• Fleischman Bernays, D. (Undated, circa 1915). Philosophy and menthol.  Essay/nonfiction. Unpublished manuscript. 1072-77-M211. Papers at Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
• Fleischman Bernays, D. (1946). The mother who lost her no. Unpublished children’s book manuscript. 1072-77-M211.  Papers at Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
• Fleischman Bernays, D. (1955). A wife is many women.  New York: Crown Publishers.

Reviewed by: Professor Robert E. Brown, Salem State College, Massachusetts.

Doris Fleischman was, in her own words, a woman who lost her No.

The not-so-famous wife of the celebrated Edward L. Bernays, acknowledged pioneer of modern public relations, began her professional career in thrilling times for women in the U.S.  Doris Fleischman was nearly 30 before a Constitutional amendment granted women the right to vote.

Fleischman’s life offers evidence of a precarious balance of triumph and loss.  Early on, as a writer, she struggled as well as succeeded.  Early in her writing career, a rejection slip from one Frank Harris, the publisher of Pearson’s Magazine, came to  23-year-old Fleischman’s desk on the woman’s page of the New York Tribune unsigned. By 1921, Miss Fleischman would marry Edward L. Bernays and join his newly minted firm he called the Propaganda Bureau, which he later changed to Public Relations Counsel, the better to avoid the unpleasant association with the rough and tumble political communication of the World War I era.

Fleischman knew success as a young reporter for the New York Tribune. She also became acquainted with failure. The rejection slip was diplomatically worded for Harris (“… thanks you for the privilege you afforded him to read the manuscript enclosed and he regrets that he is unable to use it in any of his publications …”).  But more encouraging was the note to the young writer, which the sympathetic editor of Pearson’s had typed on the back of the rejection slip. It read: “Don’t let rejection slips discourage you. Submit some other stuff.  Maybe this manuscript is being sent back because of the subject matter. The Hindu situation is a touchy matter in England, you know . . . .” It was signed by the female editor of Pearson’s, Pearl Bazaar Minor.

As for the unsigned Mr. Harris, he is best known for his classic, racy, steamily explicit and at least partially pornographic, The Many Loves of Frank Harris.
For the young feminist, discouragement was not her ruling humour – not the first woman the U.S. State Department permitted to use her maiden name – and not her husband’s – on her passport (the couple married in 1922). Not the ardent feminist who graduated from a cub reporter on the Trib’s woman’s page to invest her professional life fighting for social and economic justice for women. Not the best-selling author of A wife is many women (1955) or the distinguished honouree of Women in Communications.  But over the years, Fleischman did seem to be ruled by compromise, if not resignation.

The Jewish Enclyclopedia even discredits the apparent feminist moxie of Fleischman’s insisting on having her maiden name on her passport. The alternative and non-heroic explanation is that Bernays, ever the eager publicist, saw the opportunity to make headlines with his wife’s apparently revolutionary feminist act, and in fact the headlines followed.

‘Philosophy and menthol’, among Fleischman’s papers, is a profile of a gentleman from India whom Fleischman interviewed after watching him regale a crowd on a street corner in New York. In her story, she describes him as a compelling speaker who alternately instructed and scolded his rapt audience to disabuse them about the myths he believed they harboured about India, and Indian women particularly. Far from backward and retiring, the speaker insisted, women served on special grand juries and funded a medical college for women.  The ‘menthol’ in the story was what Fleischman characterises as an absurd anti-climax to the street-speaker’s oration. Finishing his harangue, he turned street hawker, offering tubes of menthol for sale. Fleischman seems to have bought the speaker’s advocacy of women, as well as a tube of his menthol.

In 1946, Edward Bernays sent his wife’s manuscript of a children’s book to the Child Study Association of America, quite possibly one of his many clients. The 42-page manuscript is a charming moral fable about one Lilabelle Jones whose mother gives her a most unusual wedding gift: a golden No. She cautions Lilabelle not use it too often. But when Lilabelle loses her No, chaos rules the Jones’ household until she rediscovers it.

As for Fleischman’s career trajectory, she herself seems to have lost her No, one surmises, almost as soon as she married the charismatic Mr. Bernays.  Beginning her ascent as a blue stocking, ardent, independently-minded, fearless feminist, she appears to have lost her mojo to become the somewhat passive, ambivalent factotum of a powerful and egotistic husband who opportunistically created and orchestrated Fleischman’s feminist ideology.

In A wife is many women, she wrestles with the personal and professional issues that surround her 60-year, daily partnership with her clearly more powerful husband. (In a special issue, Time named Edward Bernays as one of the 20th century’s l00 most influential people.) Fleischman writes in AWIMW, “Continuous contiguity of twenty-four hour partnership has made me depend on his presence. Being so used to someone is good. It is also crippling.”

For the historian of public relations, Doris Fleischman Bernays offers a fascinating, multi-faceted case study of a woman’s role in the spawning of modern public relations. Feminist historians and other interpreters will find plenty of evidence to support the ardent feminist and PR pioneer or her shadow self, the passive, conflicted surrogate employee of a powerful husband.  In her later years, Fleishman at last decided to take her husband’s name because, she said, she had grown weary of explanations.

What may be the most interesting dimension of the Fleischman question is seen in her own ambivalence, and the ambiguity of her career. Fleischman’s private and public struggles for legitimacy reflect the same dualities inherent in public relations itself, from its dubious and shape-shifting origins in modern times (propagandist or pro-democratic counsellor), all the way back to its conflicted source in Aristotle’s bold promotional programme of rhetoric and Plato’s dismissal of most rhetoric as sophistry.

About the reviewer: Robert E. Brown (Ph.D.) is Professor of Communications at Salem State College, in Salem, Massachusetts, and for 20 years an adjunct at Harvard University Division of Continuing Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of a number of critical studies of public relations history and theory, and is a member of the editorial board of the Public Relations Review (Elsevier). He is cited as a leading critical thinker by J. L’Etang in Public Relations: Concepts, Practice and Critique (2007). His chapter on symmetry, the dominant theory of public relations, will appear in Robert Heath’s Handbook of Public Relations II, scheduled for publication in 2010. Brown’s perspective on crisis communication appeared in the June 2010 issue of Vital Speeches of the Day and his speech on public relations and public diplomacy was published in Vital Speeches' July 2010 ssue. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of Economics and his doctorate in literature is from the University of Rochester, New York, USA.

Back to: PRism 7(4) Contents Page

Back to: PRism home page