25/03/2026
Today I want to highlight the indomitable Kit Coleman.
Kit Coleman was a newspaper journalist hailed as the first accredited female war correspondent. She managed to be both a traditional domestic wife and mother and an economically independent working woman; she is remembered for being the first female syndicated columnist in Canadian journalism and the first president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.
On 20 Feb 1864, Kit Coleman was born Catherine Ferguson in Castleblakeney, Co Galway. Her father provided an education for her, first at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Dublin and then at a finishing school in Belgium. One of the biggest influences on her was her uncle, a Dominican priest called Fr Thomas Burke. He preached social and religious tolerance, unusual for a clergyman at this time. His impact on her at a young age helped to shape her journalistic style and interests.
Coleman wrote as ‘Kit’, a way to interact with readers while remaining anonymous and the column eventually became known as “Kit’s Kingdom”. In this way, she was a dichotomy, with both a public and private persona. Kit was the independent and strident journalist; Coleman was the single working mother.
Because she was the sole breadwinner, she could not afford to be too outspoken for fear of losing her job. However, her feisty nature ensured that she challenged her employers and gave women a chance to read about subjects such as politics, religion, science, and business. In an 1892 column, Coleman wrote “I detest fashion and think it is paying us, women, a poor compliment to imagine we cannot take an interest in the highest and very deepest challenges of the day”. She once wrote a piece about the building of a canal in Chicago, purely to prove that women could be interested in architecture, just like men.
In 1898, the Spanish-American conflict in Cuba dominated headlines. It was unusual – but not unheard of – for women journalists to cover war at this time, although their work was seen as supplemental to male journalists. While Coleman was the first to receive her papers making her the world’s first accredited female war correspondent, two other female journalists were also active in Cuba, Anna Benjamin of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly and Mrs Trumbull-White of the Chicago Record.
She received praise for her work at the time and was invited to speak at the International Press Union of Women Journalists in Washington in 1898. While in Washington, she married her third husband, a doctor called Theobald Coleman.
After the marriage, Coleman continued to work both in Canada and abroad. In 1904, she helped to establish the Canadian Women’s Press Club, an act fuelled by the resentment shown towards her by male journalists during her Cuban adventure. The club grew rapidly, holding its own conference in 1906 in Winnipeg and it made such an impression (helped along by Coleman’s scolding words) that the women were invited to the Canadian Press Association’s convention in Toronto in 1910, a once all-male affair.
Coleman contracted pneumonia in May 1915 and died soon after. Today, we remember Kit Coleman for her unwavering courage to discuss topics deemed unsuitable for women, her willingness to travel abroad to document dangerous and unjust situations and for making a name for herself among her contemporaries, both male and female.
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🖋 Gwiazda, Emily. 'Kit Coleman.' The Canadian Encyclopedia. 24 September 2025. Web. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/kathleen-coleman. Accessed 25 March 2026.
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