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

Pulitzer’s protégées at the World, and now Hearst’s star editor, stepped up. He had hired her back after her marriage seemed about to crumble in 1896. Even when she left the profession, they had remained on good terms. In one letter he recalled a harrowing car trip and signed off with appreciation for her “kind, courteous, and persistent effort to kill me last Saturday.” In the middle of the lawsuit, Bly turned to him for advice on lawyers and support from Hearst’s editorial pages, but when she lost the company anyway, he offered a different kind of opinion. With her talent, she could be “doing much more useful work than making tin cans,” he suggested. So Bly, as she seemed destined to do, returned to reporting, covering political conventions and suffrage marches for Brisbane. When World War I broke out, she went to Europe and took readers into military encampments. She often shared the editorial page of Hearst papers with Winifred Black. In illustrations, she hadn’t aged at all.

When Bly died of pneumonia in 1922, Brisbane wrote her obituary. He had always admired her round-the-world trip, her Pullman strike coverage, her compassion and audacity. With his affection for all caps and for the intrepid girl reporter, he concluded, “Nellie Bly was THE BEST REPORTER IN AMERICA.”

Acknowledgments

A book is a monument to an obsession and a tribute to those who helped in the building. Thanks to Hedgebrook for the time to write, the radical hospitality, and the blackberries; and to the Talle Faculty Research Award and the Hawkins Professorship at the University of Minnesota for generous funding in support of this work.

A book is also a conversation, and this, more than my others, was the result of a wide-ranging discussion about writing, about the female body, about efforts to combine the two. For reading drafts and scraps of drafts, and the willingness to point out sentences of particular awfulness, much appreciation to Erica Olsen, Shala Erlich, Jason Albert, Frank Bures, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Emily Sohn, Tanya Barfield, Susan Thurston-Hamerski, and William Souder. In particular, thanks to Mara Hvistendahl and Jessica Nordell, for not just the critiques but the vital digressions. And to Karen Hartman for housing me on research trips and for launching a particularly informative Facebook thread about female comics, what they have to do to succeed, and the backlash that often greets them once they break through. And for the hikes (with Shala, too). Here’s to several decades of talking things through on the trail.

For research assistance, I owe a debt to Kristin Collier and Eleanor Garran for combing through the vast troves of articles by stunt reporters and likely wondering, “Must they be so prolific?” And also to Tamsen Glaser for tracking down court records in Chicago. And to Benjamin Wiggins and Cody Hennesy for their attempts to identify the Girl Reporter using stylometrics, and their research assistants, Janelle Ruth, Kamilla Ruppman, Ella Haugesag, Benjamin Schroeder, Chae Hong, Alyssa Miller, and Molly Bostrom. And to archivists at Minnesota History Center, the Widener Library at Harvard, the YMCA collection at the University of Minnesota, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the New York Public Library, the University of Tulsa, Syracuse University, Columbia University, the Library of Congress, the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, San Francisco Public Library, and University of Chicago.

This kind of work stands on what has come before. I am grateful to writers whose books and articles I found particularly influential, some of whom let me interview them about their projects: Brooke Kroeger, Jean Marie Lutes, Leslie Reagan, Paula Giddings, Suki Kim, Rachel Boyle, and Steve Kramer.

Thanks to Alice Whitwham at Elyse Cheney Literary; Sofia Groopman, and Sarah Haugen at HarperCollins for seeing the possibilities in this project; and to Thomas Frail at Smithsonian magazine for excellent editing on the article that was the seed of this book. I also have much appreciation for my former students in the creative writing program at Penn State Behrend. Bly’s story is inextricable to me from the isolating western Pennsylvania winters that formed her, the same dense snows that heaped outside our classrooms. Your astute responses to the stunt reporters’ exploits helped me articulate the contradictions of these writers and the roles they played.

And many thanks to my family: Pete and Gail Todd for careful reading, Ben and Peregrine for their curiosity and optimism, and Jay for his boundless support.

And, finally, my appreciation for everyone who discovers a hidden door of opportunity, slips through, then props it open behind her.

Notes

Prologue: The Case of the Girl Reporter (1888)

“You must not be scared about it”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 15, 1888, 1.

“Remember how to take it tonight”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 17, 1888, 1.

“Inflammation might set in”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 16, 1888, 9.

“There are enough ways”: Ibid.

“It will not do for you to feel”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 15, 1888, 1.

“If I were a girl”: Ibid.

“Don’t prate of virtue”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 18, 1888, 1.

“Today I have been wondering”: Girl Reporter, Chicago Times, December 22, 1888, pp. 1, 5.

“prostitution of the brains”: the Journalist, January 26, 1889, 13.

by 1900, papers were publishing: Lutes, Front-Page, 4.

“The natural and proper timidity”: Renfroe, “Editor’s Introduction,” x.

“the ink-stained Amazons”: Hawthorne, “Mrs. Hutchinson,” 18–19.

“A careful examination of”: Brann, “Women in Journalism,” 383.

“semipornographic titillation”: Lang, Women Who, 1999, 37.

“cast a spell of infamy”: Ibid., 36.

“she had thought of something”: Woolf, “Professions,” 152.

“telling the truth”: Ibid., 153.

they found a 25/75 split: “The 2010 VIDA Count,” VIDA Women in Literary Arts, May 16, 2011, https://www.vidaweb.org/vida-count/the-count-2010/.

Chapter 1: Trials of a Working Girl (1885–1887)

“City of Smoke”: Muller, “Pittsburgh,” 49.

“If women would just let up on this sphere business”: Wilson, Quiet Observations, 140.

“her home a little paradise”: Ibid.

“Now what am I to do”: Pittsburg Dispatch, January 17, 1885, 4.

“abnormal” and “a monstrosity”: Wilson, Quiet Observations, 167.

“Your ‘Quiet Observer’ is a fool”: Ibid., 173.

“We don’t wish to wear”: Ibid., 171.

“whore” and “bitch” and other details of the stepfather’s