Margaret Media, Inc. since 1981 researches, publishes and promotes Louisiana's people, culture and music. Our name honors Margaret Haughery, Irish social worker in 19th century New Orleans.

After losing her husband and infant child to yellow fever, she devoted her life to feeding the destitute people in the city. Through successful businesses in a dairy and a bread baking factory, she made daily rounds donating milk and bread as sustenance to indigent people in the streets of New Orleans. Her philanthropy supported various asylums and orphanages in the city. Upon her death in 1882 she left a will of $30,000 all earned by her own hand and to be divided among nine charities. Her will was signed with an X because she had never learned to read or write.

So beloved was she by the citizens of New Orleans that in 1884, two years after her death, a statue of her likeness in carrera marble, imported from Italy, was erected in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans in an area to be called Margaret Place. The statue, the first of a woman in the United States, is fittingly inscribed simply with her first name, Margaret. It stands today in its original site at the confluence of Prytania and Clio streets near the Interstate overpass.

Margaret Media, Inc. was incorporated in 1981 in New Orleans, Louisiana as the publisher of Distaff, a women’s monthly newspaper, which had been in existence off and on since 1972. A complete collection of its editions is available through the Newcomb College Research Center on Women.

Although the newspaper, the only one of its kind in the Deep South, ceased publication in 1982, the company president and one of Distaff’s founders, Mary Gehman, continued to operate Margaret Media, Inc. to conduct women’s history tours of the French Quarter and eventually to publish the book Women and New Orleans in 1988. Her second book, The Free People of Color of New Orleans, was published in 1994, and the third, Louisiana's Great River Road: The Mississippi from Angola North to Venice South in 2003. 

The company since 2008 is seeking Louisiana authors and topics in both fiction and non-fiction for publication. Check our Publishing Guidelines section on this site. To submit a query or manuscript, send it by e-mail to or by mail to the address below. Only topics about Louisiana history, people and culture will be considered.

For researchers Gehman keeps data bases and extensive files on people and issues involved in her research and writing. She is interested in sharing these on a limited basis with colleagues. These are personal files and not available on the Internet or in institutional archives.

After the home of Gehman and the office of Margaret Media flooded in Hurricane Katrina August 2005, Gehman stayed in New Orleans, but in June 2006 she relocated to a house in the historic district of Donaldsonville, LA, 55 miles upriver from the Crescent City. She maintains close business and social ties to New Orleans. 

Margaret Media, Inc. welcomes your comments and inquiries. Please visit us soon again.