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

girl (which I didn’t do because I found the idea both insulting and frightening) would have been an assignment worthy of Nellie Bly,” she wrote in her essay collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. And she included “I Was a Playboy Bunny” in the anthology, one of the few pieces that made the cut from her early career.

In the late 1990s, long after Steinem had metamorphosed into a different kind of icon, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wondered how single mothers pushed into the labor market by welfare reform might get by on minimum wage.

“Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism—you know, go out there and try it for themselves,” she mused to her editor over lunch. He agreed, and then suggested that the “someone” should be Ehrenreich.

In the resulting book, Nickel and Dimed, on (Not) Getting By in America, the reporter spent months serving meat loaf and iced tea at a hotel restaurant, scrubbing floors with a cleaning service, sorting summer dresses at Walmart. Like Nell Nelson, she kept careful accounts, recording apartment rents, uniform costs, and the occasional fast-food lunch. Like Bly, she documented the physical toll, the back strain, the persistent rashes. And like Banks, who attempted to live on a factory-woman’s wage of $3 a week, she concluded it couldn’t be done: “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow.”

Nellie Bly, in particular, inspired decades of female journalists. In her memoir In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, among other books, wrote that as a child, journalism came to her early. “I perceived it, specifically, as something I did as a woman, an assertion of my female independence,” she wrote. Courageous reporters from history loomed large in her youthful imagination: “In my schoolgirl fantasies, the incarnation of heroic womanhood was Nellie Bly exposing the horrors of Blackwell Island’s asylum for women.”

And, if not Bly specifically, the can-do “girl reporter” character Bly created lingers in the mind of almost every female reporter I know. She lives on in comic-book heroines, like Lois Lane, who disguised herself as a rich widow to report on the Playboy Poisoner, and Brenda Starr, who went undercover to sneak into a party and interview a mysterious baron. Their long legs and flying skirts were prefigured by the illustrations of Kate Swan and Helen Dare leaping across the pages of the Sunday papers. In fact, the role of “girl reporter” became almost a superhero, smoothing out the ambiguities of the real women who did the job. It was a loss of complexity, but superheroes have their purpose.

The idea of going undercover, adopting another identity, hearing what you are not supposed to hear, retains a sinuous power. It particularly appeals to the hypocrisy-exposing instincts of the young. One friend of mine, Mara Hvistendahl, now a Pulitzer-nominated foreign policy reporter, went undercover the year after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. Nannying and waitressing to pay the bills, she also held down an unpaid magazine internship and hoped to end up as a successful freelancer. It was hard to break into the glossy magazines with only clips from a second-tier newspaper, though.

But when she heard that strip clubs were hiring in anticipation of the 2004 Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, this seemed like her chance. Inspired by the work of Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed and Ted Conover in Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, she asked herself: Why not apply as a strip club server and see what the Republicans—selling themselves as the party of family values—were up to after hours?

For the week of the convention, aided by No Doze, she interned at the magazine during the day and took shifts at the strip club each night. Serving drinks and taking notes, she sidestepped energy company lobbyists looking for a twosome and tallied lap dances requested by those decked in flag-patterned ties. Then she rushed home at four a.m. to Google the house committees of her customers, type up her observations, and send them off to the Village Voice’s blog, only to get up a few hours later and do it all over again.

It was a cold (thermostats were set for men in suits), exhausting week, complete with a bout of food poisoning. And yet.

“As I look back on it, it was a good piece. It was a good way to try out my writing,” she told me. Her posts were picked up by high-traffic sites. Her parents proudly shared them with their friends. The pieces led to editors getting in touch and additional assignments for bigger outlets.

While she rarely goes undercover now, the skills are the same ones used elsewhere in her reporting life. “I do enjoy going deep into those other worlds,” she told me. “You slip into these roles and people forget that you’re there.”

But a century after the stunt reporters, women’s undercover work is often still not taken seriously, even if the disguise is much more fraught than a bunny costume. In 2011, journalist Suki Kim went undercover in North Korea, hiring on as an unpaid teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school run by American evangelicals with permission of the North Korean government. She had been covering the country for ten years by that point, and had come to the conclusion that disguise was the only way to get at the truth of what she described as “a world of deception.” For six months, she taught the sons of the North Korean elite and hid her notes in her lesson plan, typed then erased her reporting on her laptop, after saving it on a USB drive that she carried with her all the time. The book that resulted, Without You There Is No Us, documented the stunted lives of her students as they