ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on the post-First World War period has drawn attention to conservative women who often objected to being called feminists, yet whose motivations and achievements must be accounted for in an inclusive history of women’s international activism. This paper examines the work of Saturday Evening Post correspondent Eleanor Franklin Egan, whose coverage of the Great Russian Famine in 1922 helped construct a self-assuring nationalist discourse based on anti-Bolshevism and American character and values, but which elided gender, class and ethnic differences and anxieties. Egan is compared to other women journalists whose work exists at the nexus of personal, national and transnational identities.