Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie is a collection of articles, editorials, and narratives by Elia Peattie written during her tenure at the Omaha World-Herald from 1888 to 1896, richly illustrated with photographs from the period. Elia (Wilkinson) Peattie (1862–1935) was born during the Civil War and came of age at the advent of the era of the New Woman. In many ways Peattie embodied this new age of independence for women, writing both fiction and journalism and becoming one of the first Plains women to write editorial columns in a major newspaper that addressed public issues.

 

Not shy with her opinions about current events in the state of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, Peattie tackled subjects such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, capital punishment and lynchings, prostitution, the Omaha stockyards, beet-field workers in Grand Island, schools and child rearing, the need for orphanages, shelters for unwed mothers, charity hospitals, and the New Woman.

 

Editor Susanne George Bloomfield includes a biography of Peattie, who is described as "tall, dignified, and kindly, and possessing a wicked sense of humor." Peattie's work now stands as a rare and valuable history of Nebraska, showing us a lively frontier society through the eyes of a woman engaged in the life of her community and her own struggle to balance her family and career

Susanne George Bloomfield is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She is the author of The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Kate M. Cleary: A Literary Biography with Selected Works, both available in Bison Books editions.

"Peattie provides a fascinating inside view of life in the late 19th century—but as Bloomfield reminds use, most of her topics 'show just how little has changed in the last one-hundred-plus years.'"—Nebraska Life

"I cannot say enough about Peattie's editorials. They are so well thought out, so beautifully and persuasively written, so logical, that her editorials make those in our present day newspapers read as if they had been written by junior high dropouts."—Roundup Magazine

"The book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the history of US journalism."—Choice

"In collecting Peattie's work, Bloomsfield helps to close an existing gender gap in anthologies of literary journalism and sheds light on a woman journalist whose work offers historians the opportunity to understand both the times in which she lived and the ways in which women were able to contribute to journalism."—American Journalism

"Susanne George Bloomfield, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, has made a readable selection from Peattie's hundreds of thousands of words, and has prefaced the collection with an adroit summary of Peattie's hard-working life."—James Boylan, Columbian Journalism Review