While Martha waited, Nelson inquired about a position. The secretary handed her a flyer with all the details, and she proceeded to grill him.
“What’s the $3 for?”
“Can’t you read?” The secretary answered. “The $2 is to pay for the samples and instruction and the $1 as a security for our material. I don’t know who you are and if I gave you the thread I might never see you again.”
But she knew how to crochet and didn’t want the sample, Nelson persisted. Could she start work without the deposit? No. She asked to see a list of customers and pointed out there weren’t many. The Chicago market didn’t seem overwhelmed with a desire for handmade crocheted goods.
The blond secretary grew increasingly flustered and finally refused to talk with her anymore.
“Why? Is it a secret organization, a sort of Masonic—?”
But eventually she let him be. She turned her attention to the employees, peppering them with questions. None made more than 20 cents a day. When she wrote up the episode, under the headline “City Slave Girls,” Nelson commented: “I learned that many women paid $3 and gave up the work when they saw it was not possible to make the $15 necessary for the rebate.” She called the business “a concern legally incorporated to grind the life out of the women and girls unfortunate enough to patronize it.” With her focus on the economics, she uncovered an early model of a multilevel marketing scheme, like Herbalife or essential oils, where the real profit is made not from consumers but from those who think they are employees.
In factories and sweatshops, over the course of weeks, she stitched coats and shoe linings; interviewed her fellow workers in sweltering, unventilated spaces; and continued reckoning. At the Excelsior Underwear Company, she was handed a stack of shirts to sew—80 cents a dozen—and then was charged 50 cents to rent the sewing machine and 35 cents for thread. Nearby, a forewoman scolded an employee for leaving oil stains on chemises. She’d have to pay to launder them. At one facility, Nelson was told she’d need to work six weeks for free to gain experience.
The summer of 1888, Nelson was in her late twenties. Perhaps age and experience gave her confidence. Inspired by Eva McDonald’s stories for the Globe, Nelson had a distinct style, wisecracking and intrigued by human nature, much more sophisticated than McDonald’s. Like the best stunt reporters, her personality was an integral part of the story. (Unlike others, Nelson didn’t leave any writing besides her newspaper articles, so it’s hard to gauge the distance between how she presented herself in public and what she confided in a private letter or journal entry.) She never let a good digression slip by. At the Never-Rip Jersey factory, when a young woman at her table mentioned her hopes that her telegraph operator boyfriend would propose, Nelson offered tips on ways to catch him. They hatched a plan to be deployed, over chocolate cake, at a picnic in a park that evening. Nelson was confident in the recipe for commitment, though admitted she’d never tried it.
Like Bly, Nelson wrote from a close, first-person perspective, pulling readers into her bodily experience.* She included intimate details: the corsets hanging on nails, removed so the women could move more freely; the cold pancakes employees packed for lunch; a girl so tired she fell asleep in the filthy bathroom. When Nelson tried her hand at making dusters, she ended up covered in feathers: “They stuck in my woolen waist, got between my teeth and into my mouth and eyes till I could see nothing but flukes and stems.” Like McDonald, Nelson wrote overtly about sexual harassment. One day, she forgot her streetcar fare and borrowed it from a well-dressed stranger. When she hopped off near a vest maker she wanted to investigate, he followed, asking where she was going, if she worked in the neighborhood, and eventually pressing so close, as she described it, “the sleeve of my ‘never-rip’ jersey was pressed against the waist-line of his light grey suit.” She tried to shake him off, saying if he would give her a card, she’d be sure to reimburse the fare. When he finally offered one and asked for her contact information in return, she wrote, “Reporter, The Times,” on the reverse and handed it back.
“Didn’t think it was so late, have an engagement at 9:45,” he said, and walked off, briskly.
The revelation that one has been underestimated is one of the pleasures of undercover reporting, particularly for young women, so often underestimated: “You thought I was part of your story, but really you are part of mine.” It’s a moment, like the ones where Nelson confronted employers in ways an employee might not be able to, that gave female readers a vicarious thrill.
The harassment Nelson uncovered was pervasive. At one company, where both sexes worked together, the men constantly jostled against the women, and Nelson observed the resulting exhaustion and anger. A “miserable bullet-headed sapling” tipped over a box where she was sitting. At a cigar factory, she walked in to find a big boy chasing the female employees around the room, aiming to tickle them. At a coat factory, frustrated by lack of instructions on how to sew and the unwillingness of the forewoman to tell her how much she’d be earning, she got in a fight with one of the owners. He raised a fist to hit her before she ducked out. A seamstress told her she’d rather work
