by Kim Todd
The situation was particularly dire, the paper argued, as American-born Caucasian women, wanting small families, vibrant social lives, and careers, took advantage of abortion more than others, a trend that threatened to give “control of our government and country to the foreigner.” The paper proposed remedies. Women needed instruction on the delights of motherhood. Maybe there should be a lying-in hospital. Or doctors should meet stricter certification requirements. Preachers shouldn’t be squeamish about addressing abortion from the pulpit.
Though the Times’s editorials railed against the evils of “infanticide,” the paper’s reportage raised more questions than it answered. For example, there was the case of the father who wrote in and said he’d reluctantly decided to let his eighteen-year-old daughter read the articles. What was she supposed to think? Despite the paper’s moralizing, it would be hard to avoid the impression that abortion was common, available to anyone who could steel herself to ask for it. She might even meet with kindness and understanding. As many readers dourly predicted, no one was arrested, though Dr. C. C. P. Silva was fired as police surgeon.
Ad for abortion-causing pills in the Chicago Times, April 1, 1888
Pennyroyal ad. Chicago Times, April 1, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
This building tension about a practice that was publicly condemned, privately embraced—a practice that it was illegal even to write about—split politically engaged women in the same way stunt journalists divided their reporter peers. The same question lurked at the heart of each divide. Was it manipulation at the hands of unscrupulous men, or a way for women to seize control of their lives? Suffragist Susan B. Anthony, in an 1875 speech, portrayed abortion as another example of women’s victimization by men’s drunkenness and lack of self-control, citing “the newspaper reports every day of every year of scandals and outrages, of wife murders and paramour shooting, of abortions and infanticides.” It’s important to note, too, that part of her sense of women’s experience came from headlines. But, as the Chicago Times reporting showed, many women sought out abortions on their own, telling doctors they wanted to wait to have children, or to have only two. Even the Girl Reporter was conflicted, adamantly opposed to abortion, adamantly in favor of women’s equality. When one doctor, sympathetic, justified offering the operation by saying, “A woman should have the same chances as a man has and society makes it much harder,” the Girl Reporter added “amen,” in parentheses. Then she went ahead and published his name for public scorn anyway.
Never missing a chance for self-promotion, the Times capitalized on curiosity about the Girl Reporter. An illustration on the editorial page showed five sketches of thin, dark-haired women with bangs in front and a bun in the back, wearing an apron over a collared shirt. The figures looked down, or up, with expressions pensive or half-smiling, line-drawn Mona Lisas. “For the Doctors,” the caption taunted. “Guess which one of the above is the ‘girl reporter’?”
Illustration featuring the Girl Reporter in the Chicago Times, December 21, 1888
“Guess the girl reporter.” Chicago Times, December 21, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
Students at one college sent her a bouquet; students at another sent her a gold pen, a “small token of esteem in appreciation of the services you are rendering in the medical profession and the world at large.” The paper published her bashful letters of thanks and her fiery letters refuting doctors who claimed she’d misunderstood their intentions. On December 26 and 27, she wrapped up her findings, declaring, with a tone of relief, “My pilgrimage of disgrace is ended.” And then, in late December 1888, while her story spread from its Illinois epicenter, the Girl Reporter disappeared from the Chicago Times pages and from the public record.
“Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen,” wrote a male editor for the trade publication the Journalist in an issue about female reporters in 1889. “This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible.” Some who used pseudonyms parlayed their disguises into decades-long careers. Some, like the Girl Reporter, never emerged from undercover.
While Bly’s exposé was an inspiration for many aspiring writers, the Girl Reporter’s was more of a cautionary tale. That kind of assignment, those kinds of topics, were a line one might not want to cross. Yes, she received applause for her bravery, but the condemnation of the reporter as indecent was what lingered, at least in the minds of young journalists like Elizabeth Banks. Writing for the society pages of the St. Paul Globe, Banks was keenly aware of class. Such distinctions weren’t supposed to exist in America, but every time an upper-class woman offered to have lunch with the reporter, as long as she didn’t let anyone know, or she was made to wait for her ride home shivering outside in the cold after getting details of a party, the lines appeared, like invisible ink revealed by heat. It intrigued and repelled her.
But at least she was writing, finally.
Banks had been dreaming about it for years. Born in 1865 in Trenton, New Jersey, Elizabeth Banks was the fifth child of Sarah Ann Brister and John Brister, a house painter. When Elizabeth was eleven, her mother died, and the girl was packed off to live with relatives in Wisconsin. She was raised on an “experimental farm” where her uncle pored over The Scientific Farmer, trying various techniques that never were successful enough to pay off the mortgage. Rural life had its charms. A boy who lived nearby pulled her on a sled through a snowy field. Oak trees filtered the sunlight, and a creek slicing through the meadow offered a cool place to dangle bare feet on a hot day. But most of her memories centered on dragging out of bed at four a.m. to boil potatoes for breakfast, the first chore of a day full of them—feeding chickens, shucking peas, picking currants, washing dishes, weeding onions—and the sting of being hit if she left silk on an ear of corn.
Respite came through animals, which she loved, telling her troubles to the cows and mourning every dead chick, and through reading. She savored Bible tales, short stories serialized in the weekly newspaper, and, especially, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh.” The epic poem told the story of an orphan sent to live with an aunt who tries to make a lady of her, dismissing the young Aurora’s thirst to be an artist like Keats or Byron. Aurora Leigh’s attraction to books is beyond passionate. They save her. Early in the saga, Aurora Leigh turns down the chance to marry her wealthy cousin and moves to London to launch her writing career. Elizabeth Banks had no trouble imaging herself as the heroine, struggling with an oppressive aunt, taking refuge in books. As she gathered and sold eggs and watched over neighbor’s babies to scrape together money for college, certain lines echoed:
“A harmless life, she called a virtuous life.
A quiet life which was not life at all.”
After attending Downer College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, where she paid her way by ironing and washing dishes for the school, Banks wrote editors all over the country, but no one offered her a reporting job. She settled for typing for a grocer in St. Paul, Minnesota, a move that got her away from the farm and let her use some of her college skills. But in her spare time, she wrote up a piece about the life of a typewriter girl and sent it in to one of the papers. She basically interviewed herself, writing about a typist for a mercantile company who pays $5 of her $8 a week in rent, and sends out her laundry, leaving not much left of her take-home pay. But the article did the trick, and soon ink from her very own words smeared her fingers.
Exhilarated, she quit the grocer’s. She headed straight to the office of the Globe, a glowing redbrick and terra-cotta building, the tallest in St. Paul. Her article had been published, and now that she knew her writing was good enough, she wanted to be a newspaper girl, she announced to the paper’s owner.
The white-whiskered man told her the writing wasn’t that good, then pondered her request.
“A newspaper girl, a newspaper girl.”
He paused, then continued, more forcefully, “Don’t think of it my p
oor child! Be anything, but don’t be a newspaper girl.”
But when Banks threatened to go to Chicago, the wickedest city in the Midwest, the one whose dangerous glamour tempted innocent girls from small towns to catch trains to their ruin, the editor relented. She could do office work in the mornings, and in the afternoons she could pitch stories to the editors.
A bubbly fashion article earned her a desk in the newsroom and the pseudonym “Polly Pollock.” For months, Polly Pollock stayed late at society balls to record the cut of hostess’s dress sleeves, wrote about disappointing Christmas gifts, and lamented the persistence of the bustle.
Elsewhere in the Globe, Eva McDonald, writing as Eva Gay, hired herself out as a lady’s maid. She put on a servant’s dress and penned a long-running series, funny and full of misadventure with its descriptions of coddled pugs and society women smoking opium cigarettes. What an excellent way to puncture the pretensions of the moneyed class. Elizabeth Banks took note.
