Cecil I Dorrian

Feb 23, 2022

in 1870-1889 (Born), Authors, Journalists and Writers

1882-1926

Cecil I. Dorrian (1882-1926) was a war reporter for the Newark News (WWI). She wrote a weekly column and traveled Europe and was the first accredited female reporter to go to the front lines. She was a playwright and wrote a play that was performed nationally. Cecil said, “They must know what it is like. It is their war. They’re giving everything they’ve got to it, and they’ve a right to know.” The Newark News wrote, “one of Ms. Dorrian’s remarkable accomplishments was making friends of leaders of thought and action in the European world.”

Cecil Inslee Dorian was born Sept 20, 1882 in New York City to Joseph and Marie Dorrian and attended Barnard College, graduating 1905. At Barnard, in yearbooks, she’s listed as participating in many activities from the dance committee, theater, to basketball, to journalism, to pingpong.

The Barnard Bulletin in 1907 says that she’s gotten a job with Ladie’s Home Companion –they probably meant Woman’s Home Companion, which was a monthly women’s magazine. Soon, Cecil began writing plays. The most famous was The Age of Reason. It ran on Broadway from 1915-1916 at the Bandbox Theater and centered around a story of divorced parents.

Cecil began writing as a journalist and started traveling around the world including Italy, England, France and Spain. Much of her journalism was for the Newark Evening News, for whom she became European correspondent in 1914, a staff position. Newark addresses are listed on on all her passports. There is a Joseph Dorrian in the 1915 city directory, and her mother lists a Newark residence in 1916 so her parents may have lived there for some time too.

Cecil sent a weekly column to the Newark News and was at many important events like the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919. There were almost 20 accredited female correspondents in WWI according to the Women and War by Bernard A. Cook but Dorrian went places other’s hadn’t — the overlooked Belgian front, a government munitions factory where the public was not allowed, Colonial training grounds near Marseilles, the American lines, where she was the first accredited woman reporter (as related by Holly Bowers). The Women War Correspondent quotes Captain Arthur Hartzell who wrote, “Miss..Dorian writes more intelligently about the operations of the Army than any other woman correspondent if one judges her writing from a military viewpoint”. The Historical Dictionary of War Journalism by Mitchel Roth and James Olsen lists her as a “visiting correspondent of longest service” along with only one other woman.

After the War, Dorrian continued to cover Europe for the Newark News, according to the finding aid for her papers which are at Stanford. In 1920, her US passport listed some of her destinations as Turkey, Palestine, Egypt and Greece.

In 1926, however, Dorrian got pneumonia. A ship record shows her returning home to the United States with her mother. She died of pneumonia in a sanitorium in Towson, near Baltimore, according to the Jersey Journal at age 44, with her mother by her side.

Cecil’s obituary was published nationally. The Pittstown Gazette said she “received war decoration from the French government” and many papers mentioned how she was the first accredited woman correspondent on the lines. The Trenton Times talks about Cecil going to the front with the NJ Division to give “a firsthand account of their activities”.

Bibliography

“Death Comes to Cecil I Dorrian” Newark News Aug 18, 1926

Newark History Society Program

Digitized Newark News includes columns, for example “American Front, Firmly Confident Looks Ahead” Jun 12, 1913

“The Age of Reason” Vanity Fair

Digitized Barnard yearbooks

Edy, Carolyn (2017). The Woman War Correspondent, the U.S. Military, and the Press, 1846-1947

Cook, Bernard Women and the War

D-25 Dorrian, Cecil, Newark News Morgue, Newark Public Library

Barnard Bulletin

IMDB

Obituaries via newspapers.com database