DID YOU KNOW?

She was born Catherine Ferguson in 1856, in County Galway, Ireland, but identified herself privately as Kathleen Willis when she first came to Canada in 1884. She adopted the middle name Blake and by the time she began publishing, she was formally known as Kathleen Blake Watkins, and as Kathleen Blake Coleman when she later remarried.

Her pen name “Kit” and her public persona had readers guessing both her identity and gender. In her column, Coleman covered a wide range of topics in an attempt to break free from gender-based restrictions imposed upon the few presswomen of that era.

Kit first joined the Toronto Daily Mail as a women’s editor in 1889 in order to support herself and her two young children. Her weekly, seven-column “Woman’s Kingdom” page featured a mix of observations and advice, thought-provoking articles and travel writings. Coleman was known to go undercover in other cities, such as London and San Francisco, in order to write about social issues and the plight of the poor. Though her travel writings were curtailed after the Mail merged with the Empire in 1895, Kit was dispatched to London in 1897 to cover Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; while there, she spent time with Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then the prime minister of Canada (and reportedly an avid reader of Coleman’s column).

In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Coleman became North America’s first accredited woman war correspondent. While she was authorized to accompany American troops in Cuba, her male colleagues and the army commanders on the ground were opposed to the idea of having a woman in their midst, and they prevented her travel. Stranded in Florida, she eventually landed in Cuba in July 1898; while she had missed the main battles, her accounts of the war’s aftermath made her internationally famous.