First woman to win a journalism Pulitzer Prize

On 6 May 1918, Minna Lewinson, then a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Journalism, became the first woman to win a journalism Pulitzer Prize. She shared the Pulitzer Prize for Newspaper History with fellow student Henry Beetle Hough for their research paper, "A History of the Services Rendered to the Public by the American Press During the Year 1917."

This achievement was groundbreaking in multiple respects. At the time, Pulitzer categories related to journalism had been recently established, and women’s presence in professional newsrooms and journalism schools was still rare. Lewinson’s win occurred in a cohort where women students at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism outnumbered men, largely because World War I had drawn many male journalists into military service. Against this backdrop, her prize symbolized both the practical opening created by wartime conditions and the enduring capabilities of women scholars and reporters.

Historically, Lewinson’s distinction predates later, more widely known female Pulitzer winners by nearly two decades, including figures such as Anne O’Hare McCormick, who would not win a reporting prize until 1937. Her recognition in 1918 thus marks a sentinel moment in the evolution of women’s roles in journalism: the first time a woman’s work in a journalism category was honored by the Pulitzer institution. Although her name was largely forgotten in subsequent decades, contemporary scholarship and centenary reviews of Pulitzer history now restore this date as a key milestone in documenting women’s early breakthroughs in the profession.