WEBVTT

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- One of the things that Bly revealed both

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to editors and to women who
might want to be reporters

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was that it was a career

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that you didn't need a lot of training.

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What you mainly needed was
a huge amount of bravery.

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I am Kim Todd, author of Sensational.

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After Nellie Bly went undercover

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into Blackwell's Insane
Asylum for Women in 1887,

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it opened up a decade of opportunity

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for adventurous female reporters

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and this book tells their stories.

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In the 1890s, you have this
notion of the new woman,

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who could do all kinds of
things but at the same time

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women's rights were incredibly limited.

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So "girl stunt reporter"
is a rather derogatory term

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for these female investigator reporters

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of the late 1880s and 1890s.

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And they were women who a
lot of times went undercover

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into places that only women could access.

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Their reporting, because I think

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it was done by women,

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wasn't really termed
investigative reporting.

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It was termed "stunts".

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So one of the ways that I
wanted to organize the book

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was to use some more well-known
figures to reveal the story

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of these lesser-known figures.

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The woman who really starts
it all off is Nellie Bly.

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She got herself committed

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to Blackwell's Insane
Asylum for Women for 10 days

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and emerged and wrote
this hugely popular series

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for Joseph Pulitzer's The World.

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So another really well-known
reporter is Ida B. Wells

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and she really devoted her career

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to gathering statistics about lynching.

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Winifred Sweet, she steps off a street car

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in downtown San Francisco,
faints in the street,

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hopes that they're going
to call the police wagon

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which takes her to the public hospital.

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The doctors are incredibly
cruel and abusive

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and then she's able to come out,

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reveal the situation
of the public hospital

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and get an ambulance for
the city of San Francisco.

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Victoria Earle Matthews,
she goes to the South

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and she sees these employment agencies

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abusing young black women.

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And what Matthews does
is she writes about it

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and opens a settlement
house to give these women

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a place to go.

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Pulitzer and Hearst,
who are battling it out

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for newspaper circulation at the time,

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employed a lot of female reporters

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and a lot of stunt reporters in general,

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but in 1898 there had been a lot

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of really bad reporting about
the Spanish American War.

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A lot of things that were
straight out fabricated.

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Pulitzer and Hearst's style
of reporting was labeled

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as yellow journalism and the reporting

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of these women reporters,
because they were so associated

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with these particular newspapers,

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was also thrown in the trash heap.

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In some ways, yellow
journalism became really a cry

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of fake news and was used, for instance,

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by politicians to talk about reporting

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that they didn't like.

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Some newspapers in the South talked

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about reports of lynching
as being yellow journalism.

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They were used to discredit

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the work of women reporters specifically.

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One of the things that was interesting

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to me about these girl stunt reporters

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was that their stories were
often highly illustrated.

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They were early versions

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of what eventually became
comic books and comic strips.

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So I wanted to show a woman on the cover

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who could both be like
a woman of the 1890s

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but also had that resonance of,

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"Oh, maybe this person is a superhero.

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Maybe this person is a
prototype Louis Lane."

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The largest scale takeaway is

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that when you see people
denigrating writings,

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specifically by women as frivolous

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or not serious or sentimental,

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that we should always meet
that criticism with a question.