On Monday morning, a note arrived from Fanny and Martha insisting I meet them for dinner. I agreed, reluctantly.
When I’d moved into my father’s apartment after the accident, I’d worried about how to conceal my Vera Garland identity from my friends, now that I had such an expensive address. I felt guilty about hiding the truth but at the same time was unwilling to jeopardize Vee Swann, as doing so would mean jeopardizing my career. My friends, of course, had no idea what I actually looked like or who I really was. They didn’t travel in the same circles, and I was careful not to be photographed in public, often hiding behind a fan when I was at the theater or opera.
One of the interesting things about New York society was that people saw the world through their high but limited expectations. In my beautiful dresses, satin shoes, and fine jewels, with my auburn hair coiffed and my nose powdered, people only saw Vera Garland, the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the city. But when I was dressed as Vee, no one ever noticed any resemblance to Miss Garland. Early on, I’d had photos taken of myself in both identities, then examined them to make certain they looked completely different. Even my body language changed depending on the role I was playing. Miss Garland exhibited careful posture and a slightly distant expression that suggested boredom, whereas Miss Swann’s demeanor was assertive and challenging. She stood tall and held her head high while speaking.
To my coworkers, I was a fearless reporter determined to succeed.
To my mother’s set, I was her spinster daughter who’d had a hushed-up love affair and never quite recovered. The same gossipmongers who whispered about me were all surprised by how quickly Maximilian married after our breakup. I knew the reason, even if they didn’t. Having a bride by his January birthday had ensured that he received his grandfather’s estate.
I gave Vee a background that was easy enough to keep straight, having her grow up in the town next to Newport—Middleton, Rhode Island—and coming from a family of doctors. I had her graduate from Brown University, since it, too, was close enough to an area I knew well.
I knew I wasn’t the only reporter who worked incognito. For many women, it was often the only way we could get behind the scenes to carry out our research and investigations. But I’ve never known who or how many of them lived a truly double life like me. It all took an enormous amount of energy, which I only had a small store of after Father’s death.
When I’d lived in my modest apartment in Chelsea, it had been easy to be Vee and transform into Vera for certain outings. A visiting spinster, even a well-dressed one, didn’t interest my neighbors. But how to explain to my friends that Vee Swann was suddenly living in a penthouse above Garland’s Emporium? I needed a story that would make sense. So I told them that my uncle was Mr. Garland’s doctor and longtime friend and that Mr. Garland was looking for someone to organize his library. Since the businessman rarely stayed in the apartment but went home to Riverdale most nights, he’d offered me free lodging in exchange for cataloging his thousands of books.
It was only half a lie. My father did have an extensive library in the apartment, organized by a system only he understood. Whereas I could search for a title for hours and never find it, ask him where it was, and he’d go directly to the right shelf and pull it out.
After Granville Garland’s obituary appeared in the papers, Fanny and Martha were naturally worried about my living arrangements and offered to let me move in with them. But the apartment they shared in the Second Ward on Maiden Lane down near the Fulton Fish Market was tiny and barely contained them. I told them that Mr. Garland’s widow had asked me to stay on while she decided what to do about the apartment. I was to continue cataloging the books, and she liked having someone taking care of the plants. Mr. Garland, I explained, collected orchids and had a greenhouse on the roof.
Thus, I responded to Fanny and Martha’s note from my elaborate lodgings high above Fifth Avenue, and two days later, I met them at Healy’s Tavern on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Irving Place, where the adorably witty and kind O. Henry had treated us many times over the years. Before his death just a few months ago, he’d been writing a story a week for the World, which was where we all met and became friends. Mr. Henry had taken an instant liking to us, calling us the Three Musketeerettes, and gave us so much good advice, often peppered with personal anecdotes. One of his favorite tips had been to loiter in hotel lobbies. People, he said, tended to reveal their truest selves when not reclining in front of their own hearths.
Since those days, Fanny had left the World and now worked at the New York Times. Martha, too, had moved on and was at Scientific American, where she’d become an acclaimed investigative reporter writing on psychic phenomena. From articles on ghosts, mind reading, and Ouija boards to reincarnation and casting spells, she had done more to expose charlatans and scams than the police. Despite that, and being one of the senior staff, she still got paid far less than men who were her juniors.
The easygoing tavern that O. Henry had written about in his short story “The Lost Blend” was crowded that night, but the owner greeted us effusively and seated us before three other parties who were waiting.
After dinner, Martha said she had a stop to make and asked if we would mind walking with her. I wasn’t paying much attention until we turned onto Twenty-third Street and walked east. When we stopped in front of number 126, the home of the Woman’s Press Club of New York City, I asked my friends what was going on.
