The anger among the women in the press club’s meeting room the next night was running high. The letter-writing campaign to protest Packwood’s lawsuit against Betsy Beecher had failed. Not a single major paper had responded, and the editor’s lawsuit was still moving forward.
We need to come up with a more powerful protest and need your ideas, Martha had written in her note asking me to come to the meeting.
Underlying her words was her admonishment that I had remained silent at the last meeting and that without my input, they had come up with only a milquetoast idea.
Since I was getting back into the investigative game for Oxley, I thought it would be smart to attend, and I was finally motivated. It was important for my colleagues to know I had fully come out of retirement. After all, I couldn’t know what kinds of favors I was going to need in the upcoming weeks as I worked on my story.
There were more than fifty women at the meeting, forty seated, the rest standing in the aisles and in the back. Some of the best women reporters in the business, or “stunt girls” and “sob sisters,” as our male editors and counterparts had taken to calling us, were there and desperate to effect change. I tried to curb my pessimism. Around me, these women still had the hope that I’d lost. They truly believed they could make a difference, not just by stopping Packwood’s lawsuit but by improving how we were treated in our journalistic efforts and with the larger goal of bringing about equal rights for all women in all capacities. Being there that night among so many engaged, enraged, and determined reporters made me realize just how cynical and fatalistic I’d become.
Mrs. von Klenner took to the podium and commanded our attention.
“While we’ve been writing letters that haven’t worked, our sister Dorothea Woods was taken off a story about the trial of a politician. When she came across information that guaranteed a front-page placement, a male reporter was reassigned.”
Murmurs of outrage came from the assembly.
“How long are we going to accept being treated like second-class citizens in the newsroom? We get paid less, and we get assigned the least interesting stories unless we come up with them ourselves. Haven’t we proved ourselves by now?” asked Caroline Middlestein, whose brother was Betsy’s lawyer.
There was a chorus of yay and hear hear from the audience.
“It’s all well and good to be outraged, but what are we going to do about how we are being treated?” shouted a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize.
“What if we went on strike?” Dorothea called out.
There were many shouts of agreement.
Mrs. von Klenner reacted by holding up her hand. “While I understand the urge to strike, the problem is, would they even care? There are more than enough men to take our places. If anything, they’d probably be relieved.”
“They would be!” Martha shouted.
“They’d celebrate!” Fanny agreed.
My friends were right. Female reporters going on strike wouldn’t accomplish anything. But, I thought, there was something that would.
All my life, I’d seen my father’s ads for Garland’s in all the New York newspapers, but I hadn’t ever really focused on the income ads generated until I read Uncle Percy’s last letter to my father. Since then, I’d often thought about Oxley’s scheme to get rich trading secrets for a high advertising spend.
Why not focus on that? We could trade something we believed in—integrity and equality—for advertising dollars. Despite my deciding to stay on the sidelines, despite my not believing anything would make a difference anymore, I stood up.
“Striking won’t cause any change, but what if we get women readers to strike? Advertisers buy ads in the papers to lure women customers into their shops.” There was quiet. I had their attention. “If women stopped reading the papers, the advertisers would see a decline in traffic in their stores. They’d be less inclined to buy ads. That would have a financial effect that no publisher could endure for long.”
“You mean to threaten the papers with a loss of female subscriptions and therefore a loss in revenue from their advertisers?” Mrs. von Klenner asked.
“Exactly,” I said, excited despite myself as I elaborated. “Once publishers see that if our editors continue to treat us like this, they will be risking their advertising dollars, they will have absolutely no choice but to force editorial to rethink their position. Even Prescott. No paper can exist without ad revenue.”
Palpable excitement rippled through the room as we discussed the ways we might organize a protest and get the word out. I offered that I knew some people who wrote society columns and we might get them to mention the time and place.
“We would need to describe it in such a way that we could get it past our editors, who certainly wouldn’t allow the mentions to run if they blatantly cried out against them,” Fanny said.
“Let’s call it a ‘March for Equality’ and make it seem like another suffragette effort and not let on what its true purpose is. We’ll do that with the banners we carry and the leaflets we hand out.”
