by Kim Todd
*In one of Banks’s many obfuscations, she presents herself as living alone (and as being sometimes lonely), but may have been staying at least part of the time with her sister.
*This overwhelming concern with establishing class (even in Banks, who purported to critique it) brings to mind the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s 1960 letter to Robert Lowell, commenting on female writers who obsessively reference their status: “They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say.”
*Lying about one’s age was as common as adopting a pseudonym for stunt reporters. Men did it, too. The chapter about Charles Chapin’s time at the Chicago Times in his autobiography is called “A City Editor at Twenty-Five.” He was twenty-nine.
*Banks often wrote her characters’ speech in Cockney dialect, but I’ve rendered it into standard English.
*Under this pseudonym. That we know of.
*And most were from the Midwest, where eastern notions of propriety didn’t have as much weight. Back in 1887, when Nellie Bly interviewed New York newspaper editors about female journalists, many stressed that attitudes toward the role of women were more liberal in “the West.” Wisconsin alone contributed Banks, Jordan, and Sweet, with Valesh coming from nearby Minnesota.
*About $30 million today.
*Jordan never married and lived with other women for most of her adult life.
*It’s interesting to note where Pulitzer would balk. Several years later, a female reporter wrote a piece that mentioned a prominent socialite readying a nursery, implying she was pregnant. For Pulitzer, whose paper interviewed prostitutes, illustrated X-rays of hands, and showed a woman on the verge of electrocution, an article suggesting pregnancy was too far. This oblique hint at “an interesting condition” was “disgusting and sickening” he wrote to his staff, and he demanded the writer—Zona Gale—be fired.
*Reporters called the dog “Senator,” but in her books, Jordan referred to him as “Judge.” Did she give her pet a pseudonym, too?
*See Sir Walter Besant’s “The Lady Housemaid,” marveling at Banks dressing up as a servant:
“And behold a Transformation! A Fairy tale in variation!
A housemaid, meek and mild, once lady fair!”
*But Florence Finch Kelly didn’t view men’s exploits in the same light. Her husband was the Examiner reporter who brought a grizzly bear out of the mountains at Hearst’s request.
*While “sensationalism” is derogatory, concrete details that can be seen, touched, or tasted remain the best way to engage a reader. In Mary Beard’s book Women & Power, she commented on the discomfort with these effective strategies: “The smartest ancient rhetorical theorists were prepared to acknowledge that the best male techniques of rhetorical persuasion were uncomfortably close to the techniques (as they saw it) of female seduction. Was oratory really then so safely masculine, they worried.”
*Unlike other Hearst hires, Brisbane did not get a gargantuan salary increase; his motive might have been, instead, that his relationship with Katherine Pulitzer was over, and he needed some distance between him and the Pulitzers.
*I couldn’t find any sources from Matthews’s lifetime that described her passing as white to ferret out additional information in the South. She doesn’t mention it in any available lectures or letters. But the 1933 book on the Black Women’s Club movement, Lifting as They Climb, describes her as traveling “fearlessly and unobserved through the black belt of the South” and suggests that she was able to discover so much about the exploitation of young women because of “her personality and natural endowment, physically, which gave her entree to places, and conditions in the South not accessible to many of our women.”
*Fights over childcare in Valesh’s family were intergenerational. She resented looking after younger siblings; Eva Valesh’s sister resented dropping out of high school and moving to New York to look after little Frank. The sting lingered. “She was the most selfish and self-absorbed person I have ever known,” her sister wrote in a letter after Valesh’s death.
*Though this goes against modern journalistic ethics, it is an aesthetic embraced by John D’Agata, a noted nonfiction writer. The debate over whether artistic license allows making up details in creative nonfiction is the subject of his book and the Broadway play based on it, Lifespan of a Fact. He told a reporter, about fabricating statistics and place names, “By taking these liberties, I’m making a better work of art—a truer experience for the reader—than if I stuck to the facts.” I don’t agree.
*Some of these expectations had been set by Bly’s reporting of the Pullman strike. Bly had asked town residents to point her to the homes of the poorest strikers, a request echoed by New York reporters’ first attempts at covering New Bedford.
*Son of Rebecca Harding Davis, author of the 1861 industrial exposé in short-story form, “Life in the Iron Mills.”
*Harriet Pickering also lost her job. A few days after the declaration of war, the Weavers’ Union in New Bedford voted to return to work. Manufacturers made vague promises about restoring wages when the market improved. Then the spinners decided to go back. And in May, Pickering quit the Grinnell Mill after being fined 52 cents. “I have always advocated that weavers who do not do satisfactory work should be discharged, not fined,” she said. “I did not intend to go back on my principles. I don’t think the poor work was my fault. I am now looking for a situation as a double or single entry bookkeeper.”
*These claims are persuasively argued against by W. Joseph Campbell, among others. It’s worth noting, too, that the worst transgressions of “yellow journalism” occurred during war reporting. But being a war correspondent remained respectable, while being a stunt reporter did not.
*She remarried in 1901.
*Cahoon may have known this firsthand. An article in the Arena’s “Some Newspaper Women” column suggests that she and Eliza Putnam Heaton were both “Kate Kensington” of the Recorder.
*I use “horror” as an example here because it fits with the stunt reporter aesthetic. A more realistic example might be use of the word “the.”
*One report has her leaving the World for the Journal along with Brisbane. But while Brisbane left in the fall of 1897, Swan was still reporting on the New Bedford strike for the World in early 1898.
*The autobiography, edited by her daughter, Alfreda Duster, wasn’t published until 1970, almost forty years after her death. It was re-released in 2020 with an afterword by her great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster.