The issues faced by the stunt reporters and excavated by Woolf still play out today. Writing by women about women continues to be shunted into separate literary categories, those that are both high selling and low prestige, like romance novels, “chick lit,” and memoir. Like stunt reporters, the authors of online personal essays are expected to write about their bodies and are punished for doing so with scorching criticism (and sometimes threats) in the comments section. It’s a no-win situation. In contrast, roles branded more “male” are held in high esteem, like war correspondent and investigative reporter. A decade ago, when the organization VIDA, Women in Literary Arts, started counting numbers of women and men published by the most prestigious literary publications, they found a 25/75 split in some places. What is considered respectable versus sensational or “literary” versus “popular” often remains centered on discomfort around female physiology, leaving writers who take women’s lives as their subject to navigate the narrow, rocky passage between tame and scandalous.
By writing these reporters back into history, I aim to highlight the double standard that labels women as “stunt reporters” while men are “investigative journalists,” even as they do the same work. I also hope to illuminate its consequences. If we let these groundbreaking women journalists be erased, allow “muckraking” to be the provenance of Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair, leave unquestioned Tom Wolfe’s assertions about the invention of New Journalism, and permit male writers to lay claim to launching “creative nonfiction,” then we add fuel to the notion that women’s articles, essays, and novels—and by extension, women’s lives—are small, timid, unambitious. This dismissal cuts to the heart of women’s credibility as witnesses of their own experience and of the world.
Many women authors and journalists I have interviewed ended our conversations confiding how inspirational they found Nellie Bly. Some have gone undercover themselves; others just aim to write fearlessly. Bly showed the way when, even a hundred years later, paths to meaningful careers are hard to find. But as vital and exceptional as Bly was, it is equally vital to know she was not the only one. Ordinary women from Boston to Omaha stepped up, willing to breach the bounds of propriety to uncover a truth, despite a nation of obstacles arrayed against them.
This is the story of how they did it.
Part I
Voyaging Out
1885-1890
Chapter 1
1885–1887
Trials of a Working Girl
Now and then a young woman with keen sense of the world’s movements, who writes well, will look longingly to a great city paper with a desire to become one of its workers.
—Good Housekeeping, 1890
Somewhere in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, in early 1885, a twenty-year-old woman chose her words carefully. Across the river, past the barges sliding by heaped with coal, the industrial engine of Pittsburgh churned out steel beams and glass bottles. Surrounded by hills that trapped the factory pollution, Pittsburgh was the “City of Smoke.” Residents said it with pride; smoke equaled money. And the metropolis had money, but not much glamour, as the thick air smeared white gloves with ash. Not far beyond city limits, the tall buildings turned to hard-to-traverse hills and deep forest. Evergreen branches bent under heaps of snow, isolating the small towns, the kind where the young woman had grown up. But she was older now, and that day, on a large sheet of paper, she penned a letter to the editor of the Pittsburg Dispatch, hoping to write herself into a new life.*
The Dispatch was a prosperous, forward-looking paper, known for opposing slavery during the Civil War and favoring increased rights for women. But one of the paper’s columnists, Erasmus Wilson, who used the pseudonym the “Quiet Observer” and usually covered topics like the etiquette of umbrella usage, had recently taken the “women’s sphere” as his theme. It was a topic hashed over in articles and lectures of the 1880s as suffragists urged that women should take part in public life—inventing, reforming, voting—while conservatives argued that they belonged in the home. But the suffragists had encountered a series of setbacks. Passed in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had given citizens the right to vote regardless of race, but the Fourteenth Amendment had specified that the right belonged to “male citizens,” the first time sex appeared in the Constitution as a voting criteria. Efforts to pass an amendment to allow for female voters had languished in Congress every year since the proposal was introduced in 1878.
Wilson joined those who felt biology and the Bible framed the female for domestic life. His columns expressed increasing annoyance with those who sought to expand their reach. “If women would just let up on this sphere business and set themselves to do that which they are best fitted for, and which their hands and hearts find to be done, they would achieve more for themselves and be greater blessings to the world,” he wrote. A woman’s focus should be making “her home a little paradise, herself playing the part of angel.”
In January 1885, the Quiet Observer pushed his point even further. A man calling himself “Anxious Father” wrote in, asking what to do with his five daughters. In their teens and mid-twenties, they painted, collected money for the poor, played piano, but didn’t seem fit for much else. He’d love to marry them off but didn’t have many takers: “Now what am I to do with them?”
Wilson was remarkably unhelpful, suggesting that the father ask the Dispatch’s female columnist Bessie Bramble instead and noting, darkly, that in China they kill extra girl babies or sell them as slaves. When the father wrote Wilson back, unsatisfied with Bramble’s advice (she idealistically suggested that in this modern age, there were no limits to what women
