In the fall of 1888, as Nell Nelson headed for New York, newspaper readers were caught up in a story from overseas. This one also featured women’s bodies, but not strong ones, capable of striding through the city, of performing hard and dexterous labor, of engaging in deception, but those displayed on a slab at a morgue. A killer, soon dubbed “Jack the Ripper,” was ranging through the Whitechapel District in London. From early morning of September 1, when a cart driver stumbled across Polly Nichols on his way to work, columns flooded with descriptions of throats cut to the spine, sliced noses, a missing uterus, severed breasts. Here the women were dismembered by the papers and displayed for the public gaze as a warning to those who ventured into the city without money, without male protection. The urban landscape, rather than a locus for opportunity, became a field for predation. For many reporters, mostly male, the unsolved murders inspired a journalism obsessed with the identity of the killer who evaded capture and sent taunting letters to newspapers. Writers credited Jack the Ripper with an almost diabolical intelligence.
The Chicago Times reprinted Jack the Ripper articles but didn’t have an assigned reporter in London to give the paper an edge. Inspired by the circulation surge from “City Slave Girls,” though, editor James J. West doubled down on stunt reporting. One day, he approached Charles Chapin, his city editor, and revealed his newest brainstorm. Horrified, later calling it the “yellowest” idea he’d ever heard in a newspaper office, Chapin refused to have anything to do with it.
Chapin thought West had forgotten about it, even when the publisher requested a “bright man and a woman reporter” for a special assignment. But in early December, Chapin recalled, he went into the composing room and saw the headline: “Chicago Abortioners.” He quit before the edition hit the streets. (That exact wording doesn’t appear in the series, but Chapin’s memory might have faded: he wrote his account thirty-two years later, in Sing Sing, where he was serving time for murdering his wife.)
In the initial articles, under the all-caps headline “INFANTICIDE,” a male reporter asked cabmen where he could find relief for a relative who had been “led into error.” Midwives were notorious for knowing how to end pregnancies, and he sought out German and Scandinavian practitioners in the poorer section of the city and made his case. Some proposed medicines and places for her to stay during recovery. Others said they could help with adoption. But most demanded to see the young woman in question.
Headline for the abortion series in the Chicago Times, December 23, 1888
INFANTICIDE headline. Chicago Times, December 23, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
Enter the Girl Reporter. It would be hard, the Times admitted, to find just the right person for the delicate job, someone willing to “parade her shame” in front of multiple doctors and the male reporter who escorted her, “a young woman of intelligence, nerve, and newspaper training.” But somehow they did. Writing under the byline “Girl Reporter,” the female journalist and her male colleague refined their story over the next few days, switching from midwives to prominent doctors, claiming she was six weeks pregnant rather than two or three months, stressing to physicians that money was no object.
The Girl Reporter spent long days going from office to office. She visited Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, the first female member of the American Medical Association, who treated her kindly but advised her to have the child and get married, even if it would be “but a step toward divorce.” She interrupted Dr. John Chaffee at his lunch, and he urged her to have the operation right away, telling her, “Thousands are doing it all the time. The only thing to do when one gets into trouble is to get out again.” (A few days later, Chaffee was arrested for giving a woman an abortion that killed her.) Dr. Edwin Hale, a controversial figure since publishing his pamphlet “On the Homeopathic Treatment of Abortion,” gave the reporter a bottle of big, black (and harmless, the doctor assured her) pills to take before admitting herself to the hospital. That way, when he was called to her bedside and performed the operation surreptitiously, they could blame the medication for causing a miscarriage.
Illustration of medicine offered to the Girl Reporter in the Chicago Times, December 18, 1888
“Dr Hale’s Pills.” Chicago Times, December 18, 1888 (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago)
The Girl Reporter’s voice was as unique as the topic of her research. She was determined: “I felt that there was some big ruffians to be brought down yet, and I was anxious to have a composed mind and a strong heart.” She was weary: “Tonight as I write this I am sick of the whole business. I did not suppose there was so much rascality among the ‘reputable’ people.” Her prose teemed with self-conscious literary flourishes—puns and alliteration, references to Shakespeare and the Aeneid. This, alternating with casual exclamations, like “ugh” and “really swell,” the gushing enthusiasm for favorite novels and her Sunday-school moralizing, all seemed like the first attempts of a big reader and beginning writer. She wrestled with the constant need for disguise, feeling more compassion for the distraught woman she pretended to be than she expected: “I manage somehow or other to lose my own individuality all together. I really don’t recognize myself half the time.” There was the sense of a real person trying to figure things out.
It wasn’t chance that, of the almost thirty daily newspapers in Chicago during the 1880s, the Chicago Times was the one to give her this assignment. Notoriously trashy, the Times generated as much scandal among its staff as it reported in its pages. Many male Times reporters haunted the Whitechapel Club, an organization named after Jack the Ripper’s hunting grounds, admiring photographs of beheadings on the walls, drinking out of cups made from skulls, and nurturing their literary aspirations.
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