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

and posing as a reporter two years before in the Midwest, or she may have been someone else who settled on the same scheme. Sometimes being a reporter was the disguise.

Other recruits were more legitimate. Bly’s career also caught the attention of Caroline Lockhart, a woman in her early twenties, raised in Kansas and sent to boarding school in Boston because she didn’t get along with her stepmother. She was soon mired in trouble for getting drunk at her uncle’s hotel. At first Lockhart thought becoming the next Sarah Bernhardt would offer a life of excitement, free from pieties she found oppressive. Bernhardt, the renowned French dramatic actress, traveled the world, hunted crocodiles, and stormed across the stage as Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But when Lockhart found her bit parts unsatisfying, she cast about for other ideas. “Why couldn’t I write for a newspaper,” she thought to herself. “Nellie Bly was making history at the time so why couldn’t I?” She joined the Boston Post.

The Boston Post was experimenting with journalism in the Pulitzer mold. The owner, Edwin Grozier, had worked as an editor at the World when Bly went into the asylum, before buying the Post in 1891. One of the lessons he learned from his time there was the benefit of appealing to women.

In February 1894, the Post produced an issue written and edited entirely by women, a stunt of newspaper production. Much of the space was taken up with articles about female preachers, surgeons, jail wardens, lawyers, sea captains, all kinds of people the regular paper didn’t have time for. But for the men’s page, a mirror image of the typical women’s page, editors sharpened their pencils to a particularly fine point. The top left corner displayed an illustration of a man, tipped back in his chair, feet up on the table, reading the Sunday Post, under the caption “This Page for the Lords of Creation.” Articles written in the cheery, infantilizing tone of those aimed at female readers offered advice on “Ambrosial Locks” (Young men take note: long hair in the style of Beethoven, Sampson, and Byron is all the rage); “Pointed Shoes for Men” (These are painful but those men, what they won’t sacrifice for vanity); “Bachelors’ Buttons” (Studies show men are shrinking. This is clearly something they should be concerned about, rather than fretting over their “rights”).

Nell Nelson contributed a lengthy piece on the premise that behind every great woman is a helpful man. Her article “Useful Husbands” had the wry subhead, “Nell Nelson’s Opinions of the Convenience of Having a Masculine Attachment to a Clever Woman’s Career.” Actresses, authors, doctors, teachers, all benefit from a supportive man in the background, she wrote. The tone was mocking, but took a serious turn as she mentioned that a woman, no matter how financially sound, could rarely rent property in her own name. Nelson offered an example of a novelist who wrote constantly, compromising her health, but never got ahead until she married, and her husband took over the marketing.

In other efforts to engage female readers, the Boston Post developed a character just for stunts, punningly named the “Post Woman,” and Lockhart took up the part. And that is how she found herself on a boat in Boston Harbor, stepping into a rubber suit, pulling a heavy metal breastplate and collar over her head. A man tightened the bolts with a wrench, securing the collar to the rubber. A handkerchief tied over her head kept her hair out of the way. Diving shoes encased her feet, then weighted overshoes, so she could barely lift her own legs. While she leaned over the rail, sailors buckled her into a diving belt, adding even more pounds. Attempts to scare her hadn’t worked—all the talk about the sound of a roar like cannon and the sensation of knitting needles through the brain. She had confidence in her grit. She hadn’t fainted when the doctor set her arm after she’d tried to break a mustang, and stunt reporting for the past six months already tested her nerve. “Have I not been drinking moxie all this spring?” She asked herself. But when the helmet descended, cutting off what felt like all but a few gasps of air, despite the hissing of the oxygen, a shiver did course through her. Then she plunged over the side into the blue-black water.

Caroline Lockhart in a diving suit for the Boston Post, June 2, 1895

Caroline Lockhart, Diving Suit, Boston Post, June 2, 1895 (Library of Congress)

Nudging stunt reporting into new territory, Lockhart’s exploits were often outdoor adventures instead of undercover exposés. Rather than stressing her fear, she dwelt on the pleasure of walking on seaweed, almost weightless, thirty feet underwater. She would later write a vivid story about getting lost in the fog off the Maine coast in a rowboat, spotting whales, landing on a strange island and gathering wood for a signal fire, a bit chilled, a bit exuberant. These escapades, sometimes written as the “Post Woman,” sometimes under her own name, embraced stunt reporting’s new direction. Where could a woman’s body go—up in the air, underwater, across the ocean?

But at the same time as Lockhart explored this physical freedom, more established reporters were beginning to discover the limitations of their situation. By March 1895, Bly had abandoned New York for Chicago, taking a job with the newly formed Chicago Times-Herald and staying at the lavish Auditorium Hotel, a few steps away from the wind and beauty of Lake Michigan. The exterior with its massive, gray stones had an almost prehistoric feel, belying the sleek modern interior, brilliant with electric lights, housing a theater for the Chicago Symphony along with rooms for posh guests. One of the hotel clerks noticed that the famous reporter spent almost every day for two weeks in the company of another New York guest—Robert Seaman. Seaman, though in his early seventies with thin white hair, was a natty dresser with good posture, a confirmed