Kit Coleman
Woman’s Kingdom
By: Jamie Bradburn
Jamie Bradburn
Contributing Historian
Jamie Bradburn is a Toronto-based writer/researcher/historian who specializes in the stories that have shaped his city and province. His work has been published by TVO, the Toronto Star, Spacing, Historica Canada, and Torontoist.
For more than two decades, readers of the weekend edition of The Toronto Daily Mail and its successor The Mail and Empire enjoyed the work of one of Canada’s pioneering female journalists. Between 1889 and 1911, under the pen name “Kit,” Kathleen Blake Coleman reigned over the paper’s “Woman’s Kingdom” page, where her feisty, sometimes melodramatic tone touched a nerve with her audience as she covered topics beyond the expected stories on fashion and domestic duties, expanding the concept of what a newspaper’s women’s page could be.
Born Catherine Ferguson to a middle-class farmer in Castleblakeney, Ireland, in 1856, she was inspired by her family to appreciate literature, music, and tolerance for others. She changed her first name to Kathleen prior to an arranged marriage in 1876 to a man named George Willis who was 40 years older than her. The couple had one daughter, Mary Margaret, who, according to her mother, died at 2 years old (according to some sources, the child apparently grew up with her maternal aunt instead). Upon George’s death in 1883, his family disinherited Kathleen (and Mary Margaret).
After immigrating to Toronto in 1884, she married Edward J. Watkins, an alcoholic philanderer who may have been a bigamist. The marriage failed, leaving her a single mother with two children: Edward (born in 1885) and Patricia (born in 1888). This unhappy period left its influence in the stories of alcohols, affairs, and doomed marriages that would appear in her column.
To support her family, Coleman turned to her love of writing. After contacting The Mail in 1889, she was assigned to edit the “Woman’s Kingdom.” At the time, journalism as a profession for women barely ranked above barroom dancing and prostitution on the social scale. The few female journalists often received pieces male writers avoided, such as obituaries and society events.
“Kit” made “Woman’s Kingdom” one of The Mail’s most popular features. Beyond the usual domestic and beauty tips, she explored literature, politics, religion, and science. “I simply detest fashion,” she observed in 1892, “and I think it is paying us women a poor compliment to imagine we cannot take an interest in the highest and the very deepest questions of the day.” Her editors occasionally reminded her to write about traditional female concerns if she ignored them for several weeks.
She strengthened her rapport with readers by publishing responses to their letters with a mixture of compassionate advice and sarcasm. She observed that most of the missives she received concerned “politics, polemics, physiology, and pimples.”
The personal voice she employed contrasted with the impartial tone increasingly employed by newspapers. “They tell you that to be a journalist you must never let your heart run away with you,” she observed in 1893. “What a foolish saying! You must bury yourself and your troubles and joys and pipe up to amuse the people! Nonsense. The editorial ‘we’ is about played out.”
Given her androgynous pen name and commentary style, some readers speculated that Kit was a man. She encouraged such guessing to protect her privacy, which she also maintained by never revealing her home address and by meeting readers in person only if they were contemplating suicide. A fictional biography of Coleman claimed two things that weren’t true: that she was descended from a deposed Irish king and that she shared her home with her trusted friend Theodocia, who was a fictional literary device.
Some readers may have questioned her commitment to the growing women’s rights movement. One issue was the conservative leanings of The Mail, whose editors preferred promoting traditional feminine ideals. She was reluctant to rock the boat too much, as the rough patches of her life made financial security a constant worry. She believed that women could never be true friends with each other. “Was there ever a friendship between two women that did not mean a plot against a third?” she once wrote.
Coleman was slow to support suffrage, frequently criticizing militant activists. In 1890, she urged readers not to “lose sight of the exquisite home virtues, the self-sacrifice, gentleness and wonderful moral courage which is as far above the physical attribute as the stars are above the earth.” Her views evolved, aided by her peers in the Canadian Women’s Press Club; she served as the organization’s first president when it formed in 1904. Not until March 1910 did Coleman endorse the suffrage movement in print, noting that she admired “the Canadian women who are earnest in the movement” even if “it does not attract me personally.”
She was a proponent of pay equity. “Women should be paid accordingly,” she observed in 1891, “and honoured, too, if she can help in ever so small a way the partner she has chosen for life, or keep herself independently, earning sufficient to place her above the temptations offered her by men.” She made an exception for domestic servants, who she felt were better off with employer-provided room and board than women who worked in factories for higher pay. Accounts vary as to whether she was paid on par with her male colleagues at The Mail.
