Gwen Bristow (September 16, 1903 – August 17, 1980) was an American writer and journalist. Early life Bristow was born in Marion, South Carolina in 1903 to Baptist minister Louis Judson Bristow and Caroline Cornelia Winkler. Bristow became interested in writing while reporting junior high school functions for her local newspaper. Education Bristow attended Anderson Baptist College in Anderson, South Carolina, for one year before transferring to Judson College in Marion, Alabama. Bristow disliked the strict rules that Judson imposed on its all-women student population. Students were required to wear uniforms, and they were forbidden from speaking with men or boys during visits downtown. Bristow directed and acted in two plays at Judson, playing the roles of men in both. Bristow was voted "Most Original" in her junior class in 1923. Bristow graduated from Judson College in 1924 with degrees in English and French. Bristow's parents moved to New Orleans in February of that year. After college, Bristow set her sights on studying journalism at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University. Bristow's parents were unable to support her financially, so Bristow earned money by writing essays for other people, saving enough to purchase the typewriter required for school. Bristow also won a $90 scholarship from Columbia to cover her first semester. While attending Columbia, Bristow continued to support herself by writing papers for others, working as a nursemaid, typing theses, writing biographies of businessmen for trade journals, and working as a secretary to a Polish baroness on Riverside Drive. After one year at Columbia Bristow took a summer job with The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. The newspaper offered Bristow a permanent position, and Bristow accepted. She did not return to Columbia. Bristow kept a journal during her time at Columbia that she later destroyed, observing that she had been a "shrewd and remarkably accurate reporter" of her classmates' "foibles," and "this stuff should not be lying around." "And of course, there was a lot of unintended self-revelation." Early career Bristow initially lived with her parents in New Orleans at 4501 Magnolia on the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, where Bristow's father had become superintendent. When women in the United States were granted the right to vote by constitutional amendment in 1920, Bristow immediately registered. Bristow covered the great flood of 1927 for the newspaper and social issues that touched on gender equality, such as the insistence by some