You’ve studied four of the female muckrakers of the Progressive Era. Write two to three sentences describing what viewpoints these women shared.
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The muckrakers were reform-minded journalists in the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s–1920s) who exposed established institutions and leaders as corrupt. They typically had large audiences in popular magazines. The modern term generally references investigative journalism or watchdog journalism; investigative journalists in the US are often informally called "muckrakers".[citation needed]
The muckrakers played a highly visible role during the Progressive Era.[1] Muckraking magazines—notably McClure's of the publisher S. S. McClure—took on corporate monopolies and political machines, while trying to raise public awareness and anger at urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, prostitution, and child labor.[2] Most of the muckrakers wrote nonfiction, but fictional exposes often had a major impact too, such as those by Upton Sinclair.[3]
In contemporary American usage, the term can refer to journalists or others who "dig deep for the facts" or, when used pejoratively, those who seek to cause scandal.[4][5] The term is a reference to a character in John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muck-rake", who rejected salvation to focus on filth. It became popular after President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the character in a 1906 speech; Roosevelt acknowledged that "the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck."[4]