Sensational
Page 1
Dedication
For the ink-stained Amazons
Epigraph
I write the truth because I love it and because there is no living creature whose anger I fear or whose praise I court.
—Nellie Bly, The Evening World, 1895
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue: The Case of the Girl Reporter 1888
Part I: Voyaging Out (1885–1890)
Chapter 1: Trials of a Working Girl 1885–1887
Chapter 2: Opportunity in Disguise 1887
Chapter 3: Detective for the People 1888
Chapter 4: Hunger for Trouble 1888
Chapter 5: Reckoning with the Evil of the Age 1888
Chapter 6: New Territory 1889–1890
Part II: Swashbuckling (1890–1896)
Chapter 7: Under the Gold Dome 1890–1891
Chapter 8: Exercising Judgment 1892
Chapter 9: A Place to Speak Freely 1892
Chapter 10: Guilt and Innocence 1892–1893
Chapter 11: Across the Atlantic 1893–1894
Chapter 12: Girl No More 1894–1895
Chapter 13: Full Speed Ahead 1895–1896
Part III: Facing the Storm (1896–Present)
Chapter 14: A Smear of Yellow 1896–1897
Chapter 15: All Together in New Bedford 1898
Chapter 16: Reversal of Fortune 1898–1912
Chapter 17: In the Wake 1898–1900
Chapter 18: Vanishing Ink 1900–Present
Chapter 19: Anonymous Sources Present
Chapter 20: A Collection of Endings 1899–1922
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Index
About the Author
Also by Kim Todd
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction. The dialogue is taken from newspaper articles, letters, interviews, and reporters’ memoirs. As required by their profession, some of these journalists could be quite self-mythologizing. Unless I have evidence to the contrary (such as a census record showing a woman couldn’t have been born when she said), I take them at their word.
Also, I refer to some writers by their pseudonyms and some by their legal names (though marriages and casual attitudes toward consistent spelling render even these unstable). They created characters to conceal and reveal themselves, and sometimes the character overshadowed the woman behind her. Those known mainly from a single pseudonym—Nellie Bly, Nell Nelson, and Nora Marks—I refer to by their pen name. Those who used a pseudonym only sparingly or inconsistently, I refer to by their actual names. It makes sense to call Elizabeth Cochrane “Nellie Bly” when that was how the whole country knew her and how she signed many letters. It’s less logical to refer to Elizabeth Banks as “Polly Pollock” when only a handful of articles at the start of her career carried that byline.
Prologue
1888
The Case of the Girl Reporter
Have I not been drinking moxie all this spring?
—Caroline Lockhart, Boston Post, 1895
In late November 1888, a young woman threaded her way through the grit-filled streets of Chicago’s downtown, skirting horse-drawn cabs and wagons teetering under sacks of grain. When she finally arrived at the doctor’s office, she sat hot-faced in the waiting room while her companion pulled the doctor aside and explained the nature of the problem. The physician, small and alert like a sparrow, turned to the girl and tried to calm her: “You must not be scared about it,” the doctor urged. “It is perfectly safe. You suffer more from fright than you would the operation.” The patient, still agitated, put off a full examination. She’d come back another day, she promised, to arrange the abortion.
A few days later, the young woman visited a different doctor. This one had a German accent and a diploma from a German university under crossed swords on his wall. She described her situation, saying she was from Memphis, and, like many girls, she’d taken the train to Chicago because of its reputation. Then she haltingly made her request. Did she have any other health problems, the doctor asked? Was she in pain? When she said no, to both, he wrote her a prescription for ergot, a fungus thought to induce premature labor. She should go to her hotel, he said, draw a warm bath, drink a hot toddy, and take two teaspoonfuls. Don’t follow the dosage written on the prescription, the doctor warned, because it was wrong; otherwise, the pharmacist might get suspicious about the drug’s true purpose. The physician looked her in the eye, handed her the slip of paper, said, “Remember how to take it tonight, do not be alarmed if it produce[s] pain,” and sent her back out into the hectic city.
She went to another doctor after that. And another. In the course of three weeks, she visited more than two hundred physicians. Many agreed to perform an abortion, a surprising number as it was illegal. The police department surgeon, Dr. C. C. P. Silva, plump with a black goatee, highlighted the danger: “Inflammation might set in, and Lord knows what might follow.” Then he swore her to secrecy and said he’d do it for $75. The head of the Chicago Medical Society rocked back on his heels, saying, “There are enough ways in this state for a man to get into the penitentiary without taking a crowbar and prying his way in,” and refused to do it. But then he gave her directions to a man who would. Hundreds of girls have had abortions, a female physician assured her. And she added, “It will not do for you to feel so timid. . . . You must feel daring and brave.”
