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

Eastern European immigrants than on those of Black Americans migrating north. For Matthews, concrete activism, beyond airy conference resolutions, was becoming more appealing than writing articles or short stories. Helping these girls and publicizing their plight was something she could do.

As 1897 came to an end, a little girl wrote to Santa requesting the Round the World with Nellie Bly board game. Ida Wells-Barnett debated a preacher in Boston who thought lynching was sometimes justifiable. Helen Dare went to the Yukon for the Examiner. Winifred Black filed for divorce. At the Journal, she’d been her husband’s boss, which he resented. When she corrected his work, he assaulted her, and it wasn’t the first time. Things had gotten very ugly, with Orlow Black claiming their son wasn’t his. The divorce was granted.

And Elizabeth Banks took a different tack on the working-girl stunt. Rather than charting the conditions of employees in the factory, she would experience their lives at home. Like so many did, she would live on $3 a week. When she announced her plans in the paper, a dour note arrived from a working girl, predicting her demise: “If you are going to try to exist on $3 a week I advise you to leave your order with the undertaker in advance.”

The first day, Banks worried over making her rental apartment cheerful and comfortable, priding herself on creating a shelf from a box top, wishing she could sew a calico cushion for her chair. But soon, her focus shifted entirely to food. She thought about it all the time. By the end of the second day, she was already down to $1 and hungry, needing another loaf of bread. She spent three hours looking for a chicken within her budget, and when she tried to cook it, it was painfully tough. Like so many stunt reporters, her body offered proof of her claims: “My head aches and my eyes ache with poor food and worrying over it.” Meager breakfasts sapped her energy and, when she got home from work, she was often tempted to go to bed rather than cook a meal. By the fifth day, she declared, “No working girl can live comfortably on $3 a week. . . . It is a shame to ask a girl to do it.” By the end of her experiment, all but two cents of her money was gone, leaving her nothing for an emergency doctor visit, a new plate to replace the one she’d cracked, or more oil for the stove if a cold wind blew in. On the final day, she accepted an invitation to dinner with a “girl bachelor” who bought a more expensive chicken that tasted much better. In addition, the paper held a contest with the prize being Banks’s humble apartment, the one she’d obtained and furnished for the story, with three months’ rent paid.

Banks insisted she hated this kind of reporting, found it “loathsome.” Certainly, it would be hard to admit you liked something so universally condemned. And yet.

This life was more free than almost any other option. In the morning, a reporter might put on a corset, pull on stockings, lace up practical boots that could take her from Central Park to City Hall, step into a wide-bottomed cotton skirt that allowed for jumping on streetcars or chasing down an interview and wouldn’t be ruined by contact with a little dirt. A short jacket went over an unfussy striped shirtwaist. A silk tie, like a man would wear, could be tied around the neck. She might put her hair up and back, and pin on a straw sailor hat that could provide shade and take a battering. Then she’d be ready to take off, like a tennis player, or a bicyclist, or the other modern women who peppered the World’s pages.

As she wrote in Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” about her New York reporting:

As the days and the weeks went on I could even feel myself growing, growing in grace, growing in charity, putting aside such narrow creeds and prejudices as had been a part of my up-bringing, and were, perhaps, in their place and time, good and wholesome for the girl, but cramping, distorting, warping to the woman. Life! Life! Seething life was all about me. The life of a great city, its riches, its poverty, its sin, its virtue, its sorrows. . . . I entered it and, while I studied, became a part of it, learning how akin was all humanity, after all, and how large a place had environment and circumstance in the making a character and the molding of destiny.

It was the answer to those cold mornings on the Wisconsin farm, the monotonous existence she feared more than death by submarine: “A quiet life which was not life at all.”

Banks, a savvy adult woman who calculated risks, made her own decisions, and lived with the results, belied the constant worry over naive young girls taken advantage of by unscrupulous assigning editors. In many fictional short stories of the time, heroines like Jordan’s Miss Van Dyke abandon reporting for love of a man or family, but hundreds of flesh-and-blood women were making the opposite choice.

Proud of navigating the perilous yellow waters that lapped at her ankles, of standing up for herself (an ability she credited to her “self-assertive and combative disposition”), Banks finished up her series on $3 a week with satisfaction. Her next assignment seemed right up her alley, both meaty and decent. But it would threaten to drag her under.

On New Year’s Eve, 1897, the Journal funded a massive celebration. On January 1, all five boroughs would be joined together as one city: Greater New York. Flags, fireworks, clowns, horns, Chinese lanterns on sticks would pack the streets around City Hall and Newspaper Row. Searchlights and hot-air balloons would embellish the sky. As many as eight hundred singers would belt out songs. A 120-piece band would blare “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Ode to Greater New York.”

On its editorial page, the