Jane Cunningham Croly (Dec. 19, 1829–Dec. 23, 1901),
who wrote under the pen name “Jennie June,” was one of
the first American women to earn a living as a journalist
and was an architect of the woman’s club movement that
expanded woman’s sphere beyond the home and into her
community. Croly worked as an editor, publisher, reporter,
and columnist during a nearly fifty-year career in magazines and newspapers.
She used her forum to promote the rights of women to
work yet she herself was ambivalent about suffrage and
believed women’s first calling was to the home. The mother
of six children, Croly needed to work and often was the
main financial support for her family. Her columns, books
and articles were pivotal in popularizing the club movement, which began in the 1860s, as a purposeful and creative outlet for nineteenth century women. Croly believed
that women had an obligation to be involved in the domestic
aspects of their communities and often wrote in national
magazines and New York newspapers on the need for
women and their clubs to take responsibility for “municipal
housekeeping.”
Croly was born in Leicestershire, England, on December 19, 1829. In 1841, she moved with her family to New
York State and moved to New York City in 1853 to seek
work as a writer. She created a column called “Parlor and
Side-Walk Gossip” that appeared first in the Sunday Times
and Noah’s Weekly Messenger but quickly began being distributed to newspapers throughout the country. She married
fellow journalist David G. Croly in 1856 and together they
moved to Rockford, Illinois, where he became the founding editor of the Rockford Daily News. After a year, they
returned to New York City where David found work as an
editor on the New York World and Jennie worked as the
manager of the newspaper’s fledgling woman’s department.
During her decade there, she worked steadily while she also
gave birth to six children. Years later, Croly reminisced that
despite pregnancy and childbirth, she never was away from
the office for more than two weeks (with the exception of
when she was traveling abroad). Despite this highly unusual role as a working mother, Croly maintained a very traditional philosophy for her readers, advocating always that
a woman’s best place was indeed in the home. For Croly,
however, the home was defined more broadly to include the
community where a woman lived and she argued quite passionately in her writing that women needed to clean up their
cities and attend to the civic needs to women and children
within their towns and cities.
Croly worked as the chief staff writer for the popular
Mme Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions beginning in 1860 and
stayed with the magazine through several metamorpheses.
She also was, for a brief period, co-owner and editor of
Godey’s Lady’s Book. She founded the General Federation
of Women’s Clubs that united hundred of clubs in the United
States and abroad. She authored the massive History of the
Women’s Club Movement in America, which was published
in 1898. Croly died in New York in 1901.
Further Reading
Blair, Karen. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood
Redefi ned, 1868–1914. New York: Holmes and Meier,
1980.
Croly, Jane Cunninghmam. History of the Women’s Club Movement in America. New York: Henry G. Allen, 1898.
Gottlieb, Agnes Hooper. Women Journalists and the Municipal
Housekeeping Movement, 1968–1914. Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen Press, 2001.
Haught, Nancy I. “Jane Cunningham Croly (1829–1901): Journalism’s Ambivalent Advocate of Women,” unpublished
master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 1982.
Agnes Hooper Gottlieb