The slight young woman with tidy dark hair recorded these facts, but also assumptions and attitudes—euphemisms, opinions on sex out of wedlock, the way doctors made her feel shame or comfort or alarm. One, fatherly, advised her to marry; one, leering with a tobacco-stained mouth, made her suspect that he felt more sympathy for her lover than he did for her. Some called abortion “murder” and “a sin.” Another brushed away concerns about damnation, saying: “If I were a girl I would get rid of my trouble if I had to go to the devil rather than live in disgrace before my parents.” Though she had assumed women seeking abortions must be poor, the doctors’ fancy offices and high prices—ranging up to $250*—made it clear many patients must be middle- or upper-class. All the walking and asking, occasionally pretending to weep, was tiring. Some days the encounters left the woman filled with despair, even though she was not, actually, pregnant. But usually a sense of righteous anger carried her through, as when a Dr. Knox condescendingly brushed her aside. She fumed and imagined her retort: “Don’t prate of virtue to me; I am as good as the rest of the world, only less lucky.” Traveling from one end of the city to the other, past boutique windows displaying lace-up boots and butcher shops with pens of hissing geese, she captured what it might be like to be a woman in a certain kind of difficulty, looking for a way out.
Though one physician suspected she was an “adventuress,” none knew she was actually an undercover reporter, bent on revealing the extent of the city’s abortion practice. When her exposé, a monthlong project for the Chicago Times, hit the stands, the city editor quit in disgust, letters of praise and outrage flooded the news desk, lawsuits for libel piled high. Discussions of abortion, in a daily paper? Readers found it repellent—and irresistible. They also found the message hard to decipher. On the one hand, the writer referred to only as the “Girl Reporter” condemned abortion in the strongest terms; on the other, she published detailed instructions for how and where to get one, including which medicines to take and at what dosage. A heated discussion blazed through the editorial pages about women’s bodies and the power imbalance between the sexes.
The Girl Reporter’s series had such a wide reach because she dared to talk abou
t women and sex and the way it felt to be a woman talking about sex—embarrassed, threatened, angry. Her Chicago Times series took all these speeding trains—experiments in journalism, a demand for women’s rights, a medical field struggling to dilute the influence of midwives—and put them on a collision course. In her articles, the Girl Reporter also discussed the challenges of this particular assignment and of her role as a woman reporter. For example, after a long day of playing pregnant and recording justifications and refusals, she reflected on her weeks spent tromping from one doctor to another: “Today I have been wondering whether, if I had to do it over again, I would have taken a position on a newspaper staff. It used to be the dream of my childhood that I would some day become a writer—a great writer—and astonish the world with my work. And this dream had not entirely vanished yet, thank goodness.”
Then she added, “But did I ever suppose that I would have to commence on a newspaper by filling an assignment like this?
“Well, no.”
Entering journalism, a predominantly male field, meant competing with men on their own terms, she knew, and she was ready. But, ironically, for this story, one of her first, the reporter’s sex was not a disadvantage; it was a necessity.
“A man couldn’t have done it,” she concluded.
The Chicago Times’s Girl Reporter might seem exceptional in her readiness to risk scandal to tell a story no one else would, but she was not alone. The same script was playing out in cities from coast to coast. She was just one of the nation’s “girl stunt reporters,” pioneering a new genre of investigative journalism, going undercover to reveal societal ills. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, women from Colorado to Missouri to Massachusetts dressed in shabby clothes and sneaked into textile mills to report on factory conditions, slipped behind the scenes at corrupt adoption agencies, fainted in the street to test treatment at public hospitals.
At the time, American journalism, a field on the cusp of professionalization, was plotting its future. A revolution in printing technology made putting out a paper cheaper than ever before, and an influx of immigrants offered a tantalizing new audience. Newspaper rooms, from San Francisco’s Examiner to New York’s World, battled viciously for market share with weapons of scandal and innovation. In the process, they shaped the growing metropolis, reflecting it back to itself. On the one hand, cities were engines of opportunity; on the other, magnets for sin. They drew people seeking better lives and sometimes swallowed them.
Publishers were looking for a new kind of story to fill those numerous pages, to tempt those new readers, to stoke their anxieties but also feed their hopes. And when Nellie Bly’s 1887 “Inside the Madhouse” series for the World hit the streets of New York, readers couldn’t get enough. She had faked insanity to get committed to the asylum at Blackwell’s Island so she could document the starvation and abuse of patients. Even more compelling than the situation she revealed was the way she told the story—a firsthand account from a charismatic narrator, filled with dramatic twists and laced with warmth and humor. The exposé sold thousands of copies of the World, resulted in the municipality committing $50,000 for better asylum management, and created a publishing sensation.
Slipping on a disguise and courting danger suddenly became a way for writers to get a foot in the door. By crafting long-form narratives that stretched over weeks and read like novels, using engaging female narrators to explore issues of deep concern to women, and promising real-world results, stunt reporters changed laws, launched labor movements, and redefined what it meant to be a journalist. These footloose exploits were so sought after by readers and publishers that reporters willing to attempt them commanded high pay. And, while in 1880 it was almost impossible for a woman writer to escape the household hints of the ladies’ page (the kind of writing one female journalist termed “prostitution of the brains”), by 1900, papers were publishing more bylines by women than men.
Stunt reporters put a new female character in the headlines—not a victim of assault or murder—but a protagonist. Bravery was their brand. It was like they stepped out of the adventure tales that flew off the bookstore shelves, except that they were real.
