And it wasn’t just a legal issue. In a post-Darwin era fascinated with biology, women’s inferiority was codified by science. Psychologists, physiologists, and sociologists all weighed in. Phrenology—the determination of character by skull shape—revealed women to be naturally childlike, as did analysis of their stature and rounded features. Their nerves—alleged to be smaller and more delicate—made them sensitive and impressionable. Doctors increasingly diagnosed hysteria, a uniquely female ailment that could result in a patient being confined to her bedroom or sent to an asylum.
Then there was the question of womanhood on the page. Writing by women has historically been devalued, though much read, and the nineteenth century was no exception. Budding novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was so concerned that in an 1830 biographical sketch of the 1600s religious leader Anne Hutchinson for the Salem Gazette, he took a long detour to detail his fears about women writers in his own age. Why was their work so popular? What was the cost for creators of actual literature? He worried that “the ink-stained Amazons will expel their rivals by actual pressure, and petticoats wave triumphantly over the field” and mulled the “impropriety in the display of woman’s naked mind to the gaze of the world.” Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century female writers fended off this kind of disparagement in a variety of ways, from adopting male pseudonyms, like George Eliot and the Brontës, to penning essays and stories where the sex of the narrator is obscured, like Mary Austin in her Land of Little Rain.
The stunt reporters challenged these views of what a woman should be. They couldn’t cast a ballot, but they could interview presidential candidates. They couldn’t sit on juries, but the World could impanel twelve female reporters and editors to offer their perspective on court cases. Anatomy textbooks might detail their weakness and frailty, but they could leap into the cold ocean and face down burly factory bosses. Under the guise of journalism, they adopted roles forbidden to them, demonstrating their fitness to serve on a search-and-rescue team or drive a train. Unlike female writers who masked their sex, the girl stunt reporters told the truth experienced by their bodies. They wrote about sexual harassment. They wrote about seeking abortions. They wrote about crushes and concerns about their hair. These reporters were deemed silly, sentimental, or sensational—all criticisms of “feminine” writing—but the power of their voices made Hawthorne’s fears come true. They changed the journalistic landscape.
Rather than being an oddity of history, stunt reporters altered the trajectory of both traditional reporting and memoir. Along with other writers like Ida B. Wells and Victoria Earle Matthews, they developed techniques of “muckraking,” a style of investigative journalism first condemned then embraced as a noble tradition. They employed the intimate tone and scene-based structure that would later characterize the “New Journalism” of the 1960s and ’70s and the “creative nonfiction” that followed. Their disguises allowed them to go deep into the lives of their subjects, providing early examples of “immersion journalism.” But while Bly is well known, most of the women who followed in her wake have been forgotten, their legacy obscured. The identity of the Chicago Times’s “Girl Reporter,” for example, remains a mystery.
After a little more than a decade of headlines and book deals and newspaper profits, these writers faced a backlash that stripped them of their credibility and, ultimately, credit for their innovations. Their assignments shifted from public hazards to circus elephants and nights spent in a haunted house. Awareness of the body, both by the writers and in half-page illustrations, was criticized as indecent. Stunt reporting, which played a critical role in the 1890s circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, became synonymous with “yellow journalism.” It was disdained as a particularly female variety of trash. As newspaper editor W. C. Brann wrote at the time, “A careful examination of the ‘great dailies’ will demonstrate that at least half of the intellectual slime that is befouling the land is fished out of the gutter by females.” Turn-of-the-century advice books for aspiring women journalists warned them to steer clear of stunts. And these criticisms stuck, effectively ejecting these reporters from the journalistic tradition they helped forge. If the form is known at all, it is referenced with a sneer. Even today, one scholar describes the stunt reporter genre as “semipornographic titillation” that “cast a spell of infamy over the image of the woman journalist which only years of sober professional accomplishment finally exorcized.”
Stunt reporters and their treatment raise the question of what it means to write in a female body, from an overtly female perspective, in their time and in our own. It is the same question that haunts many women who write honestly about their lives: how to tell the truth and still be taken seriously. In her 1931 lecture to the Women’s Service League, Virginia Woolf described a writer as an angler, letting her line drift as she dreams over the water, hoping to hook something astonishing. But then the woman is violently jerked from her creative reverie, all writing halted, because “she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a
