by Kim Todd
That fall, the Buffalo Morning News ran a story about the flood of girls seeking newspaper work in Bly’s wake. (For all the stunt-generated debate about whether women should be factory seamstresses or servants, many women themselves seemed to think they should be reporters.) The Morning News highlighted Nelson as one of these aspirants. A little more than a month after the series ended, she published a book of her collected columns and made her way to the larger playing field of New York. The Morning News was dismissive of Nelson’s ambitions, perhaps not yet realizing the popularity of the new genre: “Occasionally her stories get into print, but like most of her sex who try to enter the newspaper ranks, she finds that the demand is limited.”
But if Nelson struggled at first, it wasn’t for long. The World had its feelers out, detecting any vivid writing anywhere, and the paper sensed her potential and hired her. Nelson started by re-creating her Chicago investigations in New York.
Pulitzer famously fired his newsroom with competition, often setting illustrator against illustrator and hiring two editors for the same job. Throughout the fall of 1888, Nelson and Bly jockeyed for space in the World’s Sunday pages, sometimes one taking the prime feature spot, sometimes the other. Bly was a star, but that didn’t excuse her from churning out daily racing prose. As a colleague noted, “She suffered the penalty paid by all sensation-writers of being compelled to hazard more and more theatric feats.” He added, “Nothing was too strenuous nor too perilous for her if it promised results.”
Drawing attention away from Nelson’s exposés, in an article that gently mocked a society-woman profile—“Hangman Joe at Home”—Bly offered a portrait of the executioner for the state of New York. The electric chair had just become the preferred mode of capital punishment, so part of his job was obsolete. He was not interested in an interview and responded gruffly when Bly showed up, but she took it as a challenge: “Nothing is very good that is easily gained.”
In a room filled with furniture he made himself (he was a carpenter, he stressed, though his signature construction was gallows), the hangman blamed the newspapers for romanticizing crime and making heroes of criminals, as Bly looked through his scrapbook of hangings. Did he have much contact with those scheduled to die, she asked. (He avoided them.) Always pursuing the “women’s sphere” angle, Bly asked whether women could observe hangings. (No.) When the executioner complained about newspapers further, she shrugged it off.
“It is the age of exaggeration, you know,” she said as she shook his hand and left.
No matter how thin the topic, Bly could excavate something worthwhile. She made a formidable competitor for newspaper space because she refused to be boring. “Should women propose?” she asked notable thinkers of the day a few weeks later. Listing professions now open to women, she wrote: “Is it just that an able (woman) lawyer shall be allowed to plead for everything except the hand of the man she loves?” And: “Shall (women) writers only woo imaginary people in their studies—propose only in stories?” In places, Bly seemed to rebel against the frothy assignment. Interviewing Chauncey M. Depew, a railroad magnate, she strayed from her purpose to ask his opinion on the recent presidential election. Republican Benjamin Harrison had unseated incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland a week earlier. Then she caught herself and recorded his view that women should, indeed, propose. While Bly generally presented the back-and-forth as fluffy fun, she also noted that these chivalric customs encourage deceit, teaching women that “it is proper and good form to express everything but that which they honestly feel.”
It’s hard not to speculate about Bly’s love life. Her persona was so sparkly and flirtatious, never failing to record a comment about her beauty, never shy about complimenting a good-looking man. In her early twenties, she must have seen her peers marrying. It would have been on her mind. In her asylum stories, she had gone out of her way to praise Frank Ingram, the assistant superintendent at Blackwell’s, who chatted with her at length and moved her to a quieter ward. Papers at the time noted his kind expression and attractive mustache and wondered at the developing closeness between the reporter and assistant superintendent. Was this series a trial run for making a proposal of her own, like asking newspapers where she wanted to work how their editors felt about hiring women?
Meanwhile, Nelson moved ahead with her factory investigations, anger and naked outrage displacing some of the Chicago humor. In “Horrors of a Slop Shop,” she described Freedman Brothers as a place where “modesty is mocked at, virtue debased, decency outraged, self-esteem murdered, and all that makes womanhood lovely and lovable crushed to death.” Women worked alongside men, the men at the sewing machines, the women finishing collar and cuffs and other details. The men pinched the women and ran their hands over their bodies. When one complained on behalf of another, she was told to stop wasting time. Cockroaches crawled across the paper wrapping a girl’s lunch. A boy, to her skeptical look, insisted he had documents proving he was fourteen.
Nell Nelson promotion in the Evening World, October 20, 1888
Evening World, October 20, 1888
In “They Work in an Inferno,” sewing beaver and chinchilla fur coats, Nelson met a seventeen-year-old named Anna who invited her to visit the tenement where the young woman lived with six brothers and sisters. Overcrowded, substandard housing was increasingly a hazard in New York where people crammed into poorly lit, unventilated spaces. Nelson didn’t stay long. Anna’s mother didn’t speak English or seem to want the reporter there, so Nelson dropped off a beefsteak and left. But what she saw formed the moral center of that day’s reporting. She ended with an overt call for action:
When a family of eight can thrive in one room, when five cents a day will board the father and half a pound of prunes with butcher’s scraps provide a soup for the maintenance of wife and children; when $3 is accepted as a fair compensation for seven days of labor of eleven hours each; when a foul-smelling, overheated, ill-ventilated, ratty fire-trap is regarded as an ideal workshop—then it seems that the time has come for action of some kind.