The closest Banks came to a “stunt” was attempting to act like a “womanly woman” for an entire day, an expectation endlessly detailed in the Woman’s Kingdom (the page where her articles appeared) and one she constantly failed at in her personal life. In this role, with instructions plucked from society parties and novels, she prayed, gossiped, sang a love song and played the piano as accompaniment, planned her winter hat while daydreaming at church, then offered praise for the sermon over dinner. That night she prayed some more: “Please make me a mean, rascally, wicked man, or even a masculine woman with a mission—anything, O, Lord, but a sweet, womanly woman!”
It wasn’t the kind of writing Elizabeth Banks wanted to do. To learn what else might be possible, she continued to read. When she’d been at the Globe only a few months, on December 20, 1888, the paper ran the article “The Chicago Sensation,” telling the story of the Girl Reporter who sought an abortion from prominent doctors. The stunt appeared to bear out all the editor’s fears of what might await a young female journalist intent on proving herself in the big city. Banks was shocked. The indecent assignment seemed to show no care for the reporter’s reputation. Who would do that? As a woman who aspired to write, she observed carefully how other female writers were treated—what earned censure, what garnered praise. And many found the abortion stunt appalling. Later, she would call the exposé an example of articles that “are so hideous and disgusting as to make one wonder how in the land of America, where chivalry of man towards woman is supposed to have reached its highest point, men can be found willing to take editorial positions which necessitate their assigning a woman to go out and degrade herself for the sake of making ‘space.’” The response of the Globe itself was more temperate: “The exposure made by the Times of the existence of the crime of infanticide seems to have been done thoroughly and conscientiously, as it surely was an exhibition of fearless newspaper enterprise.”
Chapter 6
1889–1890
New Territory
Go to work, and stop sentimentalizing about “woman’s sphere.” Any woman that is a woman carries her sphere with her wherever she goes—be it in a ballroom or newspaper office.
—Winifred Sweet, San Francisco Examiner, 1890
Stepping off the boat from Oakland in the spring of 1889, Winifred Sweet found herself at the head of Market Street, the broad cobblestone thoroughfare that sliced the heart of San Francisco, from the Ferry Building on the water, past storefronts and advertisements for beer, paper boxes, and artificial limbs. Streetcars lurched on rails embedded in packed dirt; horses pulled gilt-painted cabs. San Francisco was metropolitan, bustling, but it could feel a bit hollow, like a mining town thrown up in haste at the first glint of gold. Outside the urban core, treeless hills and sand dunes rippled to the ocean. A visitor from New York described a city of low buildings and oozing mud, characterized by the fact that no one had been there long. “The whole atmosphere of the place is charged with a vigorous, disrespectful sort of youth,” the observer concluded.
The want ads of the San Francisco Examiner and other local papers sketched the dangers for someone like Winifred Sweet, a young woman with few friends, arriving in an unfamiliar place. Concern about sex out of wedlock and its revelation by pregnancy was constant. A slew of ads made the usual promises to cure “monthly irregularities.” A Rev. J. W. Ellsworth suggested that, “Women who have fallen and wish to reform can find a Christian home and friends” by writing him a letter. And finally, in the personals: “Minnie . . . come home; all is forgiven.”
But Winifred was not one to be intimidated. Orphaned at fourteen, when her mother died not long after her father, she’d grown up in the Midwest under her older sister Ada’s care. The two sisters looked alike, with the same unruly reddish-blonde hair, but their temperaments could not have been more distinct. Ada had the military bearing of her father, a Union solider, and portraits show sober clothing, serious expressions.
Ada Sweet
Ada Sweet, portrait, c. 1882. (Chicago History Museum)
In contrast, Winifred preferred to bedeck her head with towering constructions of feathers and velvet. While Ada Sweet arranged for Winifred to attend the staid Mary A. Burnham girls’ boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, Winifred had been swept up by the desire to be an actress and spent several years on the road. As a performer she struggled, playing roles like “ZoZo, the Magic Queen” rather than Ophelia, and it left her discouraged but not daunted. She’d already navigated New York City and been stranded in small towns with rickety theaters. She had taken the train across the country to find a missing brother, fending off marriage proposals along the way, locating him on a ranch in the southwest. Her sister Minnie had died a year and a half before, and now she’d come to California to visit her brother-in-law.
