Sensational Kim Todd (popular books to read .txt) 📖

a higher class than her background indicated. Admitting domestic skills would be somehow shameful. But that didn’t keep her from peppering her pieces with household hints: using a whisk broom on the corners, dunking dishes in hot water to better rinse them, installing a dumb waiter to keep maids from running up multiple flights of stairs.

Confessing her age would be similarly damaging. At some point she shaved five years off, claiming to be born in 1870 rather than 1865, making the “American Girl” twenty-three in London rather than pushing thirty.*

Readers talked over her articles but weren’t always sure what to make of them. First, Banks seemed sympathetic to servants who worked for demanding employers; then she defended employers taken advantage of by duplicitous maids. Undercover work was traditionally linked to reform efforts. Reporters often justified their deceptions by highlighting resulting improvements: Nellie Bly mentioned that her Blackwell’s Island piece prompted additional asylum funding; Winifred Black stressed the changes in hospital policy. But what reforms did Banks want?

In the hubbub after the servant series, another woman writer pulled her aside at a social gathering:

“Now, tell me exactly, what was your aim and object—your serious one, I mean,—in going out to service and writing about it? It is a question we are all asking.”

“I did it for ‘copy,’” Banks said, “to earn my living, you know. I knew it was a subject that would interest everybody.”

In the face of the writer’s surprise, Banks continued: “I’m not a hypocrite and won’t pose as a reformer. I did it to earn my living; but, of course, if my published experience helps others to earn theirs, I shall be very glad. I have done my best with this series and have been absolutely honest and impartial. I have taken no sides. I have simply told the truth.”

As much as she tried to distance herself from that Wisconsin farm girl, a certain practicality was the soil in which she was rooted. When the other writer, dismayed, said she’d had never written anything without the goal of helping someone, Banks dug in: “Perhaps you have an income aside from your writing, which I have not.”

Her response spread, and afterward, she found herself alienated from the circle of philanthropic female journalists. (Of course, needing the money is another kind of justification, for stunts, for writing at all, perhaps more acceptable than “I craved exciting and meaningful work.”)

Banks continued her campaign against self-congratulation. The English prided themselves on valuing breeding and nobility, as opposed to those cash-obsessed Americans who just bought whatever they needed—class, society, status. This seemed a lofty, inflated claim, ripe for puncturing. Banks wrote a new ad:

“A Young American Lady of means wishes to meet with a Chaperon of Highest Social Position, who will introduce her into the Best English Society. Liberal terms.”

And then, taking care to bait the hook with a particularly juicy worm, she directed letters to be addressed to “Heiress.”

Responses flooded in with offers of marriage and presentation at court, letting Banks conclude, “After all my investigations, my faith in the purchasing power of the ‘Almighty Dollar’ still remains unshaken.”

After that, she hinted to editors that she might want to write more traditional stories. But, in the newspapers’ view, her breakthrough was the introduction of American stunt reporting to London, though she was very much working in the path of W. T. Stead (of “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” fame), who became a mentor and friend. She was an American girl, and American girls went undercover. Assignments to sell flowers, or sweep the streets, or pick strawberries piled up.

Before long, she was back to placing newspaper ads:

“A YOUNG WOMAN wants a situation in a large first-class Laundry, where she can learn the business. No wages.”

But the laundry market was, apparently, more competitive, though she offered to work for free. She only got one reply, but that was enough.

In the one large room of Y____________ and Z__________ Sanitary Laundry, shirts boiled in vats, and about thirty women ironed, starched, and folded clothes for hundreds of clients. Backs were stooped from long hours and repetitive tasks. Surveying the scene, Banks felt she needed some boatman to ferry her across the water sloshing in a river over the floor. If so, Janie, a seventeen-year-old with a dreamy expression and hair half braided and half loose, lame from a childhood accident, was her Charon, easing her way into the damp Underworld.

“I’ll help you, Miss Barnes,”* she said when Banks (who applied under the name “Lizzie Barnes”) faced any of the many bewildering tasks. Janie set up an ironing board for a table and shared her bitter tea with her sister and Banks, patiently waiting for one of the two cups to be free before she drank her own. She also, perhaps with a bit of glee, scared the newcomer with stories of exploding boilers and fingers crushed in the wringer. One recent case required amputation, she confided as they sewed red numbers on each garment so it could be tracked back to its owner.

It was a classic laundry stunt. Eva McDonald had done it, and then Nell Nelson. But Banks had a different take. Rather than charting the experience of the laundry girl, she positioned herself as an employer, sending out her own laundry to be cleaned at the same place she was working, cringing as the red numbers were coarsely stitched into her fine handkerchief. She had wondered about the condition of laundries where she shipped her clothes to be washed, Banks wrote. What if they were suffused with disease? (Meanwhile, her autobiography revealed that while in London she illegally did her washing in a hotel bathtub and almost got evicted for cooking in her room when the smell of her onions wafted down the hall.)

But this time she had another purpose, too. England had just passed a series of Factory Acts, covering at what age children could be employed, mandating a clean and ventilated workplace, and limiting the number of hours per week. But