Martha took my arm. “We need you, Vee. It’s time for you to come back.”
“The club has more than one hundred and sixty members,” I argued. “You all can’t need me.”
“No, but the action committee does. We need your ideas and your leadership. Please, just come in and listen to what’s going on, and then decide.”
I had created the action committee five years before to make noise and draw attention to the unfairness women reporters all too often faced. We wanted to change the culture and be treated the way we deserved. We were doing the same job as our male counterparts, and yet even though we did excellent work and were often asked to go on staff—which was indeed a high honor—we were supposed to simply accept that we would always be paid less than half what our male counterparts received. Raises, we were told, were out of the question. The attitude of our all-male editors and bosses was that we should be grateful to be employed at all.
The famous newspaperwoman and suffragette Rheta Childe Dorr, who was one of our club members, had once said that her managing editor believed women were accidents in the industry, only to be tolerated.
Yes some women were capable of rising to the top and becoming editors, but only of the pages that dealt with society and fashion, romance, and female health. Not one newsroom was led by a woman. Not one crime beat or political section. Not one financial section.
I thought everything about our situation was unfair and absurd. But even though we’d been trying so hard, we hadn’t effected any change. Hell, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had begun fighting the battle for equal rights more than forty years before, and we still didn’t even have the vote.
My father had always taught me to speak up and encouraged my efforts at the press club. So in honor of him, I followed my friends up the steps.
“I’m not making any promises to get involved in whatever this is,” I said at the door.
“And we’re not asking you to,” Fanny said. “Just come in and listen.”
She opened the door, and we walked inside the club that had been started in 1889 by journalist Jenny June. Also known as Jane Cunningham Croly, she had started the organization out of her home in order to help female members of the press who were not invited to join male press clubs. Her vision was that together we would encourage unity, fellowship, and cooperation within our ranks for those who were engaged in similar pursuits. The club organized social projects, raised money for journalism scholarships, offered lectures, and planned social activities.
We had also become active in the ongoing suffragette fight for equal pay and equal treatment. As reporters, we weren’t just writing about the movement but were living the inequality ourselves. Newspapers and magazines were hiring women writers—more and more each year—but we were still considered second-class citizens. Not only paid less and treated unfairly when assignments and promotions were meted out, but we were also often sexually propositioned in exchange for getting better assignments and put in terribly compromising situations by our male counterparts. We were still, even after more than two decades of having female writers on staff who more than proved their mettle, expected to be thankful for the opportunity to write “women’s stories” and not complain when men got all the “important” ones.
To take even a single step out of the girl ghetto took determination, moxie, and self-control.
By 1893, the club had swelled to more than one hundred members and moved from Jenny June’s house into its present official quarters. Meetings were the second Saturday of the month for business and the last Saturday of the month for social activities. The club was open to us all week, day and night. It was a place where we could meet, commiserate, plan, complain, or come to work on articles if we didn’t want to be at home or in the smoke-filled, male-dominated newspaper and magazine offices where we were often not welcome.
Fanny, Martha, and I walked inside and proceeded to the front room, with its terra-cotta-colored walls, cream-colored ceiling, and parquet floor. The atmosphere was homey and eclectic, since the four main rooms, plus the kitchen and bathroom, were decorated with member-donated furniture, china, rugs, and wall hangings.
Chairs were set up in the main meeting room, and more than forty women were already assembled, with seats for another dozen or so.
Martha, Fanny, and I sat near the front, where friends and colleagues I hadn’t seen since the summer before I’d had my accident could see me. They waved or called out or got up to come say hello. Before she took the podium, Katharine Evan von Klenner, the club president, stopped to shake my hand and tell me I’d been sorely missed.
She began her formal welcome a few moments later.
“Good evening, ladies. And welcome back, Vee Swann. We’re so glad you could make this special meeting of the action committee. As many of you know, a serious situation has arisen. For those of you who don’t, and for the sake of clarity, let me outline what’s occurred and where we are.”
Mrs. von Klenner proceeded to describe the situation. In May, one of our esteemed members, Betsy Beecher, had been given a mediocre assignment to cover a charitable event at the Henry Street Settlement House. During the evening, she overheard a plan being discussed by a New York City councilman and the charity’s lawyer to siphon off some of the funds raised and give them to the councilman’s reelection campaign.
Betsy wrote up the story, exposing the plot, and turned it in to Hugh Packwood, her boss, the managing editor. There was no question that he was going to run it on the Herald’s front page, but he wasn’t sure, he told her, whether he was going to run it with her name.