And people were listening. Back in Chicago, Nelson’s work had lingering effects. Industry in the area was roaring—its central location meant the riches of the West, in the form of logs, grain, and cattle passed through—but the city itself struggled to provide basic services. In August, when Nelson was still pacing Chicago alleys in search of sweatshops, the Women’s Federal Labor Union held a meeting to discuss Nelson’s articles. Were her Chicago Times reports true? If so, members should campaign for living wages, factory inspection laws, a reduction in child labor, and sanitary workplaces. One member whose sister had tried and failed to pay her bills on $2 a week, proposed a committee, in conjunction with other like-minded organizations in the city, to investigate. By October, they and twenty-six other Chicago associations, from the swanky Chicago Women’s Club to the African American literary society the Prudence Crandall Club, formed the Illinois Women’s Alliance. Numbers gave them power. And the rise of unions made citizens like these Chicago women more bold in requesting changes to city and state laws. In December, the IWA launched a campaign to appoint school inspectors to ensure children between eight and fourteen attended class at least twelve weeks per year.
Meanwhile, as Nelson forged her path in New York, Bly exposed a quack “magnetic healer,” and the Illinois Women’s Alliance agitated to fine factories employing underage workers,* the Chicago Times cast about for its next sensation.
Chapter 5
1888
Reckoning with the Evil of the Age
My judges preach against “free love” openly, practice it secretly.
—Victoria Woodhull, New York Times, 1871
In the fall of 1888, as Nell Nelson headed for New York, newspaper readers were caught up in a story from overseas. This one also featured women’s bodies, but not strong ones, capable of striding through the city, of performing hard and dexterous labor, of engaging in deception, but those displayed on a slab at a morgue. A killer, soon dubbed
“Jack the Ripper,” was ranging through the Whitechapel District in London. From early morning of September 1, when a cart driver stumbled across Polly Nichols on his way to work, columns flooded with descriptions of throats cut to the spine, sliced noses, a missing uterus, severed breasts. Here the women were dismembered by the papers and displayed for the public gaze as a warning to those who ventured into the city without money, without male protection. The urban landscape, rather than a locus for opportunity, became a field for predation. For many reporters, mostly male, the unsolved murders inspired a journalism obsessed with the identity of the killer who evaded capture and sent taunting letters to newspapers. Writers credited Jack the Ripper with an almost diabolical intelligence.
The Chicago Times reprinted Jack the Ripper articles but didn’t have an assigned reporter in London to give the paper an edge. Inspired by the circulation surge from “City Slave Girls,” though, editor James J. West doubled down on stunt reporting. One day, he approached Charles Chapin, his city editor, and revealed his newest brainstorm. Horrified, later calling it the “yellowest” idea he’d ever heard in a newspaper office, Chapin refused to have anything to do with it.
Chapin thought West had forgotten about it, even when the publisher requested a “bright man and a woman reporter” for a special assignment. But in early December, Chapin recalled, he went into the composing room and saw the headline: “Chicago Abortioners.” He quit before the edition hit the streets. (That exact wording doesn’t appear in the series, but Chapin’s memory might have faded: he wrote his account thirty-two years later, in Sing Sing, where he was serving time for murdering his wife.)
In the initial articles, under the all-caps headline “INFANTICIDE,” a male reporter asked cabmen where he could find relief for a relative who had been “led into error.” Midwives were notorious for knowing how to end pregnancies, and he sought out German and Scandinavian practitioners in the poorer section of the city and made his case. Some proposed medicines and places for her to stay during recovery. Others said they could help with adoption. But most demanded to see the young woman in question.
Headline for the abortion series in the Chicago Times, December 23, 1888
INFANTICIDE headline. Chicago Times, December 23, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
Enter the Girl Reporter. It would be hard, the Times admitted, to find just the right person for the delicate job, someone willing to “parade her shame” in front of multiple doctors and the male reporter who escorted her, “a young woman of intelligence, nerve, and newspaper training.” But somehow they did. Writing under the byline “Girl Reporter,” the female journalist and her male colleague refined their story over the next few days, switching from midwives to prominent doctors, claiming she was six weeks pregnant rather than two or three months, stressing to physicians that money was no object.
The Girl Reporter spent long days going from office to office. She visited Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, the first female member of the American Medical Association, who treated her kindly but advised her to have the child and get married, even if it would be “but a step toward divorce.” She interrupted Dr. John Chaffee at his lunch, and he urged her to have the operation right away, telling her, “Thousands are doing it all the time. The only thing to do when one gets into trouble is to get out again.” (A few days later, Chaffee was arrested for giving a woman an abortion that killed her.) Dr. Edwin Hale, a controversial figure since publishing his pamphlet “On the Homeopathic Treatment of Abortion,” gave the reporter a bottle of big, black (and harmless, the doctor assured her) pills to take before admitting herself to the hospital. That way, when he was called to her bedside and performed the operation surreptitiously, they could blame the medication for causing a miscarriage.
