, filled exclusively with
overachieving women who, at the end of the day, can still have it all and be at all, despite
their resistance.
To say that Adams and Roberts are merely images of real female reporters is to
undermine the power and authority an image can possess in both its production and
consumption. As readers in a consumerist culture, “We consume images. And images are
what the media is made of.”
ccxvii
In the process of watching news programming, reading a
newspaper or magazine, or even picking up a paperback novel, “All of us have learnt to
consume ourselves.”
ccxviii
Within the images are pieces of real women and real
journalists whose existence has been interwoven into fictional accounts like those of
Woods and Shankman. Both the authors and their readers are implicated in the future of
 
79
these images—in their re-creation, their successes and failures in popular culture, and
their impact on women’s views of the profession of journalism and their place within it.

 
80
Conclusion Endnotes

ccvi
Robinson 2005. p. 9
ccvii
Bradley and Collins 2005. p. 267
ccviii
“Over history, then, women have struggled to be taken seriously as professional journalists.”
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 232
ccix
“[T]he representation of women in news and other fact-based media presents a complex and mixed
picture of women as subjects and actors in society.” Byerly and Ross 2006.. p. 37
ccx
Lutes 2006. p. 120
ccxi
Bradley and Collins 2005. p. 263
ccxii
Chambers, Steiner and Fleming 2004. p. 92
ccxiii
Lutes 2006. p. 103
ccxiv
Born 1981. p. 10
ccxv
Beasley & Gibbons, 1993. p. 267
ccxvi
Lutes 2006. p. 118
ccxvii
Lumby 1997. p. 79
ccxviii
Ibid. p. 81

 
81
Bibliography
Abramson, Phyllis Leslie. Sob Sister Journalism. New York, NY: Greenwood Press,
1990.
Arliss, Laurie P. Gender Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1991.
Beasley, Maurine H., and Sheila J. Gibbons. Taking Their Place: A Documentary History
of Women and Journalism. Washington , D.C.: The American University Press, 1993.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence
of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 2003.
Born, Donna. "The Image of the Woman Journalist in American Popular Fiction: 1890 to
the Present." Department of Journalism, Central Michigan University, 1981.
Boylan, James. "Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality." Columbia Journalism
Review 45, no. 1 (May/June 2006).
Bradley, Patricia, and Gail Collins. "Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality." In
Visions of the American Press, edited by David Abrahamson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2005.
Byerly, Carolyn M., and Karen Ross. Women & Media: A Critical Introduction. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1941.
Chambers, Deborah, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming. Women and Journalism.
London: Routledge, 2004.
Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. Montgomery:
NewSouth Books, 1970.
Harp, Dustin. Desperately Seeking Women Readers: U.S. Newspapers and the
Construction of a Female Readership. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.
Lumby, Catharine. Bad Girls: The Media, Sex & Feminism in the 90s. St. Leonards:
Allen & Unwin, 1997.
Lutes, Jean Marie. Front-page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and
Fiction, 1880-1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Robinson, Gertrude J. Gender, Journalism and Equity: Canadian, U.S., and European
Perspectives. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 2005.
 
82
Saltzman, Joe. "Analyzing the Images of the Journalist in Popular Culture: a Unique
Method of Studying the Public's Perception of Its Journalists and the News Media."
Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) (Norman Lear Center) 39-40.
—. Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film. Los Angeles, CA:
The University of Southern California, 2002.
—. Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist in Popular Culture. 2003.
http://ijpc.org/sobsmaster.htm (accessed March 12, 2009).
Shankman, Sarah. Fisrt Kill All the Lawyers. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1988.
—. Now Let's Talk of Graves. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1990.
—. She Walks in Beauty. New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1991.
—. Then Hang All the Liars. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1989.
Smith, Stephen A. Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind. Fayetteville, AK: The
University of Arkansas Press, 1985.
Society of Professional Journalists. Code of Ethics. 1996.
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp (accessed March 26, 2008).
Woods, Sherryl. Bank On It. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1993.
—. Body and Soul. New York, NY: Popular Library, 1989.
—. Deadly Obsession. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1995.
—. Hide and Seek. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1993.
—. Reckless. New York, New York: Warner Books, 1989.
—. Stolen Moments. New York, New York: Warner Books, 1990.
—. Ties That Bind. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1991.
—. Wages of Sin. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1994.
—. White Lightning. New York, New York: Warner Books, 1995.

