by Kim Todd
Chapter 19
Present
Anonymous Sources
I started forth to test experimentally what treatment a girl whose chastity had been blighted but who was not yet publicly disgraced would receive from physicians in this city.
—Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, 1888
When I first read about the Girl Reporter and her Chicago Times abortion series, I had just quit my job as a journalist. When I was racing around, chasing down leads, friends had called me “Girl Reporter,” a motivational tool, a rallying cry, designed to propel me out the door to battle the interminable city council meetings waiting for me in the Seattle suburbs. It was the mid-1990s, and I had never heard of Nellie Bly, but I knew what “Girl Reporter” implied. Everyone did. She was a character plucked from movies and comic books, and implied fearlessness, a glamorous exterior with a do-gooder heart, all that I wanted to be. But it was a hard image to live up to in an industry that often didn’t have space, or even a framework, to tell the stories I found most important. Among the cute Mother’s Day features, was there room for a reckoning with substandard day care? In the “personal essay” column on the op-ed page, could a colleague write about abortion? The answer at the time seemed to be no.
The Girl Reporter of the 1888 Chicago Times exposé, though, offered a different picture, more complex, no less compelling. Here was someone writing about the reality of women’s lives on the front page. When I encountered excerpts of her articles in Leslie Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime, I found, rather than a roughly drawn cartoon, a flesh-and-blood young woman, trying to puzzle out sex and writing and her place in the world. One wasn’t supposed to discuss abortion (and the Comstock Act banned it), and if one did, it should be a tragic tale of regret, not reports of well-off women mapping out their lives. Yet somehow, the Girl Reporter managed to tell this radical tale.
Like the readers of the World, the Examiner, or the Tribune, who raced out to pick up the next issue featuring stunt reporters’ escapades, after reading the Girl Reporter’s investigations and growing to admire her wit and nerve, I wanted to find out what happened next. But I couldn’t, because after writing the Times piece, the Girl Reporter vanished. No one ever took the credit. But her identity seemed key to the nature of her story. Was it a cautionary tale about a country girl who came to the metropolis and was taken advantage of by a money-hungry editor? Or a rags-to-riches fable about a reporter “trying to make a reputation,” as one of the doctors accused her of doing, on the path to a blazing career? A call to action about the birth of an activist? Or a romance where the heroine finds the right man and disappears into domesticity? The Girl Reporter posed some questions, about writing, about myself, I needed to answer.
The Girl Reporter’s frank wrestling with the desire to tackle issues particular to women and her concern about condemnation stayed with me. So much so that, years later, with a few hours to kill in downtown Chicago, I found myself drawn to a cavernous room in the Harold Washington Memorial Library, dominated by banks of microfilm machines, half of them broken. The reels for the Chicago Times, a dreadful paper no one cared about, nestled in a cardboard box. “If I read the whole series, from promotional banner to the final outraged letter to the editor,” I told myself, threading the film through with methodical optimism, “I bet I can find her.”
The deeper I read, the more I became drawn into the buried tale of the Girl Reporter. Her voice was so vivid. Her series so shattering. She couldn’t just be lost. Then as I moved on from articles to letters, pamphlets, and court cases, the documents pulled me into the whole busy, dirty, electric turn-of-the-century world of the stunt reporters, who, through grit and charm, redefined what it meant to be a woman with something to say.
I still wanted to know who she was, and the Chicago Times only offered so much. How to piece together a picture? The Chicago Medical Society seethed about the exposé at several meetings but never described the Girl Reporter in any depth. The Times’s teasing illustration with the caption “Guess which one of the above is the ‘girl reporter,’” showed five young white women who looked remarkably alike, though they glanced inquisitively in different directions. Scattered hints hid in the text of the articles themselves. Back at my hotel, I made a list:
What I Know About the Girl Reporter
She was the right age to be pregnant.
The Times described her as “a woman of intelligence, nerve, and newspaper training,” though she said the exposé was her first assignment.
