Abstract
Throughout her life, Dorothy Thompson asserted that journalists, and women journalists in particular, had a responsibility to guide Americans towards the moral right. She embodied this responsibility herself, passionately so, and devoted her career in the 30s towards defending the U.S. from the threat of fascism, which she viewed as encroaching upon the world. This thesis explores how Thompson’s journalism contributed to a shifting journalistic paradigm and how she characterized journalists as moral guides in the U.S.; how Thompson’s feminist expressions, both lived and written characterized women journalists in the U.S.; how Thompson’s main through-line of anti-fascism and anti-isolationism shaped her characterization of Americans as morally obligated to oppose isolation; and how her reporting on Kristallnacht, and subsequent political activism, presented as a cohesive example of the culmination of her life's work, ideas and beliefs in the 1930s.