A quiet life which was not life at all.”
After attending Downer College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, where she paid her way by ironing and washing dishes for the school, Banks wrote editors all over the country, but no one offered her a reporting job. She settled for typing for a grocer in St. Paul, Minnesota, a move that got her away from the farm and let her use some of her college skills. But in her spare time, she wrote up a piece about the life of a typewriter girl and sent it in to one of the papers. She basically interviewed herself, writing about a typist for a mercantile company who pays $5 of her $8 a week in rent, and sends out her laundry, leaving not much left of her take-home pay. But the article did the trick, and soon ink from her very own words smeared her fingers.
Exhilarated, she quit the grocer’s. She headed straight to the office of the Globe, a glowing redbrick and terra-cotta building, the tallest in St. Paul. Her article had been published, and now that she knew her writing was good enough, she wanted to be a newspaper girl, she announced to the paper’s owner.
The white-whiskered man told her the writing wasn’t that good, then pondered her request.
“A newspaper girl, a newspaper girl.”
He paused, then continued, more forcefully, “Don’t think of it my poor child! Be anything, but don’t be a newspaper girl.”
But when Banks threatened to go to Chicago, the wickedest city in the Midwest, the one whose dangerous glamour tempted innocent girls from small towns to catch trains to their ruin, the editor relented. She could do office work in the mornings, and in the afternoons she could pitch stories to the editors.
A bubbly fashion article earned her a desk in the newsroom and the pseudonym “Polly Pollock.” For months, Polly Pollock stayed late at society balls to record the cut of hostess’s dress sleeves, wrote about disappointing Christmas gifts, and lamented the persistence of the bustle.
Elsewhere in the Globe, Eva McDonald, writing as Eva Gay, hired herself out as a lady’s maid. She put on a servant’s dress and penned a long-running series, funny and full of misadventure with its descriptions of coddled pugs and society women smoking opium cigarettes. What an excellent way to puncture the pretensions of the moneyed class. Elizabeth Banks took note.
The closest Banks came to a “stunt” was attempting to act like a “womanly woman” for an entire day, an expectation endlessly detailed in the Woman’s Kingdom (the page where her articles appeared) and one she constantly failed at in her personal life. In this role, with instructions plucked from society parties and novels, she prayed, gossiped, sang a love song and played the piano as accompaniment, planned her winter hat while daydreaming at church, then offered praise for the sermon over dinner. That night she prayed some more: “Please make me a mean, rascally, wicked man, or even a masculine woman with a mission—anything, O, Lord, but a sweet, womanly woman!”
It wasn’t the kind of writing Elizabeth Banks wanted to do. To learn what else might be possible, she continued to read. When she’d been at the Globe only a few months, on December 20, 1888, the paper ran the article “The Chicago Sensation,” telling the story of the Girl Reporter who sought an abortion from prominent doctors. The stunt appeared to bear out all the editor’s fears of what might await a young female journalist intent on proving herself in the big city. Banks was shocked. The indecent assignment seemed to show no care for the reporter’s reputation. Who would do that? As a woman who aspired to write, she observed carefully how other female writers were treated—what earned censure, what garnered praise. And many found the abortion stunt appalling. Later, she would call the exposé an example of articles that “are so hideous and disgusting as to make one wonder how in the land of America, where chivalry of man towards woman is supposed to have reached its highest point, men can be found willing to take editorial positions which necessitate their assigning a woman to go out and degrade herself for the sake of making ‘space.’” The response of the Globe itself was more temperate: “The exposure made by the Times of the existence of the crime of infanticide seems to have been done thoroughly and conscientiously, as it surely was an exhibition of fearless newspaper enterprise.”
Chapter 6
1889–1890
New Territory
Go to work, and stop sentimentalizing about “woman’s sphere.” Any woman that is a woman carries her sphere with her wherever she goes—be it in a ballroom or newspaper office.
—Winifred Sweet, San Francisco Examiner, 1890
Stepping off the boat from Oakland in the spring of 1889, Winifred Sweet found herself at the head of Market Street, the broad cobblestone thoroughfare that sliced the heart of San Francisco, from the Ferry Building on the water, past storefronts and advertisements for beer, paper boxes, and artificial limbs. Streetcars lurched on rails embedded in packed dirt; horses pulled gilt-painted cabs. San Francisco was metropolitan, bustling, but it could feel a bit hollow, like a mining town thrown up in haste at the first glint of gold. Outside the urban core, treeless hills and sand dunes rippled to the ocean. A visitor from New York described a city of low buildings and oozing mud, characterized by the fact that no one had been there long. “The whole atmosphere of the place is charged with a vigorous, disrespectful sort of youth,” the observer concluded.
The want ads of the San Francisco Examiner and other local papers sketched the dangers for someone like Winifred Sweet, a young woman with few friends, arriving in an unfamiliar place. Concern about sex out of wedlock and its revelation by pregnancy was constant. A slew of ads made the usual promises to cure “monthly irregularities.” A Rev. J. W. Ellsworth suggested that, “Women who have fallen