Not every paper had picked up the practice of having reporters’ names on articles. The New York Times’s editor, Adolf Ochs, thought it interfered with the story and never ran a name, while the Herald, the World, the Tribune, and a few others did.
For a reporter, receiving that name recognition was a major accomplishment. Having it on a front-page story was a huge coup. And for a woman, it was even more of an achievement. It would be Betsy’s first signed front-page story. A real triumph.
Packwood’s decision, he told her, was dependent on whether or not she would pleasure him. “By hand or mouth is fine,” he told her. “I don’t insist you open your pretty legs for me.”
Mr. Packwood had a long history of aggressive and improper behavior with Betsy as well as other female reporters. But nothing this blatant had been reported ever before. At first, Betsy thought he might be joking and tried to cajole him. When she realized he was dead serious, she refused.
The story ran without her name on it.
Betsy Beecher, like so many of us, was fed up. The suffragette movement that had begun in 1848 in Seneca Falls was only inching ahead. We weren’t just dealing with ideological issues. We were affected every day in a hundred different ways, and Betsy had reached her own personal point of no return.
The press club had organized a network for club members, what we called the “survival chain.” If one of our ranks encountered any editor or fellow reporter who made untoward sexual advances, made inappropriate comments, promised promotions or better assignments in exchange for sexual favors, or punished any one of us for refusing to engage in sexual activity, his name was circulated and entered in the dossier we kept in the library of the Twenty-third Street clubhouse.
We couldn’t abolish brutish behavior. We couldn’t have our editors and other reporters arrested for their actions. We couldn’t get them fired or even reprimanded. But we could warn each other so we could be prepared.
So Betsy recorded her editor’s name in our official file and wrote letters to friends and female reporters she knew, warning them about Packwood.
The following week, quotes from one of those letters wound up in an unsigned article in a rival newspaper. Had one of us betrayed Betsy? Or had one of the reporters she’d written to personally left her letter out where a male reporter had seen it and written it up? It didn’t matter. Packwood saw it and fired Betsy.
“And now,” Mrs. von Klenner continued, “Hugh Packwood has decided the best way to save his reputation is to destroy hers. Two days ago, Betsy found out that Packwood is suing her for defamation.”
There were shouts of outrage.
Beside me, Fanny leaned over and said, “Isn’t it disgusting? You see why you had to come back?”
Fanny was right. Mrs. von Klenner was right. We had to act. It was bad enough that we often were delegated to do stories men didn’t want, or that we were treated differently, or that we were paid less, or that we were patronized or propositioned. But this was that much worse. This new development turned something immoral and wrong into something unconscionable.
Mrs. von Klenner continued by telling us that the brother of Caroline Middlestein, a member of the press club, had volunteered to be Betsy’s lawyer, pro bono. Applause broke out.
“But is that enough?” Mrs. von Klenner asked. “Many of us think the time has come to take action. Too many of us suffer indignities because of our sex. Too often, we suffer and keep silent. We believe Packwood’s aggressive act has to be met with a protest of our own, doesn’t it? We can’t sit by and watch one of our own have her efforts to do good and help the rest of us turned on its head.”
I could feel eyes on me as Fanny and Martha and several other members turned in my direction. I knew what they were waiting for, but I was waiting for someone else to volunteer. We were still fighting the same battles we’d fought ten years ago. Five years ago. Nothing had changed.
I glanced down at my watch, wanting nothing more than to leave and go home. The timepiece was fancier than anything a reporter like Vee Swann had the means to own. When my friends had noticed it a while ago, I’d told them my aunt, the doctor’s wife, had left it to me when she died. But it was my father who’d given me the gold square-faced piece from Cartier’s in Paris. My father had been friends with patriarch Louis Cartier and had sold Cartier watches in Garland’s until Pierre opened his New York shop. My father had given me this one in 1908 to celebrate a story I’d broken about unfair factory conditions. On the back was engraved, There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.
My father had first quoted the line in a letter he’d sent to me in college: I’ve been reading Keats’s letters. These words were written to his brothers. They made me think of you because you are so determined to make a difference, Vera, and shine a light on what is unfair and cruel.
I’d be letting him down now if I left, if I didn’t help. Mrs. von Klenner continued by suggesting that we begin a letter-writing campaign to the newspapers about how wrong Packwood’s lawsuit was. Perhaps this was the motivation I needed to come alive again. But though my mind knew what to do, my heart lagged far behind. It wasn’t ready for uproar, not poised or positioned for the fight ahead. Not yet.
But soon it would be.