Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

tied to the women’s page as she had been in the United States. She felt strongly, though, that she didn’t want to be a do-gooder either, like many of the writers who claimed to improve society with their work. Any orthodoxy made her wince, and it was a pose that seemed like a luxury. As soon as Banks felt the embrace of an expectation of what she should write or why, she wriggled to escape.

Along with her typewriter, Banks brought a big, black poodle named Judge across the ocean. Though Banks’s writing hailed the many gallant men she encountered through her reporting, from the coworkers who brought her offerings of candy and pencils to the artist who sketched a picture to accompany her story and offered it to her for free, no one compared to Judge. In childhood, reading Sunday newspaper stories, she fantasized about being “surrounded with dozens of lovers, any of whom would cut his head off at my command,” but it was Judge who rescued her “from getting too lonely and thinking too much about myself.”* The poodle wore a colorful scarf around his neck and could fetch newspapers by title. In a photo of the two of them, the dog perches by her side, face right next to Elizabeth’s. What stands out is Banks’s expression—there’s heat behind it as she stares off the lower edge of the portrait, as if she’s just heard a loud noise but doesn’t want to show surprise. The poodle is relaxed, panting, seemingly happy, long ears covered with silky black curls.

In addition to pet and machine, she brought the lenses she’d used on American society, focused on the workings of class. One day, after she’d been in London a few months, Banks was mulling the fact that many girls she met in the city ground their lives away sewing for long hours and low pay, subsisting on boiled rice or crackers. Their situation brought to mind the hypnotic rhythm of “The Song of the Shirt” written by English poet Thomas Hood in 1843.

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”

The poem charted the life of a factory worker, wearing out her indoor days, like worn-out linen, while free-flying swallows with sun on their backs mocked her with the spring.

Pitying their discomfort, Banks wondered why the women didn’t become servants. Maids and cooks were in high demand; they earned better pay than factory employees and had room and board provided. Traditionally, in many working-class families, daughters would go into “service” for a few years between young adulthood and marriage. The arrangement provided money for their relatives and taught them wifely skills. But when Banks suggested this to one seamstress, she was met with indignation. Young women in England as well as the United States were warming to an expanded sense of possibility.

“I wear caps and aprons, those badges of slavery! No, thank you. I prefer to keep my liberty and be independent,” the seamstress informed her.

Of course, the issue of what one might be willing to do to make a living may have been on Banks’s mind. Before long, she had spent most of her moving-to-Europe money. In 1892, when she just arrived, she’d earned early fame as “the American Girl in London,” after Rudyard Kipling wrote an article in the London Times critiquing Americans, and she’d replied in the same paper with a spirited defense of her country. He had interpreted all of America by his encounter with New England, she wrote in a piece subtitled “An American Girl’s Reply to Rudyard Kipling.” He should consider occupants of Illinois, Minnesota, and Montana as well as people from different classes: “in the city whistles are blowing for 6 o’clock, and employer and [employee], counting room clerk and day laborer, the woman journalist and the typewriter girl are hurrying home from their hard but well-paid work. And these, all these, are the Americans.” The Kipling retort brought notoriety but not more assignments. In 1893, when that same seamstress told her she earned only one and sixpence a day, Banks felt a throb of pity but was brought short by the thought that she herself was not currently earning that much.

Perhaps remembering Eva McDonald’s series for the Globe when they’d worked there together, with its descriptions of society women coddling their pugs, Banks put an unconventional ad in the Situations Wanted section of the paper, one that sounded more like the opening of a novel than a request for employment:

Elizabeth Banks

Elizabeth Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity, frontispiece, 1894 (University of Michigan)

“As Housemaid, Parlourmaid, or House-Parlourmaid.–A refined and educated young woman, obliged to earn her living, and unable to find other employment, wants situation as above. Expects only such treatment as is given to servants. Will wear caps and aprons, but would not wish to share bed with another. Thoroughly reliable and competent. References; town or country. Wages, £14.”

But here the layers of Banks’s disguise grew particularly thick. While the premise of the articles was to chide English girls for an obsession with class that kept them near starving for the sake of their “independence,” Banks elided her own background boiling potatoes and feeding chickens early mornings on her uncle and aunt’s Wisconsin farm, ironing and washing dishes to pay her way through college.

“For myself, I knew little or nothing about housework,” she airily declared. The one time she tried to sweep, it blistered her hands. Her attempts to scrub a floor made up a long, comic scene of incompetence. Her inability to darn socks would reveal her disguise, she feared.* (This is one of the few places her exploits are met with incredulity. Does “there actually breathe a woman in whom the domestic instinct is so dead as this?” wondered a newspaper columnist.) In an article where she pretended to employers to be of a lower class than she was, she simultaneously pretended to her readers to be of