Illustration of medicine offered to the Girl Reporter in the Chicago Times, December 18, 1888
“Dr Hale’s Pills.” Chicago Times, December 18, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
The Girl Reporter’s voice was as unique as the topic of her research. She was determined: “I felt that there was some big ruffians to be brought down yet, and I was anxious to have a composed mind and a strong heart.” She was weary: “Tonight as I write this I am sick of the whole business. I did not suppose there was so much rascality among the ‘reputable’ people.” Her prose teemed with self-conscious literary flourishes—puns and alliteration, references to Shakespeare and the Aeneid. This, alternating with casual exclamations, like “ugh” and “really swell,” the gushing enthusiasm for favorite novels and her Sunday-school moralizing, all seemed like the first attempts of a big reader and beginning writer. She wrestled with the constant need for disguise, feeling more compassion for the distraught woman she pretended to be than she expected: “I manage somehow or other to lose my own individuality all together. I really don’t recognize myself half the time.” There was the sense of a real person trying to figure things out.
It wasn’t chance that, of the almost thirty daily newspapers in Chicago during the 1880s, the Chicago Times was the one to give her this assignment. Notoriously trashy, the Times generated as much scandal among its staff as it reported in its pages. Many male Times reporters haunted the Whitechapel Club, an organization named after Jack the Ripper’s hunting grounds, admiring photographs of beheadings on the walls, drinking out of cups made from skulls, and nurturing their literary aspirations.
This willingness to flout societal rules and journalistic standards made for some wretched reporting; it also opened a door to topics that no one else dared cover. Sometimes, an allegiance to propriety and respectability becomes a tool for censorship. For the Chicago Times, the unprecedented nature of the debates about reproductive rights was accidental, an artifact of shamelessness and the desire to sell papers by whatever means necessary. Only a paper with nothing to lose could write about abortion so frankly.
For most of the country’s history, abortion before quickening (the moment at about twenty weeks when a woman could detect fetal movement) had been accepted. But at the time the Girl Reporter wrote, laws were growing more restrictive and knowledge of abortion techniques more actively suppressed. This crackdown was partially the result of the fact that throughout the nineteenth century, birth rates were declining and abortion was on the rise. Increased population density in cities allowed remedies to spread by word of mouth. The printing boom resulted in mass-produced anatomically informative pamphlets, magazines, and journals, giving women information they needed to control their fertility. Some estimates put the figure as high as one in five pregnancies in some areas ending in abortion, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, while early in the 1800s, the rate was closer to one in twenty-five. Resolve built to shut down the practice: in 1800, no states had antiabortion laws, while in 1900, all but one did.
And over the course of the century, it would become clear that regulating women’s reproductive options—whether by laws, shame, or misinformation—was intimately related to regulating their speech. Censorship of abortion discussion specifically and women’s health information in general created the need for journalists like the Girl Reporter, who wrote about female bodies frankly, and the hunger to hear what they had to say.
The first wave of antiabortion legislation appeared in the late 1820s and 1830s. In 1828 in New York, providing medicine or an operation that produced abortion before quickening became a misdemeanor and after quickening became a felony—unless the procedure would save the life of the mother or had been signed off on by two physicians. At the time, those with rigorous training who published in the top-tier journals considered themselves the real medical experts. They were attempting to distinguish their practices from both quacks with pieces of paper from diploma mills and from midwives. Midwives often had the most experience with childbirth, and women often preferred them, stealing what doctors felt was their rightful business. But midwives often had no formal training at all. (And formal training would not have been available to them, as most medical schools
did not admit women.) Antiabortion legislation was one way to make sure business flowed into the “legitimate” doctors’ offices.
In addition to agitating for antiabortion laws to guarantee their market share, early nineteenth-century physicians trafficked in misinformation to undermine the authority of midwives. Maintaining patient ignorance was part of their strategy. They suggested that drugs used to cause abortions didn’t work. They disparaged savin and pennyroyal—known to every midwife as abortifacients—as “useless” or “dangerous,” writing that no medicines could safely provide that kind of relief. Enslaved women used cotton root to control fertility, doctors observed, and they searched for medicines that would stop a cotton-root-caused abortion and force the pregnancy to go through. (Women who read medical journals also took note and requested cotton root from their pharmacists.)
Newspapers supported the physicians’ campaign with tales of evil abortionists and innocents taken in. The Daily Commercial Advertiser in Buffalo in 1837 featured the story of a Chicago woman, pregnant by her brother-in-law, who went to a Michigan hotel for an abortion, only to then be poisoned by her sister. “They have both been excommunicated from the church,” the paper noted. The same year the Long-Island Star covered a doctor who performed an abortion on his lover, killing her. In 1843, the Courier reprinted an article from the New York Sun describing “the infernal plot” of a pastor who slept with a young woman in his church and then gave her drugs to cause an abortion. And as reporters and editorial pages involved themselves in these campaigns, abortion—its fascination, its hidden nature, its ubiquity—became intertwined with the development of journalism.