by Kim Todd
The magazine publisher Mrs. Frank Leslie-Wilde sometimes received a dozen letters a day from aspiring journalists, queries she tried to answer, offering help and encouragement. So when a young woman calling herself Mary Martin asked to tour her home for a piece about houses of the wealthy, Leslie-Wilde agreed. It was only when she found two checks missing, along with a $500 crescent-shaped jewel-crusted pin, that she became suspicious. Martin was arrested in Brooklyn. She may have been the “Ethel Townsend” who had been passing bad checks and posing as a reporter two years before in the Midwest, or she may have been someone else who settled on the same scheme. Sometimes being a reporter was the disguise.
Other recruits were more legitimate. Bly’s career also caught the attention of Caroline Lockhart, a woman in her early twenties, raised in Kansas and sent to boarding school in Boston because she didn’t get along with her stepmother. She was soon mired in trouble for getting drunk at her uncle’s hotel. At first Lockhart thought becoming the next Sarah Bernhardt would offer a life of excitement, free from pieties she found oppressive. Bernhardt, the renowned French dramatic actress, traveled the world, hunted crocodiles, and stormed across the stage as Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But when Lockhart found her bit parts unsatisfying, she cast about for other ideas. “Why couldn’t I write for a newspaper,” she thought to herself. “Nellie Bly was making history at the time so why couldn’t I?” She joined the Boston Post.
The Boston Post was experimenting with journalism in the Pulitzer mold. The owner, Edwin Grozier, had worked as an editor at the World when Bly went into the asylum, before buying the Post in 1891. One of the lessons he learned from his time there was the benefit of appealing to women.
In February 1894, the Post produced an issue written and edited entirely by women, a stunt of newspaper production. Much of the space was taken up with articles about female preachers, surgeons, jail wardens, lawyers, sea captains, all kinds of people the regular paper didn’t have time for. But for the men’s page, a mirror image of the typical women’s page, editors sharpened their pencils to a particularly fine point. The top left corner displayed an illustration of a man, tipped back in his chair, feet up on the table, reading the Sunday Post, under the caption “This Page for the Lords of Creation.” Articles written in the cheery, infantilizing tone of those aimed at female readers offered advice on “Ambrosial Locks” (Young men take note: long hair in the style of Beethoven, Sampson, and Byron is all the rage); “Pointed Shoes for Men” (These are painful but those men, what they won’t sacrifice for vanity); “Bachelors’ Buttons” (Studies show men are shrinking. This is clearly something they should be concerned about, rather than fretting over their “rights”).
Nell Nelson contributed a lengthy piece on the premise that behind every great woman is a helpful man. Her article “Useful Husbands” had the wry subhead, “Nell Nelson’s Opinions of the Convenience of Having a Masculine Attachment to a Clever Woman’s Career.” Actresses, authors, doctors, teachers, all benefit from a supportive man in the background, she wrote. The tone was mocking, but took a serious turn as she mentioned that a woman, no matter how financially sound, could rarely rent property in her own name. Nelson offered an example of a novelist who wrote constantly, compromising her health, but never got ahead until she married, and her husband took over the marketing.
In other efforts to engage female readers, the Boston Post developed a character just for stunts, punningly named the “Post Woman,” and Lockhart took up the part. And that is how she found herself on a boat in Boston Harbor, stepping into a rubber suit, pulling a heavy metal breastplate and collar over her head. A man tightened the bolts with a wrench, securing the collar to the rubber. A handkerchief tied over her head kept her hair out of the way. Diving shoes encased her feet, then weighted overshoes, so she could barely lift her own legs. While she leaned over the rail, sailors buckled her into a diving belt, adding even more pounds. Attempts to scare her hadn’t worked—all the talk about the sound of a roar like cannon and the sensation of knitting needles through the brain. She had confidence in her grit. She hadn’t fainted when the doctor set her arm after she’d tried to break a mustang, and stunt reporting for the past six months already tested her nerve. “Have I not been drinking moxie all this spring?” She asked herself. But when the helmet descended, cutting off what felt like all but a few gasps of air, despite the hissing of the oxygen, a shiver did course through her. Then she plunged over the side into the blue-black water.
