Women’s History Month—Undercover Women

The first of Nellie Bly’s asylum articles in the World, October 9, 1887.

For Women’s History Month, I’m highlighting female journalists who went undercover, those covered in Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters” and others. Pseudonyms and hidden identities were common for women writers in the nineteenth century. Some used them sparingly; some never emerged from their disguises.

First up—Nellie Bly.

“I write the truth because I love it and because there is no living creature whose anger I fear or whose praise I court.” Nellie Bly launched the stunt reporter genre when she when she faked her way into Blackwell’s Insane Asylum for Women in 1887 for the World.

Her narrative voice—funny, down-to-earth, self-deprecating—drew readers in and kept them coming back for more. Her blazing career made other women think reporting was just the kind of work they were looking for.

Illustration in the World of Nellie Bly plotting to get in to Blackwell’s Asylum.

Next, Eva McDonald Valesh (pseudonym: Eva Gay).

“The city workshops teem with abuses, and upon them the Globe proposes to throw the broad light of day.” In 1888 the St. Paul Globe touted reporter Eva McDonald who slipped into mattress and shirt factories to interview women working long hours for pennies.

Part reporter, part activist, McDonald encouraged women to stand up for themselves. As she did. She gave rousing speeches, interviewed a president, and quit editing Samuel Gompers’ magazine when he refused to credit her work.

An Eva McDonald article in the St. Paul Globe, April 8, 1888.

Then comes Winifred Sweet.

“The man’s cruelty seemed so wanton and unprovoked that I really feared he would strike as I lay there.” Winifred Sweet, alias Annie Laurie, mock fainted on Market Street in San Francisco in 1890 and uncovered vicious treatment of poor women at the public hospital.

An adventure-seeker who first tried life as an actress, Sweet (later Winifred Black, later Winifred Bonfils) investigated poisonous cosmetics and dressed as a man to be the first reporter on the scene of the Galveston hurricane. The stage’s loss was journalism’s gain.

Winifred Sweet (Annie Laurie) launches her public hospital reporting in the San Francisco Examiner on January 19, 1890.

Illustration in the Examiner of Winifred Sweet giving an interview subject a skeptical glance.

In the 1890s, Victoria Earle Matthews exposed sham agencies in the South that lured Black women north, promising jobs only to trap them. “Let women and girls become enlightened, let them begin to think, and stop placing themselves voluntarily in the power of strangers,” she said in a lecture.

Gathering a group of like-minded activists, Matthews would wait at the docks in Manhattan, trying to catch these young women before they could be hoodwinked, finding them jobs, connecting them with relatives, offering them a place to stay and access to a library stocked with books by Phillis Wheatley and other Black authors.

Illustration of Victoria Earle Matthews in The Journalist in 1889.

One of the most scandalous exposés was that of the “Girl Reporter” of the Chicago Times.

“It used to be the dream of my childhood that I would some day become a writer—a great writer—and astonish the world with my work,” she wrote. In 1888 the “Girl Reporter” feigned pregnancy and asked doctors for an abortion. Her revelations in the Times shook the city.

The Girl Reporter charted abortion techniques and gave details of prescriptions, providing “a medical education” that made readers deeply uncomfortable. Then vanished. I spent many hours in the archives trying to trace her steps while writing SENSATIONAL.

The Girl Reporter gets down to business for the Chicago Times in December, 1888.

And who could forget Nell Nelson?

“[W]hen a foul-smelling, overheated, ill-ventilated, ratty fire-trap is regarded as an ideal workshop…the time has come for action.” Even before recording sexual harassment in factories for the Chicago Times in 1888, Nell Nelson was noted for wielding a “particularly caustic pen.”

Sewing shoes, assembling feather dusters—Nelson (real name: Helen Cusack) started out posing as a job applicant at Chicago businesses before moving to New York. Her work inspired the Illinois Factory Law and convinced New York State to hire female factory inspectors.

The Chicago Times had a hit with Nelson’s 1888 series and promoted it relentlessly.

Ida B. Wells wrote during the 1880s, 1890s, and far beyond.

“[I]n me they seemed to see somebody who had come to help them in their trouble.” A legendary anti-lynching reporter, Wells pretended to be a relative to interview condemned men in an Arkansas jail in 1920.

Through these conversations, Wells uncovered the truth of the deadly “riot”—that the jailed men, mostly sharecroppers, had been trying to organize to keep more of the money from their crops, when they were attacked by whites concerned about losing their profits. In her books Southern Horrors, A Red Record, and The Arkansas Race Riot, she did what no one else was willing to do: count the lynchings, investigate the causes, expose the hypocrisy.

Illustration of Ida B. Wells in The Journalist in 1889.

Time to ponder Eliza Putnam Heaton.

“I think I shall always be a better American citizen for my emigration.” In 1888, reporter Eliza Putnam Heaton embraced a challenge deemed too dangerous for Bly—she traveled from Liverpool to the U.S. in steerage, documenting the experience of European emigrants.

Her account, subtitled “A Sham Emigrant’s Voyage to New York,” introduced readers to a bevy of interesting and hopeful newcomers. She concluded: “This is still the land of promise.”

Heaton’s story appeared in the 1888 Brooklyn Times Union, among other places.

One of the most irrepressible stunt reporters was Caroline Lockhart.

“Haven’t I been drinking moxie all spring?” If Nellie Bly could do it, why couldn’t she? That was the logic of Lockhart who had many adventures, in disguise and out, for the 1890s Boston Post, including donning a diving suit to explore the harbor.

Caroline Lockhart investigates the fish for the Boston Post in 1895.

Less than a year after Bly went into the asylum, the Chicago Tribune hired Eleanor Stackhouse.

The paper wasn’t shy about promoting her work, teasing readers by asking, “Where has Nora Marks been?” A more apt question might be where hasn’t she been? Eleanor Stackhouse (alias “Nora Marks”) went from employment agencies that promised women jobs to meat-packing plants in her 1880s-1890s reporting for the Tribune.

Nora Marks was “not idle surely” as she roamed Chicago on behalf of the Chicago Tribune.

Ada Patterson, whose career was rich in stunts, was known as “Nellie Bly of the West.”

In one example, (more “women underwater” than “women undercover,” but I love this image too much not to post it), Patterson tested out a submarine for the New York Journal in 1897.

Ada Patterson goes deep for the New York Journal in 1897.

Elizabeth Banks was known for bringing American-style reporting to London.

“It really would appear that regular hours from eight to six would be much better for all concerned,” she wrote after her trip undercover into the damp life in a commercial laundry in the mid-1890s. Her book, Campaigns of Curiosity, was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

By her own admission, she was nobody’s heroine, but she attacked hypocrisy wherever she found it.

Elizabeth Banks in her mid-1890s book, Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London.

In 1963, Gloria Steinem launched a 20th-century stunt.

“Today I put on the most theatrical clothes I could find, packed my leotard in a hatbox and walked to the Playboy Club.” Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny for Show Magazine and revealed that the promised glamour was an illusion.

In the first of two installments, Gloria Steinem describes applying to the Playboy Club for Show Magazine in 1963.