A photo of Rheta Childe Dorr from the Oct. 9, 1917, edition of the Evening State Journal and Lincoln Daily News.
Dorr, an Omaha native, studied at the University of Nebraska from 1884 to ’85 before moving to New York to study art and to write. She married John Pixley Dorr of Seattle in 1892 but left him in 1898 with their 2-year-old son, Julian Childe, to pursue her need for self expression.
She became the editor of the New York Evening Post’s women’s section in 1902, writing about the working conditions of women on the city’s East Side. She was appointed to lead the General Federation of Women’s Clubs’ committee on the industrial conditions faced by women, and lobbied Congress for the first official U.S. investigation of those conditions.
Dorr became the first editor of The Suffragist in 1914. She served as a war correspondent during World War I for the Evening Post in revolutionary Russia.
Her books include “What Eight Million Women Want,” about the women’s movement and suffrage; “A Woman of Fifty,” about her career as a journalist and suffragist; and a biography of Susan B. Anthony.
Dorr died in Pennsylvania in 1948 at the age of 81.