But it was a disorienting sense of reality, as the freedom displayed in these stories was at odds with the limited rights of American women in the late nineteenth century. More and more were moving to the big cities, finding jobs, living on their own, but the Victorian ideals of a certain kind of womanhood still clung like a corset. Women couldn’t vote. No laws protected them from sexual harassment or marital rape. Wives, in particular, struggled to be seen as full citizens: under “coverture,” a common law legal doctrine imported from Britain, their legal selfhood was subsumed under their husband’s. In many states, married women couldn’t own property, sign contracts, or earn a salary. When Myra Bradwell, denied the ability to practice law at the Illinois bar, took her case to the Supreme Court in 1873, Justice Joseph Bradley highlighted “coverture” in his response: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” Bradwell lost her case.
And it wasn’t just a legal issue. In a post-Darwin era fascinated with biology, women’s inferiority was codified by science. Psychologists, physiologists, and sociologists all weighed in. Phrenology—the determination of character by skull shape—revealed women to be naturally childlike, as did analysis of their stature and rounded features. Their nerves—alleged to be smaller and more delicate—made them sensitive and impressionable. Doctors increasingly diagnosed hysteria, a uniquely female ailment that could result in a patient being confined to her bedroom or sent to an asylum.
Then there was the question of womanhood on the page. Writing by women has historically been devalued, though much read, and the nineteenth century was no exception. Budding novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was so concerned that in an 1830 biographical sketch of the 1600s religious leader Anne Hutchinson for the Salem Gazette, he took a long detour to detail his fears about women writers in his own age. Why was their work so popular? What was the cost for creators of actual literature? He worried that “the ink-stained Amazons will expel their rivals by actual pressure, and petticoats wave triumphantly over the field” and mulled the “impropriety in the display of woman’s naked mind to the gaze of the world.” Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century female writers fended off this kind of disparagement in a variety of ways, from adopting male pseudonyms, like George Eliot and the Brontës, to penning essays and stories where the sex of the narrator is obscured, like Mary Austin in her Land of Little Rain.
The stunt reporters challenged these views of what a woman should be. They couldn’t cast a ballot, but they could interview presidential candidates. They couldn’t sit on juries, but the World could impanel twelve female reporters and editors to offer their perspective on court cases. Anatomy textbooks might detail their weakness and frailty, but they could leap into the cold ocean and face down burly factory bosses. Under the guise of journalism, they adopted roles forbidden to them, demonstrating their fitness to serve on a search-and-rescue team or drive a train. Unlike female writers who masked their sex, the girl stunt reporters told the truth experienced by their bodies. They wrote about sexual harassment. They wrote about seeking abortions. They wrote about crushes and concerns about their hair. These reporters were deemed silly, sentimental, or sensational—all criticisms of “feminine” writing—but the power of their voices made Hawthorne’s fears come true. They changed the journalistic landscape.
Rather than being an oddity of history, stunt reporters altered the trajectory of both traditional reporting and memoir. Along with other writers like Ida B. Wells and Victoria Earle Matthews, they developed techniques of “muckraking,” a style of investigative journalism first condemned then embraced as a noble tradition. They employed the intimate tone and scene-based structure that would later characterize the “New Journalism” of the 1960s and ’70s and the “creative nonfiction” that follo
wed. Their disguises allowed them to go deep into the lives of their subjects, providing early examples of “immersion journalism.” But while Bly is well known, most of the women who followed in her wake have been forgotten, their legacy obscured. The identity of the Chicago Times’s “Girl Reporter,” for example, remains a mystery.
After a little more than a decade of headlines and book deals and newspaper profits, these writers faced a backlash that stripped them of their credibility and, ultimately, credit for their innovations. Their assignments shifted from public hazards to circus elephants and nights spent in a haunted house. Awareness of the body, both by the writers and in half-page illustrations, was criticized as indecent. Stunt reporting, which played a critical role in the 1890s circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, became synonymous with “yellow journalism.” It was disdained as a particularly female variety of trash. As newspaper editor W. C. Brann wrote at the time, “A careful examination of the ‘great dailies’ will demonstrate that at least half of the intellectual slime that is befouling the land is fished out of the gutter by females.” Turn-of-the-century advice books for aspiring women journalists warned them to steer clear of stunts. And these criticisms stuck, effectively ejecting these reporters from the journalistic tradition they helped forge. If the form is known at all, it is referenced with a sneer. Even today, one scholar describes the stunt reporter genre as “semipornographic titillation” that “cast a spell of infamy over the image of the woman journalist which only years of sober professional accomplishment finally exorcized.”
Stunt reporters and their treatment raise the question of what it means to write in a female body, from an overtly female perspective, in their time and in our own. It is the same question that haunts many women who write honestly about their lives: how to tell the truth and still be taken seriously. In her 1931 lecture to the Women’s Service League, Virginia Woolf described a writer as an angler, letting her line drift as she dreams over the water, hoping to hook something astonishing. But then the woman is violently jerked from her creative reverie, all writing halted, because “she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.” Woolf told her audience that, over the years, she’d solved many writerly problems, but “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt any woman has solved it yet.”