Caroline Lockhart in a diving suit for the Boston Post, June 2, 1895
Caroline Lockhart, Diving Suit, Boston Post, June 2, 1895 (Library of Congress)
Nudging stunt reporting into new territory, Lockhart’s exploits were often outdoor adventures instead of undercover exposés. Rather than stressing her fear, she dwelt on the pleasure of walking on seaweed, almost weightless, thirty feet underwater. She would later write a vivid story about getting lost in the fog off the Maine coast in a rowboat, spotting whales, landing on a strange island and gathering wood for a signal fire, a bit chilled, a bit exuberant. These escapades, sometimes written as the “Post Woman,” sometimes under her own name, embraced stunt reporting’s new direction. Where could a woman’s body go—up in the air, underwater, across the ocean?
But at the same time as Lockhart explored this physical freedom, more established reporters were beginning to discover the limitations of their situation. By March 1895, Bly had abandoned New York for Chicago, taking a job with the newly formed Chicago Times-Herald and staying at the lavish Auditorium Hotel, a few steps away from the wind and beauty of Lake Michigan. The exterior with its massive, gray stones had an almost prehistoric feel, belying the sleek modern interior, brilliant with electric lights, housing a theater for the Chicago Symphony along with rooms for posh guests. One of the hotel clerks noticed that the famous reporter spent almost every day for two weeks in the company of another New York guest—Robert Seaman. Seaman, though in his early seventies with thin white hair, was a natty dresser with good posture, a confirmed bachelor with a reputation as a man about town. And as president of the Ironclad Manufacturing Company, he was reputed to be worth millions. Finally, on April 6, after reporters interviewed the clerk and unearthed a license made out to Robert Seaman and Elizabeth Cochran, headlines asked, incredulous, “Is ‘Nellie Bly’ Married?”
Perhaps it was another stunt, maybe a piece on the nature of honeymoons, or an exposé of May–December marriages to be followed by a first-person account the following Sunday of divorce? But none was forthcoming. For once, Bly seemed in dead earnest. On April 5, at the rectory of the Church of the Epiphany, a small structure of ruddy stones and heavy arches to the west of the city, with a lawyer as a witness, she married Seaman who, apparently, she had met several weeks before at a hotel dinner. In an interview, Bly said they’d kept it quiet because of their business affairs and illness in her family. And then she headed back to Manhattan, this time to her new husband’s fancy Midtown Manhattan mansion, a long way from her old cramped rooms in Harlem.
Some papers tried to frame it as a kind of fairy tale, but most were deeply cynical. Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner commented: “The marriage of Nellie Bly doubtless resulted from love at first sight of the groom’s bank account.” The Weekly Pioneer Times of Deadwood, South Dakota, suggested a moral: “And thus is refuted the theory that if girls were educated to support themselves they would not marry for money, for position, for a home, anything but love.” Of Mr. Seaman, the Buffalo Morning Express, said, “He is very old and a millionaire. What better luck could befall a young woman of Nellie’s cast of mind?”
Bly’s younger self would have been cynical, too, the one who counseled in her second-ever published article, “Mad Marriages,” that couples should enter into marriage slowly, deliberatively, with consultation from friends and investigation into their prospective spouse’s personal history. Urging lovers to be upfront about their faults, the twenty-year old had written solemnly that lying about one’s
past should be a crime. Maybe she forgot those concerns; maybe other concerns overrode them. There was no time for the leisurely confessions the young Nellie demanded.
Just a few months before her wedding, she’d been riding in a decorated coach in a seaside parade with editor James Stetson Metcalfe. Their names had been linked for years. He’d taken the train to Philadelphia to travel at her side for the final miles of her round-the-globe trip. But that December, as reflected in her column for the Evening World, loneliness was on her mind. A friend, Walt McDougall, a cartoonist at the World who’d drawn her liberation from the asylum and spent long nights with her in haunted houses, recalled that, despite Bly’s fame, she was intensely private: “Everybody knew her but she had very few familiars.”
