Though one physician suspected she was an “adventuress,” none knew she was actually an undercover reporter, bent on revealing the extent of the city’s abortion practice. When her exposé, a monthlong project for the Chicago Times, hit the stands, the city editor quit in disgust, letters of praise and outrage flooded the news desk, lawsuits for libel piled high. Discussions of abortion, in a daily paper? Readers found it repellent—and irresistible. They also found the message hard to decipher. On the one hand, the writer referred to only as the “Girl Reporter” condemned abortion in the strongest terms; on the other, she published detailed instructions for how and where to get one, including which medicines to take and at what dosage. A heated discussion blazed through the editorial pages about women’s bodies and the power imbalance between the sexes.
The Girl Reporter’s series had such a wide reach because she dared to talk about women and sex and the way it felt to be a woman talking about sex—embarrassed, threatened, angry. Her Chicago Times series took all these speeding trains—experiments in journalism, a demand for women’s rights, a medical field struggling to dilute the influence of midwives—and put them on a collision course. In her articles, the Girl Reporter also discussed the challenges of this particular assignment and of her role as a woman reporter. For example, after a long day of playing pregnant and recording justifications and refusals, she reflected on her weeks spent tromping from one doctor to another: “Today I have been wondering whether, if I had to do it over again, I would have taken a position on a newspaper staff. It used to be the dream of my childhood that I would some day become a writer—a great writer—and astonish the world with my work. And this dream had not entirely vanished yet, thank goodness.”
Then she added, “But did I ever suppose that I would have to commence on a newspaper by filling an assignment like this?
“Well, no.”
Entering journalism, a predominantly male field, meant competing with men on their own terms, she knew, and she was ready. But, ironically, for this story, one of her first, the reporter’s sex was not a disadvantage; it was a necessity.
“A man couldn’t have done it,” she concluded.
The Chicago Times’s Girl Reporter might seem exceptional in her readiness to risk scandal to tell a story no one else would, but she was not alone. The same script was playing out in cities from coast to coast. She was just one of the nation’s “girl stunt reporters,” pioneering a new genre of investigative journalism, going undercover to reveal societal ills. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, women from Colorado to Missouri to Massachusetts dressed in shabby clothes and sneaked into textile mills to report on factory conditions, slipped behind the scenes at corrupt adoption agencies, fainted in the street to test treatment at public hospitals.
At the time, American journalism, a field on the cusp of professionalization, was plotting its future. A revolution in printing technology made putting out a paper cheaper than ever before, and an influx of immigrants offered a tantalizing new audience. Newspaper rooms, from San Francisco’s Examiner to New York’s World, battled viciously for market share with weapons of scandal and innovation. In the process, they shaped the growing metropolis, reflecting it back to itself. On the one hand, cities were engines of opportunity; on the other, magnets for sin. They drew people seeking better lives and sometimes swallowed them.
Publishers were looking for a new kind of story to fill those numerous pages, to tempt those new readers, to stoke their anxieties but also feed their hopes. And when Nellie Bly’s 1887 “Inside the Madhouse” series for the World hit the streets of New York, readers couldn’t get enough. She had faked insanity to get committed to the asylum at Blackwell’s Island so she could document the starvation and abuse of patients. Even more compelling than the situation she revealed was the way she told the story—a firsthand account from a charismatic narrator, filled with dramatic twists and laced with warmth and humor. The exposé sold thousands of copies of the World, resulted in the municipality committing $50,000 for better asylum management, and created a publishing sensation.
Slipping on a disguise and courting danger suddenly became a way for writers to get a foot in the door. By crafting long-form narratives that stretched over weeks and read like novels, using engaging female narrators to explore issues of deep concern to women, and promising real-world results, stunt reporters changed laws, launched labor movements, and redefined what it meant to be a journalist. These footloose exploits were so sought after by readers and publishers that reporters willing to attempt them commanded high pay. And, while in 1880 it was almost impossible for a woman writer to escape the household hints of the ladies’ page (the kind of writing one female journalist termed “prostitution of the brains”), by 1900, papers were publishing more bylines by women than men.
Stunt reporters put a new female character in the headlines—not a victim of assault or murder—but a protagonist. Bravery was their brand. It was like they stepped out of the adventure tales that flew off the bookstore shelves, except that they were real.
But it was a disorienting sense of reality, as the freedom displayed in these stories was at odds with the limited rights of American women in the late nineteenth century. More and more were moving to the