She liked puns, particularly those involving doctor’s names. “Oh Hale fellow,” she addressed Dr. Hale in an imaginary confrontation.
She loved alliteration. One doctor’s “shrewd Scotch sense scented danger.”
She repeated herself with dashes: “a sin—a sin, alas.”
She attended family worship with her grandfather.
Her parents were “respectable” and “well-to-do,” not wealthy, not poor.
She described herself as well educated with moral training.
She told one of the doctors she was twenty-three.
She studied French.
She referred to “my prairie home.”
She was a huge fan of Amelie Rives’s novel The Quick or the Dead?
She larded her prose with references to poetry, the Bible, detective tales, the Aeneid, and Shakespeare plays.
List in hand, I ran her pet phrases and misquotations through online newspaper search engines: “dollars to dirt,” “shots and slings of invidious fortune,” “smell a mouse,” but came up with nothing useful. As I read contemporary newspapers, searching for mentions of the Girl Reporter, it became clear that the high profile of the series attracted lawsuits. One Dr. Reynolds had sued the Times for libel and $25,000 because his name could be confused with another Dr. Reynolds listed under “Physicians Who Recommend Others Who Would Commit Abortion.” Days later, Dr. Walter Knoll sued for $25,000. In January, Dr. Silva sued the Times for $50,000 and the Chicago Mail, also owned by West, for another $50,000.
Surveying the litigation landscape, the Rochelle Herald commented, “That lady reporter of theirs will have a mighty heap of trouble on her hands if she has to attend to all their cases in court as a witness.”
A witness with a name, I realized, one who might have been called to testify.
In the Circuit Court of Cook County Building in Chicago, citizens wandered through with kids in tow, looking confused, asking for traffic control or divorce court. But the archive was quiet. An older man searched for records of a relative’s name change. The archivist wasn’t encouraging, saying people often just adopted a new name and didn’t bother with the paperwork. “You’re applying today’s standards to yesterday’s life,” he suggested, and sent him to another building to look for miscellaneous deeds.
It was my second visit. I’d first come to request court files of the libel lawsuits. Old as they were, the papers were kept off-site—it would take several weeks to recall them. While waiting for documents to arrive, I’d searched through online databases of the Chicago Times’s rivals, newspapers that might have been eager to out the Girl Reporter. The Daily Inter Ocean mentioned that Silva didn’t sue just the paper and its publisher; he sued two men and a woman: “Florence Noble, alias Margaret Noble.” Another paper also wrote up the lawsuit, and after the woman’s name added, in brackets, “the girl reporter.”
Then the archive called. The papers were in, the man on the line told me, though the files were thin and the handwritten documents hard to decipher.
Does anyone mention a “Florence Noble?” I asked.
“No, nothing like that,” he’d said.
Then, as I was saying thank you and asking if he would Xerox the files and mail them to me, he added: “But there is a Margaret Noble.” A pause, and then: “The Florence is under an ink blot.”
Now the files for Silva’s lawsuits against the Times and Mail sat on the table in front of me, frail pieces of dingy cardboard, folded into thirds, holding court
documents. The Girl Reporter might be right there, details of her testimony revealing clues to her life after the exposé.
But the archivist had been right, the files were thin. Cases would usually have a narrative, where the plaintiff presented the complaint. A handwritten note on the front of the Mail narrative said the enclosed was a copy of the original, which was lost. The narrative for the Times lawsuit was missing entirely. And there wasn’t much else. Before the end of 1889, West had been sentenced to prison for overissuing stock certificates of the Times Company. Five years after that, the Chicago Times was defunct. The rest of the legal file was lawyer after lawyer excusing himself from the case.
