Edna Sperry

Edna Sperry is the labor reporter at The Baltimore Star, a veteran journalist whose professional reputation and personal style have earned her the nickname "the Battle-Axe." She is one of the few women on the newspaper's staff who commands genuine respect and fear from her male colleagues, having built her position not through charm or connections but through an uncompromising mastery of her craft. Her domain is the women's bathroom on the newsroom floor, one of only two such facilities, which she has effectively claimed as her private lair, filling the standing metal ashtray with her cigarette butts while the other women on staff long ago conceded the space to her.

Identity and Professional Standing

Edna's self-presentation is deliberately austere and functional. She describes the women's bathroom as "small and mean and utilitarian," adding, "Like me, some would say. But never to my face." This acknowledgment of her own reputation reveals a woman who has embraced the role of the difficult, indispensable professional as a survival strategy in a newsroom that would otherwise dismiss her. She works on her own schedule, arriving when she pleases, making notes on how the day's copy was butchered, screaming at Cal, and then writing tomorrow's copy, filing around eight or nine in the evening so that her editor has to move her stories. She likes working with Cal, noting that he is "a little scared of me, as he should be," though he still tinkers with her prose. When he oversteps, she threatens to make him admit his errors in a correction box, and she compares him to "a dog, a dumb one, who has to be trained over and over again," joking that she should be allowed to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper.

Her background is Scottish, not Jewish as many assume from her name and her sympathy for labor causes. She is proud of her heritage, describing her family as "Scots, tough and durable, as hard as the marble they quarried." This heritage, she insists, explains her opposition to unions, which she believes "work for average people and they are a godsend for the incompetent." In her view, a union holds back anyone who is genuinely good at their work. This contrarian stance, combined with her willingness to challenge the assumptions of her colleagues, marks her as a woman who thinks independently and refuses to be categorized.

Political Maneuvering and Ambition

Beneath her gruff exterior, Edna is engaged in careful political calculation. She reveals that she has been contacted by Spiro Agnew, who is running for governor that year as a Republican, and who offered her the position of press secretary, suggesting it could lead to something in his administration. Edna countered by demanding a cabinet post, preferably Commerce. Simultaneously, she reached out to Congressman Sickles, the leading Democratic contender, and told him that Agnew wanted her. By November, she calculates, she is in a win-win position, and she insists that her agreements with both camps prove her impartiality. This double-dealing reveals a woman who has grown tired of newspaper life and is positioning herself for a political career, using the leverage of her reputation to extract maximum value from both parties.

Her contempt for the younger women entering the profession is palpable. She observes the "pretty girls, trip-trapping through the newsroom in their high heels, thinking it's fun and exciting," and notes with disdain that they even want to date newspapermen. She reflects that she has made many mistakes in her time, but dating newspapermen was not one of them. This disdain extends to her assessment of Maddie Schwartz, whom she dismisses as a pretty girl who only got her job as Don Heath's assistant because of her looks, a post Edna considers a dead end. She suggests that Maddie should have tried for a job in the Sunday section, where she would have been a natural writing up brides and engagements.

Role in the Newsroom and the Sherwood Case

Edna's presence in the newsroom serves as a counterpoint to Maddie's struggles. When Maddie, dismissed for the second time in a day by an editor, retreats to the ladies' room to splash cold water on her face, she finds Edna parked on the Naugahyde love seat in the anteroom with her copy, coffee, and cigarettes, emerging at the last possible moment to file, preemptively cursing the changes she anticipates to her prose. This scene establishes Edna as the only woman who lingers in that space, a figure of professional permanence in contrast to Maddie's precarious position.

Edna's reaction to the Cleo Sherwood case reveals the racial dynamics that Maddie initially fails to grasp. When Maddie expresses outrage that Cleo's disappearance was treated as unimportant, Ferdie Platt explains, "Because she's a Negro, Maddie. That's why it wasn't a big deal when she went missing." Edna, as a veteran journalist, would have understood this calculus instinctively, even if she never articulates it directly. Her presence in the newsroom during the primary night coverage, where she is assigned to write a color story on whatever patterns emerge from the statewide races, places her at the center of the political drama that Maddie belatedly realizes has nothing to do with Cleo.

The 1966 Primary and Its Aftermath

On primary night, Edna is present in the newsroom when a sensation sweeps through the staff, a surprise in the election results that catches even the jaded labor reporter off guard. This moment, in which Edna's professional composure is momentarily shaken, underscores the significance of the political upheaval. Maddie, typing vote tallies, observes that Ezekiel Taylor finished a distant fourth in the Fourth District senate race, and reflects on how silly she had been to think that any of this had anything to do with Cleo. Edna's presence as the color writer for the statewide races positions her as the chronicler of this political transformation, a role that aligns with her ambitions for a cabinet post.

Significance and Legacy

Edna Sperry embodies the possibilities and limitations of professional women in 1960s journalism. She has achieved a measure of power through competence and intimidation, but her path has required her to adopt a persona that isolates her from other women. Her contempt for the "pretty girls" and her willingness to play both political parties against each other reveal a woman who has internalized the cutthroat logic of the newsroom and the political machine. Yet her private reflections also expose the costs of this strategy: she is alone, feared rather than liked, and her only real satisfaction comes from the work itself. In a novel concerned with the fates of women who lack power, Edna represents the exception that proves the rule, a woman who has traded conventional femininity for professional authority, and who navigates the male-dominated worlds of journalism and politics with a pragmatism that is both admirable and chilling.