Sensational by Kim Todd (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📕

interview and responded gruffly when Bly showed up, but she took it as a challenge: “Nothing is very good that is easily gained.”

In a room filled with furniture he made himself (he was a carpenter, he stressed, though his signature construction was gallows), the hangman blamed the newspapers for romanticizing crime and making heroes of criminals, as Bly looked through his scrapbook of hangings. Did he have much contact with those scheduled to die, she asked. (He avoided them.) Always pursuing the “women’s sphere” angle, Bly asked whether women could observe hangings. (No.) When the executioner complained about newspapers further, she shrugged it off.

“It is the age of exaggeration, you know,” she said as she shook his hand and left.

No matter how thin the topic, Bly could excavate something worthwhile. She made a formidable competitor for newspaper space because she refused to be boring. “Should women propose?” she asked notable thinkers of the day a few weeks later. Listing professions now open to women, she wrote: “Is it just that an able (woman) lawyer shall be allowed to plead for everything except the hand of the man she loves?” And: “Shall (women) writers only woo imaginary people in their studies—propose only in stories?” In places, Bly seemed to rebel against the frothy assignment. Interviewing Chauncey M. Depew, a railroad magnate, she strayed from her purpose to ask his opinion on the recent presidential election. Republican Benjamin Harrison had unseated incumbent Democrat Grover Cleveland a week earlier. Then she caught herself and recorded his view that women should, indeed, propose. While Bly generally presented the back-and-forth as fluffy fun, she also noted that these chivalric customs encourage deceit, teaching women that “it is proper and good form to express everything but that which they honestly feel.”

It’s hard not to speculate about Bly’s love life. Her persona was so sparkly and flirtatious, never failing to record a comment about her beauty, never shy about complimenting a good-looking man. In her early twenties, she must have seen her peers marrying. It would have been on her mind. In her asylum stories, she had gone out of her way to praise Frank Ingram, the assistant superintendent at Blackwell’s, who chatted with her at length and moved her to a quieter ward. Papers at the time noted his kind expression and attractive mustache and wondered at the developing closeness between the reporter and assistant superintendent. Was this series a trial run for making a proposal of her own, like asking newspapers where she wanted to work how their editors felt about hiring women?

Meanwhile, Nelson moved ahead with her factory investigations, anger and naked outrage displacing some of the Chicago humor. In “Horrors of a Slop Shop,” she described Freedman Brothers as a place where “modesty is mocked at, virtue debased, decency outraged, self-esteem murdered, and all that makes womanhood lovely and lovable crushed to death.” Women worked alongside men, the men at the sewing machines, the women finishing collar and cuffs and other details. The men pinched the women and ran their hands over their bodies. When one complained on behalf of another, she was told to stop wasting time. Cockroaches crawled across the paper wrapping a girl’s lunch. A boy, to her skeptical look, insisted he had documents proving he was fourteen.

Nell Nelson promotion in the Evening World, October 20, 1888

Evening World, October 20, 1888

In “They Work in an Inferno,” sewing beaver and chinchilla fur coats, Nelson met a seventeen-year-old named Anna who invited her to visit the tenement where the young woman lived with six brothers and sisters. Overcrowded, substandard housing was increasingly a hazard in New York where people crammed into poorly lit, unventilated spaces. Nelson didn’t stay long. Anna’s mother didn’t speak English or seem to want the reporter there, so Nelson dropped off a beefsteak and left. But what she saw formed the moral center of that day’s reporting. She ended with an overt call for action:

When a family of eight can thrive in one room, when five cents a day will board the father and half a pound of prunes with butcher’s scraps provide a soup for the maintenance of wife and children; when $3 is accepted as a fair compensation for seven days of labor of eleven hours each; when a foul-smelling, overheated, ill-ventilated, ratty fire-trap is regarded as an ideal workshop—then it seems that the time has come for action of some kind.

And people were listening. Back in Chicago, Nelson’s work had lingering effects. Industry in the area was roaring—its central location meant the riches of the West, in the form of logs, grain, and cattle passed through—but the city itself struggled to provide basic services. In August, when Nelson was still pacing Chicago alleys in search of sweatshops, the Women’s Federal Labor Union held a meeting to discuss Nelson’s articles. Were her Chicago Times reports true? If so, members should campaign for living wages, factory inspection laws, a reduction in child labor, and sanitary workplaces. One member whose sister had tried and failed to pay her bills on $2 a week, proposed a committee, in conjunction with other like-minded organizations in the city, to investigate. By October, they and twenty-six other Chicago associations, from the swanky Chicago Women’s Club to the African American literary society the Prudence Crandall Club, formed the Illinois Women’s Alliance. Numbers gave them power. And the rise of unions made citizens like these Chicago women more bold in requesting changes to city and state laws. In December, the IWA launched a campaign to appoint school inspectors to ensure children between eight and fourteen attended class at least twelve weeks per year.

Meanwhile, as Nelson forged her path in New York, Bly exposed a quack “magnetic healer,” and the Illinois Women’s Alliance agitated to fine factories employing underage workers,* the Chicago Times cast about for its next sensation.

Chapter 5

1888

Reckoning with the Evil of the Age

My judges preach against “free love” openly, practice it secretly.

—Victoria Woodhull, New York Times,