“You’re on fire. What’s happened to you while you have been recuperating?” asked Elinor Edmundson, a society reporter who had always treated me with disdain. I wasn’t sure why, but I suspected it was because she resented my lack of interest in my looks. Of all of us, I had always been one of the worst-dressed and most uncoiffed, eschewing the beauty tips, treatments, and products she wrote about so often. I found it especially ironic that Elinor was so obsequious to Vera Garland and her family when she wrote about them yet so dismissive of Vee Swann.
Ignoring her question, I continued on with another idea. “We should even take out ads for the march in the papers themselves.”
“What if our editors notice?” Elinor asked.
“The ad departments and editorial are church and state,” I said, trying to keep the supercilious tone out of my voice. “Editors never look at the ads, and the salesmen who sell them are so hungry they never really study them.”
Half of them were advertising products that had no worth at all. I remembered Mr. Nevins quoting H. G. Wells, who said advertising was legalized lying.
“How much would advertising cost?” Fanny asked.
I knew because of conversations I’d overheard between Jack and my father at the dinner table over the years, and so I told them.
“But how could we afford that?” Fanny asked.
“A patron?” Martha suggested.
“That’s a ridiculous idea. Where would we get a patron?” Elinor said in her most annoying tone.
“I bet we could get a patron without too much trouble. This is a great cause, and there are many wives and daughters of wealthy men who suffer from the same kind of treatment in their families. I bet some of them would be willing to support us.” I’d enjoy proving Elinor wrong. And I already had an idea for how to do so. I’d employ the same methods I’d used to help quite a few organizations that were in need. By embarrassing my mother and sister into helping in my column. I hadn’t imposed it in a while, and it was time.
After the meeting, Fanny and Martha and I walked down to Greenwich Village and went to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, John’s of 12th Street, and feasted on inexpensive plates of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade red wine. At first, our conversation focused on the march. Then we segued into discussing the suffragette movement’s recent public events and how we could incorporate their efforts into ours. Having been stranded in a fog of medication and grief the last many months, I hadn’t forgotten our camaraderie, but I had forgotten how inspiring spending time with them could be.
Our discussion moved on as Fanny told us the latest news in the Thompson trial, which she’d been covering for the last four weeks. Harold Thompson had kidnapped a little boy named Jimmy Campbell from his bedroom and held him hostage for one week. Although the Campbells had paid the ransom, Thompson had still murdered the six-year-old boy. He’d been the groundskeeper at the Campbell estate and had an affair with Sarah Campbell, the boy’s mother. After Mrs. Campbell had ended the affair and fired Thompson, he’d taken his revenge.
Since the trial had started and the affair had come out in testimony, Donald Campbell, the boy’s father, had left his wife.
“Sometimes it is hard to write the news,” Fanny said. “Even though it’s my job, I feel for Mrs. Campbell and can’t separate myself from what she’s gone through. Yes, she had an affair, but she didn’t deserve to lose her son and now her husband. She’s suddenly all alone and in mourning. All for having a six-week dalliance with the gardener.”
“Which is exactly why they want us women covering these stories,” I said. “It’s our emotional connection and perspective that sell the papers.”
“Women reporters are the ones writing the stories that boost circulation, and yet we’re still relegated to sob stories and fashion,” Martha said. “Our editors insist we can’t take on assignments that could keep us out at night or take us away from our families. But our male counterparts have families and need sleep, too.”
The waiter came and removed the plates.
“Have you heard that Helene Bishop is getting married?” Fanny asked us both once the waiter had left.
Neither of us had heard the news about the reporter who covered women’s health for the Tribune. We fell into a discussion about marriage while the owner of the restaurant served us biscotti and small glasses of lemon-flavored liqueur that we dipped the cookies into.
“A victim of her romanticism,” Martha said, and then took a bite of her sweet.
Martha was bitter about love. Before she’d gone to work at Scientific American, she’d been at Cosmopolitan magazine, where she’d had an affair with her editor. Once it began, he started treating her even worse than before, claiming that, like Caesar’s wife, she now had to be above suspicion with the rest of the staff. So she cut off the affair. And he fired her for no reason, with no severance and no warning.
Fanny, a bisexual, was even more bitter about traditional romance than Martha. She had been raped almost five years before. Not brutally by a stranger but taken by force by a fellow reporter she was dating whom she thought she might be growing to care about. She’d gotten over it as well as could be expected, but she’d developed an edge and trusted women more than men now.
