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

editor? Or a rags-to-riches fable about a reporter “trying to make a reputation,” as one of the doctors accused her of doing, on the path to a blazing career? A call to action about the birth of an activist? Or a romance where the heroine finds the right man and disappears into domesticity? The Girl Reporter posed some questions, about writing, about myself, I needed to answer.

The Girl Reporter’s frank wrestling with the desire to tackle issues particular to women and her concern about condemnation stayed with me. So much so that, years later, with a few hours to kill in downtown Chicago, I found myself drawn to a cavernous room in the Harold Washington Memorial Library, dominated by banks of microfilm machines, half of them broken. The reels for the Chicago Times, a dreadful paper no one cared about, nestled in a cardboard box. “If I read the whole series, from promotional banner to the final outraged letter to the editor,” I told myself, threading the film through with methodical optimism, “I bet I can find her.”

The deeper I read, the more I became drawn into the buried tale of the Girl Reporter. Her voice was so vivid. Her series so shattering. She couldn’t just be lost. Then as I moved on from articles to letters, pamphlets, and court cases, the documents pulled me into the whole busy, dirty, electric turn-of-the-century world of the stunt reporters, who, through grit and charm, redefined what it meant to be a woman with something to say.

I still wanted to know who she was, and the Chicago Times only offered so much. How to piece together a picture? The Chicago Medical Society seethed about the exposé at several meetings but never described the Girl Reporter in any depth. The Times’s teasing illustration with the caption “Guess which one of the above is the ‘girl reporter,’” showed five young white women who looked remarkably alike, though they glanced inquisitively in different directions. Scattered hints hid in the text of the articles themselves. Back at my hotel, I made a list:

What I Know About the Girl Reporter

She was the right age to be pregnant.

The Times described her as “a woman of intelligence, nerve, and newspaper training,” though she said the exposé was her first assignment.

She liked puns, particularly those involving doctor’s names. “Oh Hale fellow,” she addressed Dr. Hale in an imaginary confrontation.

She loved alliteration. One doctor’s “shrewd Scotch sense scented danger.”

She repeated herself with dashes: “a sin—a sin, alas.”

She attended family worship with her grandfather.

Her parents were “respectable” and “well-to-do,” not wealthy, not poor.

She described herself as well educated with moral training.

She told one of the doctors she was twenty-three.

She studied French.

She referred to “my prairie home.”

She was a huge fan of Amelie Rives’s novel The Quick or the Dead?

She larded her prose with references to poetry, the Bible, detective tales, the Aeneid, and Shakespeare plays.

List in hand, I ran her pet phrases and misquotations through online newspaper search engines: “dollars to dirt,” “shots and slings of invidious fortune,” “smell a mouse,” but came up with nothing useful. As I read contemporary newspapers, searching for mentions of the Girl Reporter, it became clear that the high profile of the series attracted lawsuits. One Dr. Reynolds had sued the Times for libel and $25,000 because his name could be confused with another Dr. Reynolds listed under “Physicians Who Recommend Others Who Would Commit Abortion.” Days later, Dr. Walter Knoll sued for $25,000. In January, Dr. Silva sued the Times for $50,000 and the Chicago Mail, also owned by West, for another $50,000.

Surveying the litigation landscape, the Rochelle Herald commented, “That lady reporter of theirs will have a mighty heap of trouble on her hands if she has to attend to all their cases in court as a witness.”

A witness with a name, I realized, one who might have been called to testify.

In the Circuit Court of Cook County Building in Chicago, citizens wandered through with kids in tow, looking confused, asking for traffic control or divorce court. But the archive was quiet. An older man searched for records of a relative’s name change. The archivist wasn’t encouraging, saying people often just adopted a new name and didn’t bother with the paperwork. “You’re applying today’s standards to yesterday’s life,” he suggested, and sent him to another building to look for miscellaneous deeds.

It was my second visit. I’d first come to request court files of the libel lawsuits. Old as they were, the papers were kept off-site—it would take several weeks to recall them. While waiting for documents to arrive, I’d searched through online databases of the Chicago Times’s rivals, newspapers that might have been eager to out the Girl Reporter. The Daily Inter Ocean mentioned that Silva didn’t sue just the paper and its publisher; he sued two men and a woman: “Florence Noble, alias Margaret Noble.” Another paper also wrote up the lawsuit, and after the woman’s name added, in brackets, “the girl reporter.”

Then the archive called. The papers were in, the man on the line told me, though the files were thin and the handwritten documents hard to decipher.

Does anyone mention a “Florence Noble?” I asked.

“No, nothing like that,” he’d said.

Then, as I was saying thank you and asking if he would Xerox the files and mail them to me, he added: “But there is a Margaret Noble.” A pause, and then: “The Florence is under an ink blot.”

Now the files for Silva’s lawsuits against the Times and Mail sat on the table in front of me, frail pieces of dingy cardboard, folded into thirds, holding court documents. The Girl Reporter might be right there, details of her testimony revealing clues to her life after the exposé.

But the archivist had been right, the files were thin. Cases would usually have a narrative, where the plaintiff presented the complaint. A handwritten note on the front of the Mail narrative said the enclosed was a copy of the original, which was lost. The