Ada, a noted Chicago reformer who supported her younger siblings by working as a United States pension agent, had urged Winifred to give up her attempts at an acting career and try reporting. Deeply invested in pulling Chicago from the muck and making it a healthy, compassionate city, Ada saw how the Women’s Club responded to Nell Nelson’s daring journalism. It fired them up, so that the society women were suddenly engaged in the lives of factory girls and poor children missing school. The bravura required by journalistic stunts might be a perfect fit for her younger sister, who, with her acting career languishing, needed another way to make a living. Winifred might be impetuous, but she was a good writer, as evidenced by her letters home, some of which Ada had arranged to be printed in the Chicago Tribune as a series on “Confessions of an Actress” by “Columbine.”
On the page, Winifred poked fun at herself, admitting that while she considered herself a “heaven-born genius” as an actor, her friends generally thought she was a “stage-struck idiot.” She mocked her own inexperience, reporting that she delivered her first-ever line, “My Lord, the carriage awaits,” with such a tone of tragic intensity that she almost got fired. And when she finally landed a leading role and strode to center stage so the villains could abduct her, her fellow actors missed their cue. No one showed up for so long, she confided, “I began to think I should have to abduct myself.” Though her dream of being a romantic heroine with the need to “weep and denounce” hadn’t panned out, she knew she wanted a life that would let her roam. And in San Francisco, she found it. She immediately determined to stay and, since her first attempts had met with laughter and her sister’s approval, try to make her way as a writer.
For someone considering a journalistic career, the San Francisco Examiner would have been hard to miss. In the spring of 1887, just as Bly headed to New York, William Randolph Hearst took his own risk. For at least two years, he’d been haunting the Examiner offices when he was home from college, sending his father, the wealthy Senator George Hearst, letters of advice on the paper’s management. He’d been studying Pulitzer’s World like a textbook, hiring college friends from the Harvard Lampoon to write columns, urging his father to spend more freely, chiding him: “The paper must be built up,
” and noting “cheap labor has been entirely ineffectual.” After this lengthy campaign, and when it appeared he never would return to Harvard to finish his degree, the twenty-three-year-old had gotten what he wanted—a newspaper of his own. On March 4, a change appeared on the masthead. In a boastful note under “Ownership of the Examiner” was the comment: “The Examiner, with this issue, has become the exclusive property of William R. Hearst, the son of its former proprietor.”
It’s no surprise that the visitor who described San Francisco’s atmosphere as “charged with a vigorous, disrespectful sort of youth” had spent an afternoon with Examiner reporters. Hearst himself had the intensity of a frontier priest or a prizefighter. Both characters held sway in his personality—a teetotaler known for a love of hunting and fishing, restless and ruthless in his desire to dominate the newspaper business. His techniques could be those of a broad-shouldered bully, while his soft voice was, according to a colleague, like “the fragrance of violets made audible.” Bartenders all over the city knew the name of the Examiner’s sharp-witted editor S. S. Chamberlain, as careful in his dress as Hearst, with Paris tastes and a gardenia in his lapel, but a hard drinker. In Chamberlain’s small warren of an office, the reporters and editors, some from Hearst’s Harvard days, some hired at high salaries with his father’s backing, flung ideas like darts. They constructed elaborate and expensive schemes as if they were sand castles that could collapse without consequence. There always seemed to be more money.
The Examiner was evolving, testing out what might be possible with a printing press, creativity, and a mine full of gold. Editors masterminded exposés of police bribery and morphine clubs in Oakland. And in a strategy Hearst learned at the World, the Examiner ferreted out stories that, rather than focusing on power plays of senators, revealed scenes of life in factories, criminal courts, prisons. Like Pulitzer, he positioned himself as a champion of the poor and overlooked. Whether this reflected a deep-held political conviction on Hearst’s part or not is hard to tell. More than one colleague commented he seemed willing to try anything, adopt any stance, to boost circulation. One reporter, with the kind of backhanded compliment that followed Hearst like hungry strays, said the publisher had “a very sure instinct about the seamy underside of human nature and what it would feed on with gusto.”