For Bly, the stunt drove the story. The delight in fooling the powerful, the slipping disguise, the fact of her being a rather poor actress—it all added to the drama. In fact, that was most of the drama, as she often breezed by genuine hazards. When she was at Bellevue, a doctor came into her room as she got ready to sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, put his arm around her, asked about Cuba, and said, “Don’t you remember me? I remember you.” In the article in the World, Bly mentioned that this doctor was particularly handsome and commented, “It was a terrible thing to play insane before this young man, and only a girl can sympathize with me in my position.” But in the version she published as a book, a few months later, she acknowledged that his caress could be read the wrong way. “Some people have since censured this action,” she wrote, “but I feel sure, even if it was a little indiscreet, that the young doctor only meant kindness to me.” A sexual encounter, even against her will, would have bumped her out of the “good woman” class. Chastity meant credibility. Throughout her story, Bly downplayed real risks—disease, assault, drugging—and highlighted less significant ones—that her hair was a mess, that she might burst out laughing and blow her cover.
This strong first-person point of view immersed readers in the narrator’s experience. Bly’s tone was confiding—a whisper to a trusted friend rather than the assertions of a disembodied observer—and the body she inhabited was specifically young and female. The reader was right next to her, shivering, thrown into the icy bath, smelling spoiled meat, responding to a handsome doctor, hiding behind a veil. This vivid narrator, full of life, moral but not preachy, was clearly enjoying herself. And if this little scrap of a person—this “mere girl” as the Hazel Green Herald put it—could take on the whole system of institutions with wit and compassion and negligible acting ability, what couldn’t be done? A stunt reporter had real power.
Suddenly, everybody wanted to hire one.
Or be one.
Chapter 3
1888
Detective for the People
Detective: B. n. One whose occupation it is to discover matters artfully concealed.
—Oxford English Dictionary
All across the country, throughout late 1887 and 1888, girls took notice. They opened the paper as they ate their eggs, read headlines as they stood in line at the corner store to buy butter, glanced at a father’s desk as they tidied it, or grabbed an abandoned page on a street-car seat.
One of these was Eva McDonald, a voracious reader in Minnesota with a rebellious streak, who would discover the potential of stunt reporting as an activist tool. Small with a dark fringe of bangs, McDonald had a round, pale face and thick, ink-swipe brows. A bout of diphtheria when she was nine left her heart weak, but she was anything but frail. If there was a beehive to be poked with a stick, McDonald wasn’t going to stand around eating store-bought honey. On some women, the frills and ribbons of the time flowed naturally, but photographs show McDonald stuffed uncomfortably into puffed sleeves and lace collars. With her cropped hair, even at twenty-one she looked like a twelve-year-old boy, more likely to be whitewashing a fence for Tom Sawyer than writing newspaper articles.
McDonald lacked polish, and she felt it. When her mother, who claimed aristocratic roots and had high-class aspirations for her daughter, sent McDonald to a nun for piano lessons, student and teacher quickly agreed she was hopeless. Declaring her “a terrible tomboy,” the nun offered to teach her elocution instead. And her pupil agreed, sensing that speaking well might come in handy to accomplish what she wanted to do, though she wasn’t yet sure what that was. She told herself that if her family had only stayed in Maine rather than moving to Minnesota, she would have gone to college like her friends, maybe even become a lawyer, stunning the courtroom with her arguments. But now, her education disrupted, that avenue was closed to her. When she tried to get a job as a teacher, the school board rejected her as too scrawny and told her to “go do something else for two or three years until you grow up.” She had a talent for recitation, particularly comic poems, but there wasn’t much money in that. Typesetting paid well but was tiring.
She knew what she didn’t want to do, though, which was take care of any more siblings. One of eight with five younger brothers, two younger sisters, and a mother who doted on the latest baby but left the others to McDonald’s care, she was overwhelmed and resentful. Minnesota was full of things to do. Sledding, ice-skating, swimming in the lakes and rivers—it all happened just outside the window, and she wanted to be out in it. Or haunting the library in pursuit of religious histories to fuel arguments with her Catholic-school teachers. Or making forays into union organizing as a member of the Ladies’ Protective Association, Local Assembly 5261, Knights of Labor. McDonald also belonged to the Typographical Union. But, as the oldest, she was usually stuck inside, trying to read while rocking a cradle-bound baby to sleep.
So when an editor for the St. Paul Globe showed up at her house, saying he’d seen her in a local theater production—maybe as Mother Foresight in Danger Signal or Mrs. Arabella Blowhard in The Persecuted Dutchman—and asked if she’d like an assignment where she could put her talents to good use, she said yes, thankful that her mother wasn’t home. He wanted her to investigate conditions for working women by sneaking into factories. It was hardly proper, and her mother would have disapproved. Her carpenter father, indifferent, said she could do what she liked. Here was a chance to get out of the house, escape the sticky fingers and tidying, earn
