“I don’t think I can tell you how many ways there are to insult a girl. I have had a foreman just give me a look as I passed in to my machine or handed in my sewing that made me wish I was dead,” she told the reporter.
In her travels, Nelson also encountered those far too young for factory work. In a rough part of the city, on a pitted road lined with garbage, she found thirteen-year-olds sewing frantically at a long table. In another sweatshop, a girl of about twelve brought seamstresses water. “But worse than broken shoes, ragged clothes, filthy closets, poor light, high temperature, and vitiated atmosphere was the cruel treatment by the people in authority,” she wrote. Her series, “City Slave Girls,” went deep into August. Businesses grew increasingly wary. One, armed with her description, refused to hire her and quickly dispatched a representative to the paper to contradict anything she might say about her brief time on the premises. When the Times sent a male reporter to take her place, even he was met with raised eyebrows.
“Aren’t you from the Times?” a woman at a book bindery asked him.
“Do I look like a woman?”
“You might be Nell Nelson disguised in pants for all I know,” she answered.
Demand for the Chicago Times soon strained the capacity of the printing presses. West must have been thrilled. What did it matter that the Never-Rip Company sued the paper for libel, asking $50,000?* Letters to the editor praised “the true knight errant of today . . . a lady reporter for THE TIMES.” The editorial pages hosted a robust debate about the situation of factory women, offering a variety of solutions. They should unionize, or rely on higher tariffs. Many told young women to hire themselves out as servants in the country, suggesting they were only drawn to Chicago by a desire for frivolous entertainment. “If they prefer working at starvation wages in the city . . . let them stay and work. They won’t get my commiseration,” one man wrote in.
This prompted a reply from a woman who’d been a servant on country farms. The wages were terrible, she reported. Sexual harassment was no less rife in rural areas. She had to leave one situation because the master “made himself obnoxious to me,” she reported, and another where one of the sons became “insolent.”
One letter writer delicately pointed out how many proprietors with Jewish last names Nelson frequented. He warned the paper against leading “an anti-Semitic crusade under the pretense of assisting poor working girls,” and offered to take reporters to many establishments run by Christians. The dominance of Jewish last names lessened a bit.
If editors hadn’t already been intrigued by undercover possibilities, Nelson’s stunt proved their potential. The Globe congratulated itself that Eva McDonald’s articles had been influential—“The highest compliment paid them was in the duplication of their character and scope by such newspapers as the Chicago Times”—but Nelson’s made a much bigger splash. The Times’s rival, the Chicago Tribune, hired Eleanor Stackhouse, another teacher turned reporter, who took the name “Nora Marks,” to do stunt after stunt throughout the fall of 1888, including testing out employment agencies and working in a meat-packing plant.
Reporter Eliza Putnam Heaton took up the challenge that Cockerill deemed too dangerous for Bly—she traveled from Liverpool to the United States in steerage, documenting the experience of immigrants coming from Europe, an account that appeared in papers, including the Brooklyn Times, in October. In the cramped, claustrophobia-inducing lower deck on the Aurania, she met a miner’s wife on her way to join her husband in Pennsylvania, a youth in a cowboy hat with his heart set on Texas, a bevy of Irish girls aiming to work as servants in Boston and New York. Despite arriving exhausted, hollowed out from seasickness, and desperate for fresh fruit, she found the experience a positive one: “I think I shall always be a better American citizen for my emigration. This is still the land of promise.” The piece was subtitled “A Sham Emigrant’s Voyage to New York.”
That fall, the Buffalo Morning News ran a story about the flood of girls seeking newspaper work in Bly’s wake. (For all the stunt-generated debate about whether women should be factory seamstresses or servants, many women themselves seemed to think they should be reporters.) The Morning News highlighted Nelson as one of these aspirants. A little more than a month after the series ended, she published a book of her collected columns and made her way to the larger playing field of New York. The Morning News was dismissive of Nelson’s ambitions, perhaps not yet realizing the popularity of the new genre: “Occasionally her stories get into print, but like most of her sex who try to enter the newspaper ranks, she finds that the demand is limited.”
But if Nelson struggled at first, it wasn’t for long. The World had its feelers out, detecting any vivid writing anywhere, and the paper sensed her potential and hired her. Nelson started by re-creating her Chicago investigations in New York.
Pulitzer famously fired his newsroom with competition, often setting illustrator against illustrator and hiring two editors for the same job. Throughout the fall of 1888, Nelson and Bly jockeyed for space in the World’s Sunday pages, sometimes one taking the prime feature spot, sometimes the other. Bly was a star, but that didn’t excuse her from churning out daily racing prose. As a colleague noted, “She suffered the penalty paid by all sensation-writers of being compelled to hazard more and more theatric feats.” He added, “Nothing was too strenuous nor too perilous for her if it promised results.”
Drawing attention away from Nelson’s exposés, in an article that gently mocked a society-woman profile—“Hangman Joe at Home”—Bly offered a portrait of the executioner for the state of New York. The electric chair had just become the preferred mode of capital punishment, so part of his job was obsolete. He was not interested in an
