Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover image © yogysic/Getty Images (woman)
Art from Shutterstock / impulse50
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-284363-0
Version 02162021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284361-6
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*About $6,000 in 2020.
*Throughout the nineteenth century, “Pittsburgh” was spelled both with and without the “h.”
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton sent in a plea on behalf of her son.
*As Jean Marie Lutes, author of Front-Page Girls, Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, told me in an interview: “One of the paradoxes of the way that women journalists like Bly worked was that they took the thing that was used to disempower them—their physical vulnerability and the way they were objectified—and turned that into an asset.”
*A suit the company ultimately abandoned.
*Their efforts would eventually result in the passage of the (short-lived) 1893 Illinois Factory Law that limited women to an eight-hour workday and restricted child labor.
*Statistics for other populations are less available.
*Abortion is famously the thing that can’t be talked about—see Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a 1927 short story often used to teach the concept of subtext.
*A conspiracy-minded reader might wonder whether the World also was behind Bisland’s trip. The story gains tension and drama as a race against a real woman as well as the fictional character of Phileas Fogg. And Bisland is listed as part of the editorial department in the World’s 1889 office directory.
*Chicago physician Dr. P. H. Cronin had fallen afoul of a group of Irish extremists, and his body ended up in the sewer. His murder in May 1889 and the resulting trial captivated the country. It is interesting to note that he was one of the many who wrote a letter in response to the Girl Reporter’s exposé, pointing the paper to a case where a husband coerced his unwilling wife into having an abortion.
*One wonders if he had actually met her.
*After the 1906 Food and Drugs Act, the Bureau of Chemistry analyzed a sample of Gervaise Graham’s “Cactico Hair Grower,” guaranteed to grow hair on bald heads, and found the tincture contained mostly water with a little alcohol, borax, glycerin, and pepper, and determined it wouldn’t work. Graham paid a $50 fine.
*It wasn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court ruled states couldn’t create laws that discouraged women from participation on juries, and 1994 when peremptory challenges based solely on sex were outlawed.
*She would dedicate the book to “the Afro-American women of New York and Brooklyn, whose race love, earnest zeal and unselfish effort at Lyric Hall, in the City of New York, on the night of October 5,1892—made possible its publication.”
*It’s interesting that those who watched the trial unfold, the whole jury, most newspapermen (at least the ones Elizabeth Jordan talked to), Jordan herself, and even the judge, with his sympathetic jury instructions, were convinced Lizzie was innocent. While, now—at least among those who write television and movie adaptations—the consensus is that she was guilty. Did the prosecution just do a spectacularly bad job? Are modern-day interpreters more willing to consider female rage and psychosis? Or were viewers at the time, crammed into that hot courtroom, feet away from Lizzie and the police and their ax collection, able to see something that we can’t?
*In one of Banks’s many obfuscations, she presents herself as living alone (and as being sometimes lonely), but may have been staying at least part of the time with her sister.
*This overwhelming concern with establishing class (even in Banks, who purported to critique it) brings to mind the poet Elizabeth Bishop’s 1960 letter to Robert Lowell, commenting on female writers who obsessively reference their status: “They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say.”
*Lying about one’s age was as common as adopting a pseudonym for stunt reporters. Men did it, too. The chapter about Charles Chapin’s time at the Chicago Times in his autobiography is called “A City Editor at Twenty-Five.” He was twenty-nine.
*Banks often wrote her characters’ speech in Cockney dialect, but I’ve rendered it into standard English.
*Under this pseudonym. That we know of.
*And most were from the Midwest, where eastern notions of propriety didn’t have as much weight. Back in 1887, when Nellie Bly interviewed New York newspaper editors about female journalists, many stressed that attitudes toward the role of women were more liberal in “the West.” Wisconsin alone contributed Banks, Jordan, and Sweet, with Valesh coming from nearby Minnesota.
*About $30 million today.
*Jordan never married and lived with other women for most of her adult life.
*It’s interesting to note where Pulitzer would balk. Several years later, a female reporter wrote a piece that mentioned a prominent socialite readying a nursery, implying she was pregnant. For Pulitzer, whose paper interviewed prostitutes, illustrated X-rays of hands, and showed a woman on the verge of electrocution, an article suggesting pregnancy was too far. This oblique hint at “an interesting condition” was “disgusting and sickening” he wrote to his staff, and he demanded the writer—Zona Gale—be fired.
*Reporters called the dog “Senator,” but in her books, Jordan referred to him as “Judge.” Did she give her pet a pseudonym, too?
*See Sir Walter Besant’s “The Lady Housemaid,” marveling at Banks dressing up as a
