as well as a former editor, and currently a corresponding editor, of Journalism History. The book's dust cover immediately invites readers into the period with a photograph of an aerial view of early-twentieth-century New York City. Superimposed photos of the three women clearly identify them as women of the 1920s: short hair, a cloche hat, and, in the case of two of them, a direct gaze into the camera. The text is divided into three nearly equal narratives, one for each of the women, Doris

more »

... schman, Ruth Hale and Jane Grant, with emphasis on each woman's contributions to her husband's career. A short coda at the end outlines Henry's introduction to and interest in each of these early pioneers in the world of publishing and public relations. The book is heavily footnoted (one reviewer counting more than a thousand citations), and these appear in forty pages of endnotes. A selected bibliography and a useful index complete the book. Anonymous in Their Own Names is the story of three women who worked as professional equals with their husbands. Their relationship, contribution to, and support of their husbands' careers were ironically anonymous, according to the author, because they elected to retain their birth names. A graduate of Barnard College, Doris E. Fleischman was Edward Bernay's partner in marriage as well as his first partner in what would become a successful firm that launched the field of public relations after World War I. Ruth Hale, a Tennessee native who attended Hollins College and the Drexel Academy of Fine Arts, was a hard-working journalist in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia before moving to New York, where she worked at the New York Times and then as a press agent for a Broadway producer. She met Heywood Broun, a successful sportswriter, critic and, later, columnist who prided himself on doing as little as possible and relied on his wife for research, insight, and editing. Jane Cole Grant left her rural roots to go East and study voice. Adaptable and outgoing, she worked for the New York Times and danced in a floorshow at night until she went to France as part of the war effort to provide recreation for the troops. There she met Harold W. Ross, described as uncouth but charming, the man whom she would marry and with whom she would co-found the New Yorker magazine. Emily Toth, in Women's Review of Books 30(2) (March 2013), notes that group biographies appear to be a publishing trend (29). However, the structure of a collective biography invites comparisons and begs for analysis. What were the differences between and among these women, especially with regard to their personal lives, the men they married, and the careers and choices they made? Henry omits this and misses an opportunity to address the powerful subtext of contemporary expectations in conflict with the changing mores of young women living in New York City in the 1920s. Exploring the ways in which these women collectively challenged the prevailing ideas about identity, roles, and expectations in a final chapter, rather