 
 
 
83

Appendix: Novel Summaries

Bank On It (1993) By Sherryl Woods
When investigative reporter Amanda Roberts gets a call from an anonymous
source asking her to meet him in a cemetery at midnight, she did not know she’d end up
in the midst of a matter of national security. When her mysterious source is killed before
her very eyes, Roberts is hot on the trial to try and find the murderer and his motivations.
When tips lead her to an Atlanta bank brokering illegal high-stakes arms deals to the
Middle East, Roberts is faced with a dilemma—run her story on the front page of the next
issue of Inside Atlanta and risk a U.S. military operation abroad or hold the story and
comply with law enforcement for the first time in her career.

Body and Soul (1989) By Sherryl Woods
When a beloved aerobics instructor is killed at a popular workout club, Weights
and Measures, Amanda Roberts is already on the scene working on a story about rise of
singles’ memberships. The murder brings up a lot of unanswered questions about the club
and its ownership. The deeper Roberts and her partner Joe Donelli dig, the more
complicated the crime becomes. After an undercover drug operation, threatening phone
calls, and a few attempts on her own life, Roberts discovers that the illegal activities at
the club are a cover up for a more prestigious local institution. In the end, Roberts not
only comes out alive but with a hot story for Inside Atlanta magazine’s center spread.

Deadly Obsession (1995) By Sherryl Woods
When Hamilton Kenilworth, a high-society Atlanta lawyer, finds that his wife has
disappeared with his 7-year-old daughter, he marches down to Inside Atlanta and
implores Amanda Robert’s help. Promising a first-rate front-page story, Kenilworth gives
Roberts access to one of the city’s most guarded families—and the secrets of their
troubled marriage. Discovering a web of affairs, lies, jealousy, and betrayal, Roberts
finally tracks down Mrs. Kenilworth who has run away to South Carolina, only to find
out she has been murdered. With her persistent investigations, Roberts finally uncovers
the cause of Mrs. Kenilworth’s death—a twist that no one, not even Roberts herself,
expected.

First Kill All the Lawyers (1988) By Sarah Shankman
In the first novel of the series, Samantha Adams returns to her hometown of
Atlanta, Georgia, with a pocketful of journalistic awards and an impressive stack of clips
she earned while a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Accepting a new job at the
Journal-Constitution, Sam gets straight to investigating after a distinguished attorney is
found dead in a ravine. Sam finds herself in the midst of a complicated cover-up where
“good ole’ boys” go to any lengths to protect their land investments and lucrative drug
deals—including setting up the honest lawyer and costing him his life. When Sam finds
herself abducted by the corrupt sheriff, she sacrifices her life to get the story. With hard-
 
84
hitting reporting and some luck, Sam gets her story on page one and restores justice to
Atlanta’s high society.

Hide and Seek (1993) By Sherryl Woods
When reporter Amanda Roberts takes up jogging in an effort to get physically fit
she does not realize that she is placing herself in the path of a psychopathic serial killer.
When a beautiful marathon runner is killed just moments after stopping to talk to her on a
jogging trail, Roberts knows that she cannot rest until she finds the woman’s murderer.
The closer Roberts comes to solving the crime, the closer she gets to her own death.
Receiving multiple death threats, Roberts continues on with the story despite protests
from her editor and fiancé Joe Donelli. When Roberts finds herself face-to-face with the
man Donelli hired to protect her, she realizes that her soon-to-be husband unknowingly
placed her face-to-face with the murderer. Roberts manages to escape (with the help of
her foster son Pete) with her life and another great story for Inside Atlanta magazine.

