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

women, banned from juries, might offer a different perspective on criminal proceedings, and in her experiments at the World, empaneling a “jury” of women to weigh in on newsworthy cases, “sob sisters” were female reporters who covered trials. They offered their thoughts and—as implied dismissively in the name—feelings. Winifred Black Bonfils* was one of the most famous, with her coverage of the 1907 trial of Henry Thaw for the murder of his wife’s former lover (perhaps abuser) Stanford White.

It was another pejorative label, associating first-person point of view with an unseemly display of emotion, another thing women writers had to scramble to distance themselves from if they wanted to be taken seriously.

Winifred Black Bonfils

Head and shoulders, facing slightly right. “Annie Laurie.” Winifred Black, 1936., c. 1913. Jan. 18. (Library of Congress)

The collapse of the stunt reporter genre might well have been a relief for some female journalists who came after. The door to the newsroom had been pried open by Bly, Nelson, Black, Swan, and others, and women who remained had access to more respected forms. Ida Tarbell, working as one of the few female “muckrakers” for McClure’s, pored over hundreds of documents for her series about the unethical tactics of the Standard Oil Company. Her reporting resulted in the dissolution of its monopoly. Women continued to report, free to write about business or politics or organized crime with professional detachment, but were open to criticism if they adopted a unique voice or dipped into subjects more closely tied to their sex.

This catch-22 can be seen in the life of Willa Cather, who spent years as a journalist before writing groundbreaking novels about life on the plains—O Pioneers! and My Antonia, among others. After spending much of her childhood in Nebraska, she worked as a columnist for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh to edit the magazine Home Monthly in 1896, at the height of the stunt reporter craze. She couldn’t help but be aware of these writers and the mocking of them. She then became managing editor of McClure’s, the magazine famous for muckraking, which published some of her first fiction. After leaving journalism, Cather would go on to win the 1922 Pulitzer Prize, not for her inventive work about women but for One of Ours, a book with a patriotic male soldier as its hero. She was careful to keep her private world walled off from her writing. As Francesca Sawaya wrote of Cather’s attempt to destroy her letters and other evidence of her personal life: “On the one hand, that action conforms to her notion that her work was professional and should be evaluated impersonally; on the other hand, it reveals her sense that her work would not be read impersonally unless she erased all signs of the personal.”

Chapter 17

1898–1900

In the Wake

In the face of continual and massive discouragement, women need models not only to see in what ways the literary imagination has . . . been at work on the fact of being female, but also as assurances that they can produce art without inevitably being second-rate or running mad or doing without love.

—Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, 1983

On steamships from the South, after a disorienting boat ride of often more than twenty-four hours, young women, noise of clucking chickens still in their ears, arrived in this vast city. On the pier at the end of Beach Street, they blinked against the fish smell, the seagulls crying overhead, the sun sparkling off the water, a sea of unfamiliar faces. Stony roads led into Manhattan, lined with high buildings casting long shadows, the winds whipping between them.

Often, during the final years of the nineteenth century, Victoria Earle Matthews would be waiting, hoping to reach these young Black women before the others, also biding their time, who would pounce at the sign of insecurity flickering across a face or a repeated scanning of the crowd for someone who hadn’t shown up. These included hansom-cab drivers ready to charge huge fees for a ride around the block, or to load up a person’s luggage and run away with it; pickpockets running fingers over a jacket in search of a purse; pimps; agents of the employment service who would whisk them off to an apartment where they would sleep on the floor accruing debt for every night they didn’t pay rent.

Matthews and the others she recruited to wait in her place on the docks often felt as if they were doing battle for these rural young women, unguarded against New York scams. The second half of the century had been characterized by women stepping off ships, trains, carriages into the big city and hoping to make their fortune. Matthews wanted to be sure vulnerable Black women from the South were met by a friendly face. The rescue missions were harrowing, she declared, “so brazen and defiant were the agents and ignorant and timid the majority of women who came up, that a woman had little power against the insolent white agents (men).”

If the woman getting off the ship, sometimes holding a toddler or two, insisted her sister would be coming to meet her, Matthews and her coworkers would wait with her until darkness made it hard to see, and the dockworkers shooed the women away. If the new arrival was trying to find her husband, only knowing he was somewhere in Brooklyn, they helped her search for the scrap of paper with the address tucked somewhere at the bottom of a piece of luggage. And if no one ever showed up? Or the scrap had been torn away by a gust of wind? They would find the newcomers someplace to stay.

Victoria Earle Matthews

Quarter-length portrait of journalist and social worker Victoria Earle Matthews, 1903. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Used with permission.

For Matthews, articles about home decor had turned to lectures on human trafficking.

Her 1898 speech at the Hampton Negro Conference—“Some of the Dangers Confronting Southern