Tucked inside one file, though, was a summons for “The Chicago Times Company, James J. West, Joseph R. Dunlop, Florence Noble alias Margaret Noble and———Bowen.” On the back, the deputy sheriff scrawled that he had served the summons to the paper, West, and Dunlop, but made no mention of Noble or Bowen. It meant, most likely, they couldn’t be found in the county. A few weeks later, one newspaper claimed to have spotted her four hundred miles away in Ashland, a Wisconsin town on Lake Superior, declaring: “The Girl Reporter of the Chicago Times Is Here.” But the identification seemed based on a stray comment from a railroad man and the fact that a small, attractive, brown-haired woman showed up asking pointed questions about local dives, lying about her lodgings and her name. Then, nothing. Once again, the Girl Reporter, possibly known as Florence Noble, had slipped away.
No online searchable newspapers or magazines from the 1880s or 1890s have a reporter named Florence Noble. The archives of the Illinois Woman’s Press Association didn’t list any member with that name. No Florence Noble appeared in the Chicago directory for those years. A Margaret Noble did write a piece on presidential hopeful Benjamin Harrison’s Indiana home during the summer of 1888, but wrote nothing else that I could find.
Of course, Florence Noble could also be an alias. Certainly, “Florence” calls to mind Florence Nightingale, a medical heroine. And “Noble” would be an obvious choice. One of the Times’s editorials was headlined, winkingly, “A Noble Work.”
Or the series might have been too scandalous to launch a career. Maybe she had abandoned journalism. Stunt reporting in general had a dubious reputation, operating at the margins of decency; pretending to be pregnant out of wedlock and seeking an abortion may have been over the line of what a reporter might do and emerge unscathed. Was she the actress Florence Noble who read the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in New York during a week of Italian opera? Or the Florence Noble who sailed on the Olympic, the twin ship of the Titanic? Or the Florence Noble who had been a Chicago schoolteacher for thirty-two years before, according to the Tribune in 1924, being “committed to the Joliet asylum” because she “suffered from delusions.” I hoped not.
Anonymity seems unfortunate in hindsight, but maybe it was essential. Or so I thought, until I read Elizabeth Banks’s critique of yellow journalism in the Nineteenth Century.
In her indignation at the treatment of women reporters, Banks referenced the abortion series and declared: “That the young woman filled the assignment, wrote her exposé, was the means of having sent to prison several of Chicago’s leading physicians, and had her salary doubled the following week is now a matter of journalistic history.” So, according to Banks, the Girl Reporter did have a career, or at least she stuck around long enough to get a salary bump. Another writer confirmed this. In her 1897 piece “Women in Gutter Journalism,” essayist and suffragist Haryot Holt Cahoon blasted editors who assigned female reporters undercover work under the pretense they were doing “legitimate journalism.”* Her prime example was the Girl Reporter, though she seemed to misidentify her city: “Years ago, a degenerate public was nourished by the newspaper story of a young woman who called upon the various prominent physicians of New York, representing to them that she wished to lend herself to a criminal operation at their hands. As the tangible fruits of her canvass, she gathered an interesting collection of prescriptions. Then she published, together with the prices she paid for each prescription, the name of each physician and the interview.” This same reporter went on to other stunts, according to Cahoon, including showing up at the door of Reverend Parkhurst, after the 1893 Tenderloin raids that threw prostitutes out in the snow, claiming to his wife to be “a homeless fallen woman” needing shelter. So even a decade after her abortion series, her fellow journalists knew the identity of the Girl Reporter.
I thought of all the writers who had passed through Chicago in 1888. Nelson, hired by the World after her Times reports, had just left town. She might have lingered to do one last Chicago piece. Nora Marks, who had worked with Ada Sweet to report on prison conditions and the need for an ambulance service, had the perfect training as the Tribune’s stunt reporter. Elizabeth Jordan hadn’t yet left Milwaukee for New York and the World, and in the meantime, she wrote for Chicago outlets. Eva McDonald and Elizabeth Banks worked for papers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, not a far trip on the train. Winifred Sweet was still an actress, but her sister had Tribune connections and would soon be pushing her to publish. Could one of them have done the stunt, then gone on to flourish under another name?
