Jane Grant (May 29, 1892 – March 16, 1972) was a New York City journalist who co-founded The New Yorker with her first husband, Harold Ross.
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She was born Jeanette Cole Grant in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up and went to school in Girard, Kansas. Grant originally trained to be a vocalist. She came to New York City at 16 to pursue singing, but fell into magazine writing, later joining the staff of The New York Times.
Grant was close friends with critic Alexander Woollcott; it was through him that she joined the Algonquin Round Table. Another good friend was the writer Janet Flanner. Grant showed Ross her friend's letters from Paris; Ross liked them so much he tapped her to be one of The New Yorker 's greatest correspondents. Grant also helped on the business side of the magazine in its earliest days.
In World War I, Grant, who was also a talented singer and dancer, talked her way onto a troopship to France. She joined the American Red Cross and entertained soldiers during shows in Paris and at camps. It was in France that she first met Ross and the future "Vicious Circle" members.
In 1921, Grant, along with Ruth Hale, founded the Lucy Stone League, which was dedicated, in the manner of Lucy Stone, to helping women keep their maiden names after marriage[1] (as Grant did after her two marriages); the group was a vocal group of feminists throughout the 1920s and '30s.
Ross and Grant divorced in 1929 after nine years of marriage. She published a memoir about Ross called Ross, The New Yorker and Me (Reynal and Co., 1968 NY NY).
As a journalist for The New York Times (she was the first woman reporter in the city room), she covered women's issues, questioning public figures about their views on the status of women and interviewing women who worked in traditionally male professions.
In 1939 she married William B. Harris, the editor of Fortune magazine. Grant became even more active in feminist causes, reactivating the Lucy Stone League and expanding its purpose. She continued to work for the rights of women into the 1960s, advocating for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and serving on the National Council of Women.
She and Harris moved from Manhattan to Litchfield, Connecticut, before World War II. The couple had a love of nature and flowers; so they founded White Flower Farm out of a barn on their property. In the 1950s they started a mail order business for home gardening; it was a big success.
Grant died in 1972 on the Connecticut farm she shared with her husband. Harris sold the nursery to its current owner, Eliot Wadsworth, in 1976.
In 1974 Harris was approached for an endowment by the University of Oregon. After a visit to the school, he agreed to fund a center that engaged in research on women and gender studies. In 1976, Harris donated Jane Grant's papers to the University of Oregon. Upon his death in 1981, he left a $3.5 million bequest in his wife's name to establish the Center for the Study of Women in Society.
She wrote Confession of a Feminist,[2] describing the experience of being feminist, recounting her experience as a reporter among men for the N.Y. Times, explaining why keeping one's name is important for one's identity and thus was a feminist issue, uncovering the protective laws, anticipating the denial of jobs to women when World War II would end, noting that gaining suffrage was important but not enough, and summarizing explicitly discriminatory laws.
Grant was portrayed by the actress Martha Plimpton in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.[3]