Here was just another mystery, though McDougall offered a clue to her Chicago move and to her marital leap: “Nellie was deeply attached to a friend of mine, and when he suddenly married another she abandoned New York. I never knew, nor does anybody, I suspect, what her intentions were.”
Maybe something was in the air. Two months later, in June 1895, Nell Nelson returned from Europe on the steamship Brittanic from Liverpool. She’d been traveling with her ailing mother, sending dispatches from Paris and contributing a chapter to a serialized “composite novel.” The next day, barely having had time to unpack, she ducked into the modest Church of the Transfiguration, a bright spot in the Manhattan landscape with its redbrick tower, golden wood doors, lush green garden. And there, under a fanciful ceiling painted with stylized clover and morning glory, with only a few friends to witness—she married S. S. Carvalho, the publisher of the World.
At this point, Carvalho was deeply involved in the day-to-day operation of the paper, with Pulitzer leaning on him increasingly heavily. He’d apparently been scheduled to come to Europe to meet her but hadn’t made it, possibly because of yet another upheaval in the World’s staff. The wedding caught many off guard: “It is a genuine surprise to all his friends, and they are legion,” wrote a Boston Post columnist about Carvalho. But the writer declared himself “delighted.” Carvalho was known to be serious-minded, well paid, vigorous despite a limp, and dogged in pursuit of the paper’s interests. A World staffer described him as “a small man with muscles of iron gained by driving a fast horse every evening” and “the most energetic, resourceful and original of all of J.P.’s finds.” Many who knew Nelson also commented on her work ethic, the way she’d taken care of her invalid mother, looked after two sisters, and written article after article. Elizabeth Jordan, who’d been awed by Nelson as she paced through the World’s offices, wrote, of all the hard labor that culminated in this marriage: “Her reward was great.” Nelson never wrote again.*
The same day as Nelson’s nuptials, Ida B. Wells lectured at St. John’s Church in Kansas, describing for her audience, in detail, the violence of lynching, explaining the cruel economic calculations behind it, then continuing to press her message over punch at the reception after. With the publication of Southern Horrors, Wells had become an acknowledged leader of the anti-lynching movement. The revered Frederick Douglass contributed the introduction to the book, thanking her for writing it (“Brave woman!”) and lauding her methods: “You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.” The book launched her career as a public speaker and resulted in an invitation to take her message to England and Scotland.
Wells took two trips abroad, in the spring of 1893 and again in the spring 1894. In churches, drawing rooms, and YMCA halls, she urged listeners to start anti-lynching societies and shower the United States with moral condemnation. On her second visit, the Chicago Inter Ocean printed her dispatches from abroad. In one, she marveled that even in Liverpool, which had been deeply invested in the Atlantic slave trade, citizens showed up to her lectures, in venues that held up to a thousand people. After giving up its dependence on slavery, the city had been able to prosper, she noted, and also commented that for a Black person raised in America, time spent in Liverpool was a revelation: “It is like being born into another world, to be welcomed among persons of the highest intellectual and social culture as if one were one of themselves.” Her talks received positive English press in venues ranging from the Birmingham Daily Post to the Ladies Pictorial.
After returning from England, Wells had been traveling the United States, from Santa Cruz, California, to Rochester, New York, making similar speeches. She’d also published a second book—A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. If possible, it was even more unblinking than Southern Horrors. One illustration showed a naked man hanged by a chain, well-dressed people clustered around him, pointing to the corpse. A photograph captured another crowd around another dead man, his clothes torn, body mutilated. Lists, all narrative stripped away, detailed people murdered by mobs each year under headings of their alleged crimes: “attempted robbery,” “well poisoning,” “asking white woman to marry him.” These were followed by stories of particular cases, tortures detailed remorselessly, at length.
While many reporters of the age experimented with including their own subjective impressions, Wells underscored the subjectivity of institutions supposed to be most objective—police and the courts—and the savagery of those supposed to be most civilized—white men. She put side by side the killings of Black men accused of raping white women and the acquittals of white men accused of raping Black women. The book also took on the selective nature of the South’s vaunted chivalry. The most chivalrous men seemed impervious to Black women and even to the white teachers who came from the North to educate the formerly enslaved: “The peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men for women never shed its protecting influence about them.” Wells critiqued, at length, Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who courted southern support for her causes by condemning the “great dark-faced mobs,” writing sympathetically of the need to restrict voting by uneducated Black men.
Despite the importance of her advocacy and the fact that several southern states had passed anti-lynching laws as a result, Wells’s campaign was taking a personal toll. It must have been emotionally draining and it depleted her financially. Her writing was too frank for some. There was nothing nice or polite or exalting of womanhood about her prose, no rhetorical batting of an eye. A Red Record sold few copies. Others saw her eagerness to make her case abroad as a betrayal. A New York Times columnist complained that Wells, an “octaroon evangel,” fired up the English, who already tended to be reform-minded and “meddlesome.” And even those she thought she could count on for backing were wavering. In Europe, she struggled to get a statement of unequivocal support from Frederick Douglass and had to reuse his flattering introduction from Southern Horrors for A Red Record. She told the truth. And she paid for it.
And then, a few weeks after her talk at St. John’s Church, on June 27, at the AME Bethel Church in Chicago, in front of almost a thousand people and wearing a dress trimmed with orange blossoms, Ida B. Wells married Ferdinand Barnett, a lawyer and founder of the Chicago Conservator, an African American newspaper. He was notable for his commitment to equality, not just for men of his own race but for everyone, writing against the Chinese Exclusion Act and in favor of women’s suffrage. He had gone out of his way to help Wells as early as 1891, before they were romantically involved, when she instigated a lawsuit to protect her reputation. And still, Wells was torn about what marriage might mean for her writing and advocacy. People weren’t shy about expressing their fears that the anti-lynching campaigns would suffer in her absence. She herself delayed the wedding a number of times, taking every lecture opportunity. With marriage, though, she declared herself “retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home.” (Her retirement didn’t last long. The Monday after the ceremony, she went to work as editor of the Conservator.)
This cluster of weddings in spring and summer 1895, as distinct as th
ey were, demonstrates the power of demographics. Most of the women who burst into journalism in the late 1880s and early 1890s were born during or just after the Civil War.* This meant Bly, Nelson, and Wells were in their early thirties. All had been writing for ten years and supporting family members with their wages. Maybe they weren’t where they wanted to be professionally and financially. Journalism had let them travel only so far. The economy was still struggling to recover after the crash of 1893. Marriage might be a last bid for a more conventional kind of happiness. Nelson’s comment in the previous year’s all women’s issue of the Boston Post echoed through those churches and chapels, in perhaps a less scornful tone than it seemed at the time: “Next to a great, big bank account the best thing a woman could have is the strong right arm of a good man.”
In addition, Nelson and Bly, at least, were aging out of the “girl reporter” role they had helped create. What models were there for midlife career women except the spinsterism of reformers like Susan B. Anthony, a lifestyle that newspapers routinely mocked? A number of stunt reporters expressed ambiguity in print about the woman’s suffrage cause, at the same time as their actions flaunted self-sufficiency. Stunt reporters were often young women, reacting to an older generation they found stuffy and unfashionable. By mid-1895, Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, high-profile movement representatives, were in their seventies. And the suffragists seemed to have little power: the movement suffered loss after loss at the state and the national levels. In 1894, a pro-suffrage petition with more than half a million signatures went nowhere in New York; shortly after, the New York State Association Opposed to Woman’s Suffrage was launched. Stunt journalists tended to have less formal education and, as a result, be less erudite than writers like Anthony or Margaret Fuller, a journalist of an earlier generation. In the newspaper offices where they were trying to fit in, they were surrounded by the attitude that suffragists were to be made fun of, to be treated lightly. And their jobs depended on their spritely good nature, on being one of the boys.