As US journalist Nellie Bly gained fame for her investigative reporting and globe-trotting, The Mail allowed Coleman to roam. From 1892, she frequently visited the seedier parts of cities like London and San Francisco, often disguised as a man or a working-class woman as she investigated problematic social conditions. A Dickensian tone crept into her writing, especially during her visits to London. This annoyed some readers, which led her to insert descriptions of meals she ate when she wasn’t undercover. She also wrote literate depictions of her journeys, which, as Eva-Marie Kröller noted in her book Canadian Travellers in Europe 1851–1900, created “an exhilarating sense of space, movement, and anticipation.”
Budget restraints limited her to journeys to nearby locales after The Mail merged with rival newspaper The Empire in 1895. She battled with the new paper’s management, refusing to contribute to a new fashion page and “For and About Women” column. Foreign adventures were replaced by stories about her children. Her travels resumed in 1897 when she went to London to cover Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. She spent portions of the trip with one of her column’s biggest fans, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who she described as “a person of spotless honesty . . . so utterly charming you can’t help liking him, although some of his policies are quite senseless.” The financial failure of a book that compiled her experiences in London fed her occasional bouts of depression, which were driven by her fear that she was destined to be not a great literary figure, but a lowly woman’s page editor.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in early 1898, Coleman lobbied to cover the battles in Cuba. The Mail and Empire believed she would depict the human side of the conflict. She became Canada’s first officially accredited female war correspondent, but not without facing numerous roadblocks placed by male colleagues.
Her journey began in May 1898 in Washington, D.C., where U.S. Secretary of War Russell Alger feared that the uncomfortable conditions within temporary army camps were no place for a lady. He warmed up when she suggested being attached to missionaries or relief corps and assured her that his department would help if she ran into any difficulties. Her request for accreditation from the United States government was so unusual that the paperwork was still written for a man.
After arriving in Tampa, Florida, she repeatedly failed to secure passage to Cuba, joining at least 50 other journalists who were also stuck there. Rumours suggested that her predicament may have been due to an unconfirmed arrest for ignoring military censorship rules. Another rumour suggested she was denied space on a medical ship because Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, took an instant dislike to her. She usually ate solo and resorted to her hotel’s pet monkey and tropical birds for companionship. “The woman war correspondent had been called the unknown quantity,” she wrote. “She is carefully ostracized. She is not young and pretty. Generals will have nothing to do with her. She shall be left behind. The great army of pressmen shall move forward jeering at her. She shall not produce ‘copy.’” With deadlines that were more flexible than her male colleagues, she became a source of scoops or introduced military officials to other reporters.
Coleman finally arrived in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay at the end of July 1898, just as active hostilities were winding down. She found plenty to write about with an increasing tone of despair and horror, whether it was the ghostly looking Spanish soldiers, the mounds where battle victims were buried, the suffering of poorly trained and equipped US troops, or the squalid appearance of the city of Santiago, which she described as a hopeless place where one was “cut off from everything that is fresh and sweet and wholesome.” The experience led her to adopt an anti-war viewpoint, apart from following editorial directives to support the Boer War.
During her return from Cuba, she stopped in Washington, D.C., to marry Dr. Theobald Coleman. Her third marriage was successful, even if her financial worries were not eased by her husband’s habit of treating poor patients for free. The Colemans briefly moved to Copper Cliff, a Northern Ontario mining town, where they complained about the poor medical conditions the Canadian Copper Company offered its employees. Residents were not unhappy to see the couple move to Hamilton, as she had compared the town to Siberia.
Gradually, her relationship with The Mail and Empire cooled. The correspondence section of “Woman’s Kingdom” was dropped in 1910 to allow her to write a short daily column. When a pay raise was refused, she quit. When her final edition of the page was published in February 1911, the editor removed her goodbye message.
Coleman quickly bounced back. After failing to reach an agreement with The Globe, she launched a syndicated column (“Kit’s Column”), which papers paid $5 per weekly instalment. Despite reservations from her editors, Coleman wrote about the First World War, which she viewed as a sign of Armageddon. She urged readers to be compassionate to those on both sides of the conflict, arguing that the lack of it amid wartime propaganda did no one any good. The column continued until her death in May 1915.
Summing up Coleman’s career for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Barbara M. Freeman concluded that she spent most of her journalistic career “walking a creative tightrope between what was considered acceptable behaviour for a woman journalist and what was considered too daring. Her realistic but chronic fear of poverty, the demands of her editors, and her own Victorian upbringing may have combined to rob her, at times, of the courage of her convictions, especially where the rights of women were concerned. But in her own day she was considered a romantic, adventurous, talented, and accomplished woman, who expanded the narrow boundaries of the woman journalist’s world, and that of her readers as well.”