Kim Todd - Sensational: The Hidden History of Americas “Girl Stunt Reporters”

For the ink-stained Amazons

I write the truth because I love it and because there is no living creature whose anger I fear or whose praise I court.

Nellie Bly, The Evening World, 1895

T his is a work of nonfiction. The dialogue is taken from newspaper articles, letters, interviews, and reporters memoirs. As required by their profession, some of these journalists could be quite self-mythologizing. Unless I have evidence to the contrary (such as a census record showing a woman couldnt have been born when she said), I take them at their word.

Also, I refer to some writers by their pseudonyms and some by their legal names (though marriages and casual attitudes toward consistent spelling render even these unstable). They created characters to conceal and reveal themselves, and sometimes the character overshadowed the woman behind her. Those known mainly from a single pseudonymNellie Bly, Nell Nelson, and Nora MarksI refer to by their pen name. Those who used a pseudonym only sparingly or inconsistently, I refer to by their actual names. It makes sense to call Elizabeth Cochrane Nellie Bly when that was how the whole country knew her and how she signed many letters. Its less logical to refer to Elizabeth Banks as Polly Pollock when only a handful of articles at the start of her career carried that byline.

Have I not been drinking moxie all this spring?

Caroline Lockhart, Boston Post, 1895

I n late November 1888, a young woman threaded her way through the grit-filled streets of Chicagos downtown, skirting horse-drawn cabs and wagons teetering under sacks of grain. When she finally arrived at the doctors office, she sat hot-faced in the waiting room while her companion pulled the doctor aside and explained the nature of the problem. The physician, small and alert like a sparrow, turned to the girl and tried to calm her: You must not be scared about it, the doctor urged. It is perfectly safe. You suffer more from fright than you would the operation. The patient, still agitated, put off a full examination. Shed come back another day, she promised, to arrange the abortion.

A few days later, the young woman visited a different doctor. This one had a German accent and a diploma from a German university under crossed swords on his wall. She described her situation, saying she was from Memphis, and, like many girls, shed taken the train to Chicago because of its reputation. Then she haltingly made her request. Did she have any other health problems, the doctor asked? Was she in pain? When she said no, to both, he wrote her a prescription for ergot, a fungus thought to induce premature labor. She should go to her hotel, he said, draw a warm bath, drink a hot toddy, and take two teaspoonfuls. Dont follow the dosage written on the prescription, the doctor warned, because it was wrong; otherwise, the pharmacist might get suspicious about the drugs true purpose. The physician looked her in the eye, handed her the slip of paper, said, Remember how to take it tonight, do not be alarmed if it produce[s] pain, and sent her back out into the hectic city.

She went to another doctor after that. And another. In the course of three weeks, she visited more than two hundred physicians. Many agreed to perform an abortion, a surprising number as it was illegal. The police department surgeon, Dr. C. C. P. Silva, plump with a black goatee, highlighted the danger: Inflammation might set in, and Lord knows what might follow. Then he swore her to secrecy and said hed do it for $75. The head of the Chicago Medical Society rocked back on his heels, saying, There are enough ways in this state for a man to get into the penitentiary without taking a crowbar and prying his way in, and refused to do it. But then he gave her directions to a man who would. Hundreds of girls have had abortions, a female physician assured her. And she added, It will not do for you to feel so timid.... You must feel daring and brave.

The slight young woman with tidy dark hair recorded these facts, but also assumptions and attitudeseuphemisms, opinions on sex out of wedlock, the way doctors made her feel shame or comfort or alarm. One, fatherly, advised her to marry; one, leering with a tobacco-stained mouth, made her suspect that he felt more sympathy for her lover than he did for her. Some called abortion murder and a sin. Another brushed away concerns about damnation, saying: Dont prate of virtue to me; I am as good as the rest of the world, only less lucky. Traveling from one end of the city to the other, past boutique windows displaying lace-up boots and butcher shops with pens of hissing geese, she captured what it might be like to be a woman in a certain kind of difficulty, looking for a way out.

Though one physician suspected she was an adventuress, none knew she was actually an undercover reporter, bent on revealing the extent of the citys abortion practice. When her expos, a monthlong project for the Chicago Times, hit the stands, the city editor quit in disgust, letters of praise and outrage flooded the news desk, lawsuits for libel piled high. Discussions of abortion, in a daily paper? Readers found it repellentand irresistible. They also found the message hard to decipher. On the one hand, the writer referred to only as the Girl Reporter condemned abortion in the strongest terms; on the other, she published detailed instructions for how and where to get one, including which medicines to take and at what dosage. A heated discussion blazed through the editorial pages about womens bodies and the power imbalance between the sexes.

The Girl Reporters series had such a wide reach because she dared to talk about women and sex and the way it felt to be a woman talking about sexembarrassed, threatened, angry. Her Chicago Times series took all these speeding trainsexperiments in journalism, a demand for womens rights, a medical field struggling to dilute the influence of midwivesand put them on a collision course. In her articles, the Girl Reporter also discussed the challenges of this particular assignment and of her role as a woman reporter. For example, after a long day of playing pregnant and recording justifications and refusals, she reflected on her weeks spent tromping from one doctor to another: Today I have been wondering whether, if I had to do it over again, I would have taken a position on a newspaper staff. It used to be the dream of my childhood that I would some day become a writera great writerand astonish the world with my work. And this dream had not entirely vanished yet, thank goodness.

Then she added, But did I ever suppose that I would have to commence on a newspaper by filling an assignment like this?

Well, no.

Entering journalism, a predominantly male field, meant competing with men on their own terms, she knew, and she was ready. But, ironically, for this story, one of her first, the reporters sex was not a disadvantage; it was a necessity.

A man couldnt have done it, she concluded.

T he Chicago Timess Girl Reporter might seem exceptional in her readiness to risk scandal to tell a story no one else would, but she was not alone. The same script was playing out in cities from coast to coast. She was just one of the nations girl stunt reporters, pioneering a new genre of investigative journalism, going undercover to reveal societal ills. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, women from Colorado to Missouri to Massachusetts dressed in shabby clothes and sneaked into textile mills to report on factory conditions, slipped behind the scenes at corrupt adoption agencies, fainted in the street to test treatment at public hospitals.