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

stand side by side with them and hold my own. Of course my ambitions are confidential.”

Her ambitions may have been confidential, but they were, in fact, clear to everyone around her. She and Frank fought over whether she should return to the lecture circuit after giving birth to her son in the spring of 1892, a pregnancy that almost killed her. When Dollenmayer planned to stop by to offer congratulations, Frank wrote to say that she wasn’t well enough to come downstairs. Would he mind postponing several weeks? (By then, he added, not only might his wife be better but the “baby being then considerably older will appear more intelligent hence more of a credit to this family.”) As soon as Valesh was able, she arranged for her mother-in-law to help with childcare and went back to writing and politics.

They also clashed about where to live. She loved the East and missed the landscapes of her Maine childhood, the green lushness, the buttercups. While in New York State, she wrote to Dollenmayer, “I don’t think I shall ever be content to live in the prairies again.” But Frank seemed perfectly happy with Minnesota life. Like other journalists of her generation, Eva married young with one set of expectations of what life might offer, and then grew into another, more expansive, reality.

Finally, after years as a labor activist, in the summer of 1897, against the advice of many, including colleague and American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers, she took her son, Frank, with her younger sister to look after him,* and moved back East to seek work as a reporter. Friends warned that some of these jobs were perilous for women. Assignments required haunting criminal courts. Subject matter might cause a “loss of self respect.” But New York journalism once again dangled its lure, and she wanted to give it a try. She’d started to tell people her husband was dead, though he was alive and well, making cigars in the Midwest.

Now she was a reporter for Hearst.

The circulation battle between the World and the New York Journal was growing more heated, but the life wasn’t as bad as people had said. Rather than dangerous and degrading tasks, she found, like other hopeful women before her, a lack of good assignments. Her stack of St. Paul Globe columns didn’t have much weight. The Journal hired her as a “space” writer, paid by the article rather than a staff salary, the kind of position that left Elizabeth Banks broke before she signed on at the World. Colleagues poked fun at her unfashionable black lambskin coat. She worked from noon to midnight and found herself scrambling, always with the threat of being fired, under an editor who didn’t have much use for women in the newsroom.

One day, after struggling at the Journal for months, she was sent to uncover the identity of a woman who killed herself by drinking carbolic acid on the sidewalk along Fourteenth Street. Unidentified bodies often had absorbing stories behind them, but they were hard to get. Young women drawn to the city (as she had been) often didn’t have nearby families to claim them. Valesh considered it “an impossible assignment,” designed to get rid of her. On viewing the corpse at the morgue, she got sick and, stomach roiling, sped back to her apartment. But after she recovered and tidied up, her luck broke.

On her way back to the street, she—always up to talk—chatted with the boy selling papers. She mentioned her hopeless task, adding, bleakly, “I’m getting nowhere.”

“Oh,” the boy said, “I know something about that girl. Go in and ask the druggist at the corner here. She tried to buy the carbolic there, but he wouldn’t sell it to her. I’m sure that’s the girl. Then she got it at a drug store down the street.”

Not only did the druggist know her—Mamie Donahue—he knew where she was from. Donahue was one of a group of young women who hung out at the Florence Crittenton Mission, a house on Bleecker Street that held night religious services and offered rooms to young women, many of them prostitutes. Tired of a life Valesh characterized as filled with a “terror of work, of monotony, of subjection to authority, of the hospital, of waning beauty, of hunger, of contempt” and covetous of the flower- and hymn-filled funerals the mission provided, about a dozen girls, after a night of drinking, had cooked up the idea for a “Suicide Club.” They drew lots, and the one who got the skull and crossbones had to kill herself by drinking carbolic acid before the next meeting. Two had already died.

At the mission, Valesh confirmed the woman’s identity with the assistant matron then accompanied her to the morgue. If it’s Mamie Donahue, Valesh told her, pinch me, but don’t say the name out loud.

“I want an exclusive story,” she said.

A Suicide Club, featuring a dead girl on a slab, body displayed for the writer and reader to peer at without shame, was just the thing to please the Journal. “She has good looks to recommend her. Even her dead face, showing as it does the burns of acid on lips and chin, is handsome. The features are regular and feminine, without conspicuous marks of dissipation, the hair is thick and the eyebrows are superbly arched,” wrote Valesh.

She didn’t receive a byline, but she established her worth, kept her job, and earned a reputation as the “suicide editor,” a regular beat, though a far cry from the labor journalism she loved. As she commented later of Journal reporting: “It was gruesome work.”

She weighed the pros and cons of staying. On the one hand, perhaps the constant emphasis on crime promoted crime, including copycats for particularly gory acts. Unlike in the Twin Cities, where reporters would wait for stories to land on their office desks, the cutthroat nature of New York journalism demanded going out and finding a story even when there was no obvious news. Reflecting