For the young writer in Allegheny City, this idea of domestic bliss directly contradicted her personal experience. She’d heard her mother called “whore” and “bitch” by her alcoholic stepfather and watched as he choked her. Marriage made her mother wish she was dead. At fourteen, the girl fled the house, along with her younger sister, mother, and brother, when the stepfather leaped up from a dinner table argument, brandishing a gun. Over the course of several days, the stepfather barricaded himself inside and destroyed their home, smashing furniture and flowerpots, upending the table, kicking holes in wall plaster. Hard to play an angel in this domestic paradise.
She wanted something more, but what? Teaching was an option for smart young women, and so she’d started at Indiana State Normal School with high hopes. Her father left some money when he died, but the executor mismanaged it, and funds ran out after one term. She found herself back home. Factory worker, servant, shop clerk—fields open to women—had applicants lined up to apply. In the Dispatch’s Help Wanted section, things looked equally bleak. The city was recovering from a nationwide recession marked by a stock market crash, meager prices on corn and wheat, and a bank panic that shuttered the Penn Bank in Pittsburgh and left the streets crowded with the unemployed. So listings were thin. But still, that January, in the “Male Help” column readers could find:
“Wanted–manager for art publications for the best house in the trade.”
“Wanted–Experienced press boy–that can make himself generally useful in a printing office.”
“Wanted–Agents in every county in Western Pennsylvania, Western Virginia and Eastern Ohio, to sell the celebrated Electric Light Lamp.”
But reading farther down to the “Female Help” listings, job seekers would find only:
“Wanted–Two good dishwashers at Horner’s Chophouse.”
“Wanted–a good girl for general housework.”
“Wanted–a chambermaid, from 25 to 40 years of age; one that can make good soup.”
The letter writer saw herself in Anxious Father’s daughters. How frustrating to be brushed off as useless when she had so much to offer. It wasn’t fair.
The young woman, called “Pinkey” by friends and relatives, wrote the newspaper to say so. Her writing style was unpolished, to say the least, punctuation haphazard as hail, but she made a passionate argument, rooted in a real situation—her life. She wrote about applying for jobs, being treated badly and rejected over and over. She was too small. They didn’t have any openings. The pay for women was less than half what a man might make, nothing one could live on. She signed it “Lonely Orphan Girl” and sent it off.
Flipping through the Dispatch several days later, she didn’t find her letter, but this instead:
“If the writer of the communication signed ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’ will send her name and address to this office, merely as a guarantee of good faith, she will confer a favor and receive the information she desires.”
The next day, a girl who struck those she passed as shy and rather frightened showed up at the offices of the Pittsburg Dispatch, out of breath from climbing the four flights of stairs, and asked to speak to the editor. Her meek voice and timidity were in contrast to her clothes—a floor-length silk cape and a fur turban—which projected, if not grandness, at least the idea of grandness.
Under her plush hat, the girl had hair cut with bangs, a round face, and a snub nose that would later be described as evidence of “a strain of sound North Ireland in her stock.” Elizabeth Cochrane (originally “Cochran,” but she added a final “e” to sound more distinguished), struck people, then and later, as not so much as beautiful but straightforward. There was nothing vague or unfocused about her curious glance. She asked for what she wanted. The editor, who had been impressed by the personality in her prose, despite the rough edges, hired her to write two articles. A working-class young woman would add a missing perspective.
Her first column, a direct response to Wilson’s dialogue with Anxious Father, was called “The Girl Puzzle.” Not all women marry, and not all have the skills, money, beauty, or connections to succeed as writers, doctors, or actresses, she wrote. The white-haired columnist’s fantasy home life obscured the reality for many. She also pushed back against the abstract optimism of Bramble, who had painted endless possibilities for women, while in her view, there were hardly any. What women needed, she said, were better jobs. Why not have female messengers or office assistants, and allow them to work their way up as a young man might? Why couldn’t girls be Pullman conductors or traveling salesmen? After all, she wrote, “Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn.”
Her second article, “Mad Marriages,” argued for a law that would bar anyone who had taken public charity, or owed taxes, from marrying. At her mother’s divorce proceeding, neighbor after neighbor testified that they’d known for years the man she married had a foul temper and propensity to drink. They should have been required to speak up before the ceremony, the writer suggested. And divorce should be outlawed, so that people wouldn’t just leap into a wedding, ignoring warning signs. All these steps would keep the unhappy spouse from saying “I did not