But weren’t we all changed by the men we’d come in contact with? Certainly, there were good men out there, but those who took advantage of us were the ones who left scars on our souls and forced us to become suspicious and overly cautious.
That none of us three was married was atypical. We all found our jobs exciting and our careers daring. But if we married, our editors expected us to give up our work. And none of us was willing to do that. Trade in our typewriters for aprons? Our pencils for diapers? It was fine for the women who wanted it, but we had stories to cover and careers to pursue and changes to make.
“Helene’s fiancé is a doctor, so he’s well off. A widower with two small children,” Martha continued.
“Two children? Then she’s totally lost her mind,” Fanny said, and we laughed.
“She’s going to wind up a babysitter and a cook,” I said.
“She claims he has a nanny and a cook and a maid. He’s a society doctor. I think his name is Bernstein, or Bernstern.”
I knew the name well. Dr. Bernstein was the Garland family doctor. And very much a society physician. He had overseen my back surgery and recovery after my fall and had assured me that because of doctor-patient confidentiality, he would never tell anyone about Vee Swann. But would that extend to his wife? Especially when that wife was also a journalist?
“It is possible,” I said, remembering Dr. Bernstein the night my father passed away, “that Helene has found one of the good ones. If he has money, he won’t expect her to be a slave to the children or the kitchen. There do seem to be some modern men who understand that not every woman wants the same thing. That some of us want to work and make a difference just like they do.”
“Well, you won’t find me testing those waters,” said Fanny resolutely.
“No one would guess that you would. Not to mention how Susannah would react if you did.”
We all laughed. Fanny’s current female companion—the polite way of saying her lover—was a painter of some renown and as jealous as she was beautiful. Her temper with clients and friends and lovers of both sexes over the years was notorious. But in the last twelve months, she and Fanny, much to our surprise, had settled into a very domesticated arrangement. It seemed as if Fanny calmed Susannah while Susannah inflamed Fanny. It was what they both needed.
“Sometimes I think it would be easier to like women,” Martha mused. “At least, the question of marriage and children and giving up your life for someone else wouldn’t come into it.”
Fanny sighed. “Like everything else, Martha, it only looks easier. We have our burdens. We have to hide our affection in public. No one thinks anything of a man leaning down and kissing his wife tenderly or taking her hand or a million other small niceties, but all of that is verboten to us.”
“But the freedom,” Martha continued.
“There is no freedom,” I said. Both women turned to me. “There is no freedom for any of us. Whether we take women as lovers, or men. Whether we vow to remain unmarried, or marry a sophisticated, supportive man. Even if we dress as men like Malinda Blalock or Elisa Bernerström, who did it to fight in wars, or use male pen names like George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë, who did it to get published, we will still and forever be women, never liberated from our sex. Never freed from our way of loving and grieving and mourning. Never free from the power that men can exert over us. We are prisoners of our feelings. Of our attachments. Of our sentiments. We can pretend that we can do everything a man can do and more. We can insist we get the vote and the respect that is our due. But in the end, we will still be the ones to cook dinner and make the bed and weep over a novel and be called weak. We will still be forced to try to fight off a drunken coward who knows he is stronger than us and can get away with it even though he is a stupid lout and we are ten times smarter. We will stand up and fight for our sisters and our rights, but when the baby is sick, which one of us will not forgo all else to sit by its side? What man would do the same?”
Fanny took my hand. “Vee, you have to use that anger.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always been angry at injustice,” I said. “There’s nothing different now.”
“Yes, there is. I don’t know what’s changed in you, but the anger isn’t impersonal anymore. It’s not you looking through a window at a tableau you find disturbing. You’re inside the house now. Don’t be defeatist by thinking that what we do doesn’t matter. That we’ll never be free. We will be. We have to be. Even baby steps are still forward movement. Even if all we can do right now is fight for it, it’s when we fight that we are really alive.”
I went home that night and wrote and rewrote my Silk, Satin and Scandals column to include a rallying cry about the march. Finally, at midnight, when I read it over, I decided I had accomplished my goal. Surely, after reading about Letty Garland Briggs stepping up to spearhead the March for Equality, my unsuspecting sister would, in fact, volunteer and become the patron of an army of women determined to fight the status quo and protect one of their own.