Now Let’s Talk of Graves (1990) By Sarah Shankman
Samantha Adams finds herself covering a murder while visiting her friend Kitty
Lee at Louisiana’s Mardi Gras festivities. When Church Lee, Kitty’s brother and the
father of the debutante and drug-dealer Zoe, is hit by a car and killed by a masked driver,
Sam starts searching for answers explaining his untimely death. Harry Zack, a local
insurance investigator, is also sent to investigate the case. When Harry and Sam cross
paths, they trade more than insults. Eventually, they help each other discover the twist to
an already twisted murder: the wealthy Church Lee set up his daughter’s drug dealer, the
son of his girlfriend, to kill him so his daughter could collect on his insurance. By the end
of the novel, Sam not only has one more investigative story under her belt, but she also
has a new love: Harry Zack.

Reckless (1989) By Sherryl Woods
The first in a series of novels, Reckless describes Amanda Roberts, a well-
educated female reporter who sacrifices her prominent career in New York to move to a
rural Georgia town in order to support her husband’s new professorship at the University
of Georgia. When he cheats on her with one of his students, Amanda finds herself
divorced, alone, and working for a small weekly under Editor Oscar Cates. After being
sent out to cover a cooking demonstration by famous Chef Maurice, Amanda finds
herself in the midst of a murder and an investigative story. Her only obstacle to solving
the case and getting a great story is former Detective Joe Donelli. Even though Amanda
always stays one step ahead of Donelli, she cannot seem to shake him. By the end of the
novel, Roberts and Donelli are working side-by-side to solve the case of Chef Maurice’s
death. Amanda’s hard work gets her an offer at a new magazine called Inside Atlanta,
which she accepts in the waning moments of the novel.

 
85
She Walks In Beauty (1991) By Sarah Shankman
Samantha Adams managing editor Hoke Toliver has once again sent her as far
from hard news as you can get—the Miss America Pageant. But while in Atlantic City,
Adams notices that one of the obnoxious pageant judges, Kurt Roberts, has suddenly
gone missing and she wants to get to the bottom of his disappearance. While filing her
“soft” news stories about the contestants every day, Adams also makes calls and scours
Atlantic City for anyone who might know of Roberts’s whereabouts. In the process of
solving the mystery, Adams finds herself in the middle of Miss America drama—a stolen
dress, two missing hotel employees, kidnapping, murder, religious protestors, and a
friendly wager with her boyfriend, Harry, about who will find Roberts first. The novel
ends with the mystery solved, a hard news story for Adams, and her resignation from the
Constitution.

Stolen Moments (1990) By Sherryl Woods
In the second novel in the Amanda Roberts series a thief wreaks havoc on
Atlanta’s high society and its collection of pricey Civil War antiques. Inside Atlanta’s
star reporter, Amanda, is commissioned by Miss Martha Wellington, one of the
wealthiest and most prestigious of Atlanta’s citizens, to help solve the crime and return
her stolen property. But, when Roberts ex-husband and Civil War memorabilia expert,
Mack, makes his way into Amanda’s life again, she must choose between the two men in
her life—Mack, the man she once loved, and Donelli, the man who slowly but surely
snuck into her heart. Putting her life on the line, Amanda does almost anything to solve
the crime, return the stolen property, and ease the minds of Miss Martha—all without
hardly ever stepping foot into the newsroom. In the end, Donelli proves that he’ll fight
(and even wait) for Amanda, and the two end the novel by talking of marriage.

Ties That Bind (1991) By Sherryl Woods
After months of persuasion Joe Donelli has finally convinced reporter Amanda
Roberts to marry him. But when Roberts finds herself alone at the altar and Donelli’s old
Chevy blown to pieces by a car bomb, she knows that she is in for a good story. Roberts
finds herself hot on the trail of a small-town conspiracy to cover up KKK and skinhead
activity in the government. With her fiancé Donelli still missing, Roberts forms a unique
bond with an FBI agent who also has interest in the case. Together, they manage to
untangle a web of hatred and racism that leaves Roberts dodging death threats. After
being reunited with Donelli at the end of the novel, Roberts is ready to write a convincing
story that will land this deep-South mayor behind bars.

