But the power of exposure was a tool available even to those without access to the ballot box, a particularly potent one when backed by a newspaper with a large circulation. In New York, Bly continued to use smooth talking and costumes to ferret out corruption. In March, she posed as the wife of a patent medicine manufacturer. A bill in the state legislature would force makers of these concoctions (many useless, some dangerous) to file a list of ingredients with the Board of Health. She met lobbyist Edward Phelps at his Albany hotel and offered him $2,000 to kill the bill. He said he’d do it for $1,125, then ticked off the names of six politicians whose votes could be bought. Needless to say, as the Buffalo Times (which called Bly a “petticoat detective”) declared: “Statesmen Shaking at the Knees and Red with Rage Denouncing a Metropolitan Newspaper.”
In their use of deception and disguise, stunt reporters echoed another phenomenon of the time: the rise of the private detective, particularly as embodied by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, an organization with origins in 1850s Chicago. The Pinkertons, an extensive network of investigators, worked mostly as corporate spies. Railroads used Pinkertons to eavesdrop on disgruntled conversations and then break unions. Streetcar companies hired them to ride the lines and catch conductors who let passengers slide without paying a fare. Stunt reporters, like the Pinkertons, infiltrated organizations, looked for clues, ferreted out secrets, and interviewed witnesses. But the reporters presented themselves as sleuthing from the other side—investigators for the people—catching businesses as they acted unethically and thwarted laws. Along with the Buffalo Times, papers like the Times-Picayune pointed out similarities between the jobs, responding to Bly’s exploits by objecting to “the spectacle of a brilliant young woman in the role of a private detective.” And one of the appeals of stunt reporting to its readers was its similarity to detective novels. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” came out the same year Nellie Bly published her initial investigation for the World.
Though clearly inspired by Bly (the headline of her first story echoed language from a Bly article published several months earlier), McDonald took her own approach. Her writing style was spare, mostly records of conversations, but she doggedly pestered reluctant subjects to talk. Bly loved to chart her elaborate cover stories. McDonald made only the faintest pretense of seeking work. Her preferred technique was to slip onto the factory floor while the superintendent was distracted, ignoring NO HANDS WANTED and NO ADMISSION signs, then wander through, sidling up to anyone who looked willing to talk. Scrawniness had its uses.
McDonald’s sensibility was different than Bly’s, and the results were different, too. McDonald’s piece sparked not a governmental investigation but a strike. This was another power available to those without the vote. Despite worker demands, Shotwell had refused to return wages to 1887 levels and then owners cut wages again—by an average of 17 percent. While the St. Paul Globe suggested ministers and charitable donors get involved, on April 18, less than a month after McDonald’s first Globe article, Shotwell’s female workers stood up from their sewing machines and walked out.
Later in the afternoon, they returned to the factory at First Avenue South and Second Street, to collect their pay. The door was locked. When it finally opened, only a few were let in at a time, leaving a mass of women on the sidewalk. As they waited, they felt damp drops down their collars, in their hair. But it wasn’t spring rain. They looked up to find their male colleagues, several stories up, pelting them with wadded-up bits of paper, cemented with spit.
Over the next few weeks, strike organizers raised money for women out of work, sought support from other local unions, held meetings to plot strategy. They wanted higher wages, but they also wanted Superintendent Woodward fired. As one worker commented, “If we do go back it will be with the understanding that the dude clerks shall stop ogling us and trying to mash us when we go to and from work. We call ourselves respectable and want to be treated as if we were.”
At one meeting, 175 women showed up drenched from the pouring rain. The organizing committee had met with the company and shared its report: Shotwell, Clerihew & Lothman would only hire one hundred women back, and Woodward threatened more rules for those who returned—no talking during working hours, 9.5-hour work days, the firing of women who couldn’t sew fast enough to make $6 a week. In response, the women threatened a boycott. Union men, who supported the strike, were a big market for overalls and jeans.
They pitched their case to the public at another meeting. With a theatrical flourish, strikers decorated a drop curtain with overalls and shirts and pinned two numbers to each, a comparison of pay at Shotwell to a comparable factory in St. Paul. A blouse bore the labels SHOTWELL, CLERIHEW & LOTHMAN, 6 CENTS and ST. PAUL 9 CENTS. A lecturer from a local home for unwed mothers warned that girls who couldn’t earn living wages “have only the option of ruination or destruction.” (This was a common line of reasoning, one that McDonald embraced early on then left behind as old-fashioned. The argument went: without good working conditions, women would become prostitutes, as if the only reason to treat them fairly
