Dedication
For the ink-stained Amazons
Epigraph
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
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue: The Case of the Girl Reporter 1888
Part I: Voyaging Out (1885–1890)
Chapter 1: Trials of a Working Girl 1885–1887
Chapter 2: Opportunity in Disguise 1887
Chapter 3: Detective for the People 1888
Chapter 4: Hunger for Trouble 1888
Chapter 5: Reckoning with the Evil of the Age 1888
Chapter 6: New Territory 1889–1890
Part II: Swashbuckling (1890–1896)
Chapter 7: Under the Gold Dome 1890–1891
Chapter 8: Exercising Judgment 1892
Chapter 9: A Place to Speak Freely 1892
Chapter 10: Guilt and Innocence 1892–1893
Chapter 11: Across the Atlantic 1893–1894
Chapter 12: Girl No More 1894–1895
Chapter 13: Full Speed Ahead 1895–1896
Part III: Facing the Storm (1896–Present)
Chapter 14: A Smear of Yellow 1896–1897
Chapter 15: All Together in New Bedford 1898
Chapter 16: Reversal of Fortune 1898–1912
Chapter 17: In the Wake 1898–1900
Chapter 18: Vanishing Ink 1900–Present
Chapter 19: Anonymous Sources Present
Chapter 20: A Collection of Endings 1899–1922
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Index
About the Author
Also by Kim Todd
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
This 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 couldn’t 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 pseudonym—Nellie Bly, Nell Nelson, and Nora Marks—I 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. It’s 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.
Prologue
1888
The Case of the Girl Reporter
Have I not been drinking moxie all this spring?
—Caroline Lockhart, Boston Post, 1895
In late November 1888, a young woman threaded her way through the grit-filled streets of Chicago’s downtown, skirting horse-drawn cabs and wagons teetering under sacks of grain. When she finally arrived at the doctor’s 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. She’d 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, she’d 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. Don’t follow the dosage written on the prescription, the doctor warned, because it was wrong; otherwise, the pharmacist might get suspicious about the drug’s 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 he’d 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 attitudes—euphemisms, 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: “If I were a girl I would get rid of my trouble if I had to go to the devil rather than live in disgrace before my parents.” Though she had assumed women seeking abortions must be poor, the doctors’ fancy offices and high prices—ranging up to $250*—made it clear many patients must be middle- or upper-class. All the walking and asking, occasionally pretending to weep, was tiring. Some days the encounters left the woman filled with despair, even though she was not, actually, pregnant. But usually a
