Fleet Street Girls, The: The women who broke down the doors of the Gentleman's Club

- Blurb -

The Fleet Street Girls is the inspiring story of the female journalists who broke down barriers in the 1970s as women arrived on Fleet Street for the first time. Julie Welch was the first ever female football reporter. To achieve this roleat the Observer, she had to battle the National Union of Journalists nearly calling a strike when she dared to write an article as a mere secretary (despite allowing men who weren't journalists to write for the same pages); an entire room of men falling silent to listen to her give her first football report over the phone, before pronouncing it passable, and many other battles in-between. Julie's personal journey will provide the backbone of the narrative, and she will interweave weaving the stories of many of the great women who were simultaneously climbing up the ranks, from Lynn Barber (of An Education fame) to Wendy Henry, the first woman to edit a Fleet Street newspaper, and many more, as well as several of the secretaries whom the men overlooked but who subsequently knew everything. Pioneers one and all. The Fleet Street Girls will be a fascinating story of the hopes and despairs, triumphs and disasters of a group of women in the glitzy heyday of journalism, where they could be interviewing Elton John one moment and partying in the pubs unofficially assigned to each newspaper the next. Fleet Street was the biggest, cosiest all-male club you can imagine, and half the human race and its thoughts and insights were consigned to an area in the papers called The Women's Page, but we follow Julie and the women around her as that tide finally started to change.