Sensational – The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”

Tune in to The Smithsonian Associates discussion of the book July 15

https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/sensational-trailblazing-women-journalists

In November 1888, a female journalist went undercover for The Chicago Times to research an exposé on the city’s illegal abortion trade. She visited over 200 doctors pretending to need the procedure; garnered advice, was handed prescriptions, and more often than not, offered an operation – at a wide scale of cost. Signing her work “Girl Reporter,” the young woman “condemned abortion, but wrote about how and where to get it. Readers found it repellent and irresistible.”

“The Times capitalized on curiosity about the Girl Reporter. An illustration on the editorial page showed five sketches of thin, dark-haired women with bangs in front and a bun in the back, wearing an apron over a collared shirt. They looked down, or up, with expressions pensive or half-smiling, line-drawn Mona Lisas. Underneath was written: Guess which one of the above is the girl reporter?” Author Kim Todd tried unsuccessfully to discover the woman’s identity (a journey she shares later in the book) becoming fascinated with the origins of investigative newswomen then called girl stunt reporters “because they slipped on disguises courting danger.” At the time, women had no vote and were thought so sensitive and impressionable they were fit only to be wives and mothers.

The brazen protagonists in this volume – many from quiet Midwestern homes – not only broke into the male dominated field, but managed to do so evading assignments on domestic arts and the lovelorn. Intrepid women became sweat shop workers, probed adoption agencies and scrutinized public hospitals covering issues of concern to peers.

Perhaps the first and best known of this ilk was Nellie Bly aka Elizabeth Cochrane who told Joseph Pulitzer she’d do anything to get a start. (The women worked under pseudonyms for years.) Her initial assignment was to fake insanity and get herself incarcerated at the asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). This was an era when uncooperative females were commonly committed by so-called loved ones for the ersatz medical diagnosis of “hysteria.” Women, many of whom had no mental illness, were treated horribly on the island. Bly suffered starvation, chilblains, bedbugs, injury and illness. Nor was it easy to extricate herself once locked up. The reporter’s riveting, detail filled, first-hand account brought about significant change. (Her book Ten Days in a Madhouse is compelling.)

In 1890, newspapers in San Francisco and New York each sent a woman to circumnavigate the globe in less time than Jules Verne’s popular (fictional) Fileas Fogg who, despite misadventure, did it in 80 days. Under the aegis of William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner, Annie Laurie aka Winifred Sweet ran second to Bly’s 72 days, 6 hours, 10 minutes for The New York World. In her home city, Sweet faked fainting on the street to test hospitals. She was summarily packed into police vans not ambulances and checked for alcohol, drugs, and poison before any usual examination. The poison test necessitated drinking something foul. When the reporter refused, doctors instructed her either to be given a thrashing or strapped down.

Kate Swan aka Kate Swan McGuirk of Massachusetts was the only journalist with access to supposed axe murderer Lizzie Borden during the latter’s highly publicized trial. Swan had worked with the accused at The Fall River Fruit and Flower Mission. She was personally requested. (Borden was acquitted and spent the rest of her days quietly in Fall River. No one else was charged.) The reporter wrote about what it was liked being strapped into an electric chair and securing opium without a prescription.

Also covering the Borden trial was journalist/suffragist Elizabeth Jordan who would go on to edit Harper’s Bazaar and two Sinclair Lewis books as well as having an affair with Henry James. These women had brains, guts and stamina. Nathanial Hawthorne called them “ink-stained amazons.”

Elizabeth Brister Banks took stunt reporting to London (for The Daily News, Punch, and St. James Gazette) posing as a housemaid, street sweeper and Covent Garden flower girl to write about the lower classes. “Suddenly everyone wanted to hire a stunt reporter or be one.” As Eva Gay, Minnesotan Eva Valesh became an undercover union activist assigned to factories to investigate working conditions like sweltering temperature, irregular payment, faulty machinery, and sexual harassment. Her piece sparked a strike and eventual bankruptcy. 

“These features, with lush, half-page illustrations of women facing down dangers, hair and skirts billowing, prefigured nothing so much as comic-book heroines. (See Brenda Starr and Lois Lane.) And as the stakes plummeted and the public good became more difficult to decipher, the reporters were mocked, and the style written off as a fad. Their embrace of writing from a female perspective in female bodies made them all the easier to dismiss as insignificant.”

Gradually we work our way to Gloria Steinem’s month-long investigative stint as a Playboy Bunny named Marie Catherine Ochs. The journalist and feminist discovered not only padded bosoms and stilettos, but low pay and an environment of fear. “The Truth,” she wrote, “will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” Her tenure was instrumental in stopping Playboy Clubs from giving physical examinations to applicants. (Steinem then rejected an assignment to expose high end prostitution by posing as a call girl.)

Female investigative newswomen got laws changed, launched labor movements, and redefined journalism, often doing jobs literally impossible for men.  Kim Todd is thorough, enthusiastic (not pedantic) and writes with the descriptive color of fiction. A lively read.

All quotes are Kim Todd

The book is published by Harper/Collins