Then Hang All the Liars (1989) By Sarah Shankman
Samantha Adams of the Journal-Constitution finds herself investigating the beau
of an old family friend after rumors emerge that the women in his past have mysteriously
died. In order to prevent the death of her friend, Sam begins digging up Mr. Randolph
Percy’s past in an effort to save her friend’s life and make the front page. A poisoned
puppy and a savaged doll end up in murder, and Sam finds herself in the middle of it all.
Fighting back an attacker who tries to choke and poison her to death, Sam comes out
alive and with a story in-hand.
 
86
Wages of Sin (1994) By Sherryl Woods
When a beloved receptionist for Georgia’s Senator Blaine Rawlings is found
dead, her car rammed headfirst into a tree off the highway, the police rule it a suicide. But
Amanda Roberts is not so sure. Why would a woman commit suicide only days after
putting a down payment on her dream wedding dress? Traveling to and from the Capitol,
Roberts discovers that the receptionist, Mary Alice Walker, was on the verge of accusing
Rawlings of sexual harassment thereby ruining his political career. But that was just the
beginning. Roberts soon uncovers a love triangle of politics and love that not only
threatens to ruin Rawlings’s political career, but the lives of others close to him. When a
hit-and-run outside the Capitol leads to an unlikely arrest, Roberts manages to not only
get her exclusive story for Inside Atlanta, but she also gives Walker’s family peace of
mind and redeems the careers of a few politicians as well.

White Lightning (1995) By Sherryl Woods
The last novel in the Amanda Roberts series tells the story of Miss Martha
Wellington, an 86-year-old woman of Georgia’s high society, who commissions Amanda
to link a crime committed 52 years ago by her long, lost lover (who was wrongfully
accused), to a recent murder, and solve them both. The only catch? Miss Martha has been
told by doctors that she has only a little longer to live, which puts Amanda on a fast
deadline. When she finds out she is pregnant with her husband, and former Brooklyn
cop’s baby, she has to fight morning sickness, the new assignment editor in her
newsroom at Inside Atlanta magazine, and the men who are protecting a business that has
been in the family for generations: making moonshine. In the end, Roberts solves the two
crimes by getting a murderous confession, putting the other suspects in jail, and
providing closure for Miss Martha. The novel ends with the birth of Roberts’s baby—
Martha Elisa Donelli.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The lovesick journalist: the image of the female journalist in Danielle Steel’s novels

PDF

Two-faced: the image of the female political journalist in American film

PDF

Heels, microphones, and unlikely heroines: comparing the female broadcast journalist in the fiction of Sparkle Hayter and Kelly Lange

PDF

Fashion transgressions and crimes of style: the image of the female fashion journalist

PDF

Skid Row culture: an embedded journalist's exploration of art and community in the nation's homeless capital

PDF

The evolution of Black women journalists' hair in the news: how the CROWN Act has changed Black hair forever

Asset Metadata

Creator Rossie, Amanda Marie (author)

Core Title Beauty, brains, and bylines: comparing the female journalist in the fiction of Sherryl Woods and Sarah Shankman

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Online Journalism)

Publication Date 05/04/2009

Defense Date 04/16/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag image of the female journalist in twentieth-century fiction,newsgathering ethics,OAI-PMH Harvest,race and class issues in the South,representations of femininity,stereotypes of women reporters

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Saltzman, Joseph (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Castaneda, Laura (committee member)

Creator Email amanda.rossie@gmail.com,rossie@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2167

Unique identifier UC1447794

Identifier etd-Rossie-2692 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-223296 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2167 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Rossie-2692.pdf

Dmrecord 223296

Document Type Thesis

Rights Rossie, Amanda Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu