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The photograph, taken in August 1925, shows a well-dressed man and woman standing on the deck of an ocean liner. They look seriously into the camera while he holds a piece of paper in both hands. She is Doris E. Fleischman; her husband, Edward L. Bernays, is clasping her new U.S. passport-the first ever issued to a married woman in her birth name.1
Doris Fleischman's fight for, as she put it, "the right to sign her own name under her own face" on her passport was a popular newspaper story.2 Yet three years earlier she had received even more media attention the first time she asserted her right to "sign her own name." On September 16, 1922, after she and Edward Bernays were married, they checked into the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan for their honeymoon weekend, signing the register "Miss Doris E. Fleischman" and "Mr. Edward L. Bernays." The hotel had never before permitted this kind of registration for a married man and woman and at first refused to let Fleischman sign her birth name. But when it reversed its decision, more than 250 newspapers carried news stories or commentaries on the event.3
The papers did not note, though, that something far more important had happened when Fleischman and Bernays married: The two became equal partners in the firm of Edward L. Bernays, Counsel on Public Relations.4 Remaining partners until Fleischman's death in 1980, they were among a handful of people who invented the field of public relations. They operated one of the country's premier public relations agencies from the 1920s through the 1950s, and Bernays and his work have received tremendous attention. A 1978 bibliography lists more than 3,400 published references to him.5 But the fact that Bernays had an equal partner in his work has been ignored or barely acknowledged by most who have written about him, and the partnership itself has never been examined.6 Similarly, very little has been written about women's considerable involvement in American public relations history.7
This article examines Doris Fleischman's pioneering work as a public relations consultant and the many reasons her work has received scant recognition. Focusing on her personal and professional partnership with a highly visible man, it argues that this relationship was typified by the...