This classification of muckraker, which I did not like - Ida Tarbell

When a woman enters the office of a great daily she is painfully conscious that she is a woman — just a woman. She cannot at first grasp the idea that the great daily is a wonderful and almost perfect machine that makes what she terms cruel demands.
That daily paper is a wonderful creation, and all who serve it become a part of the machinery, and not individuals. It takes a woman some time to realize this.
She goes into the office, receives her first assignment, does her best on it and next morning finds that not a word of it is used. She takes her next assignment, and perhaps two of the ten inches she wrote is used. Finally, she goes to the busy man with the glasses at the night desk and asks why. She is coldly informed that her first articles were “rot.” She thinks it is brutal and hard and does not understand why the men ignore the fact that she is a woman.

One of my great satisfactions has been a revival of curiosity. I lost it in the 1920's and early 1930's. Human affairs seemed to me to be headed for collapse. War was not over, and men were taking it for granted it was. The failure of the hopes of previous generations had taught us nothing. The sense of disaster was strong in me. What I most feared was that we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character. If you believed as I did (and do) that permanent human betterment must rest on a sound moral basis, then our house would collapse sooner or later. It was taking a longer view, looking at my fifty years as a whole, that revived me. I thought I saw a spiral, was eager to prove it. Once more I am curious. It is an armchair curiosity-no longer can I go out and see for myself; but that has its advantages. It compels longer reflection, intensifies the conviction that taking time, having patience, doing one thing at a time are the essentials for solid improvement, for finding answers. Perhaps, I tell myself, I may from an armchair find better answers than I have yet found to those questions which set me at my day's work, the still unanswered questions of the most fruitful life for women in civilization, the true nature of revolutions, even the mystery of God. It is the last of the three which disturbs me least. The greatest of mysteries, it has become for me the greatest of realities.

Even more hopeful, if not so clear to many people, is the increasing knowledge that we are getting of man as an individual and as a mass, coming to us particularly from men of science.