None, that I could find, went to Reverend Parkhurst’s house in disguise in late 1893, in the aftermath of the brothel closings. The Recorder, the newspaper that ran Kate Swan’s interview with Lizzie Borden and hired Cahoon at one point, did send “Kathryn Krew” to the Florence Crittenden Mission, the Home for Fallen and Friendless Girls, and other places overrun with homeless women and frustrated with Reverend Parkhurst. Krew wasn’t in disguise, though, just accompanying two women looking for a place to stay. All the shelters were full.
In recent years, computer-based stylometry (authorship analysis) has been used to show, for example, whether William Shakespeare wrote sections of the play Arden of Faversham and which Supreme Court opinions were penned by clerks. I reached out to digital media experts at the University of Minnesota, Benjamin Wiggins and Cody Hennesy, to see if this type of analysis would yield any clues to the Girl Reporter’s identity. We took articles from eight female stunt reporters published in the late 1880s and early 1890s: Bly, Valesh, Jordan, Stackhouse (Nora Marks), Cusack (Nell Nelson), Banks, Black, and Elia Peattie (a writer for the Chicago Tribune whose husband, in a tantalizing detail, edited the Chicago Times; the couple moved to Omaha in late 1888). We also added in one male reporter—Allen Kelly, the San Francisco Examiner’s grizzly bear hunter—as a control. He did stunts, but couldn’t have been the young woman the doctors reported pleading in their offices.
The Burrows Delta method of stylometry takes the most frequently used words by one author and compares them to the most frequently used words by another author. (For example, for Author A, 5 percent of their text might use the word “horror”;* for Author B, the number might be only 2 percent.) Then it compares those percentages with the average use of “horror” in the pool of words contributed by all the authors. Another method, called the “imposter’s tool,” allows the results of this analysis to be mapped on a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 is a strong match. A comparison of known writing by J. K. Rowling to The Cuckoo’s Nest by “Robert Galbraith” (her pseudonym) earned a 1.
A analysis of text by our eight known authors versus the Girl Reporter’s articles using the Burrows Delta method with three variations indicated Nora Marks and Elizabeth Banks were the most likely Girl Reporter candidates. One variation gave Stackhouse a score of .94; another gave Banks a score of .63. Allen Kelly earned a score of 0, indicating that the methods could ferret out a clear pretender.
On the one hand, these results make sense. Marks was from out of state (Indiana), as the Girl Reporter claimed to be, and began her stunt reporting at the very moment the Girl Reporter came on the scene. She first appeared in the Chicago Tribune at the end of August, feigning to look for a job with an employment agency. She would have had to walk only a few blocks to end up at the Times office. Her tone, swinging between
casual and formal, sometimes sounded like the Girl Reporter, with a fondness for throwing in a snatch of poetry or a religious phrase. She liked alliteration—one room was “dark, dingy, and dirty”—and addressing the subjects of her investigation directly—“O, Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Colby and diverse other keepers of intelligencers.” At one point, she speculated, as the Girl Reporter did, that she found herself slipping so deep into her role that she almost forgot her true identity. But the Girl Reporter specified that she wasn’t a working girl or a servant: “I would feel myself lost among them. I wouldn’t know what to say to interest them,” and Marks cheerfully stepped into a servant’s shoes, then later chatted with the jail urchins. Also, she had an in at the Tribune. Why would she jeopardize it by freelancing for a competitor?
Banks was also from a nearby state—Wisconsin—and in late 1888, like Marks, like the Girl Reporter, she was at the start of her career, penning society stories for the St. Paul Globe. Easy enough to take the train to Chicago for a few weeks. It might explain her disgust at the Girl Reporter’s abortion work years later as she reflected back on her younger self. Maybe she felt she’d been taken advantage of. She also loved literature, as the Girl Reporter did. At the same time, though, the Girl Reporter had a confidence, sometimes arrogance, that Banks lacked, even at her most famous; and the Girl Reporter loved to moralize, while Banks railed against do-gooders.
Ultimately, though, the stylometry results weren’t conclusive enough to say positively that any of these writers visited doctors on behalf of the Chicago Times.