it was from 1946 so i was flipping through, i couldn't find her so only in the last few pages in front of her, there were 180 pages of other young jewish women who fought the nazis, photographs and names, what if this was snippets, it was rusty at the time. i'm reading and reading over, am i getting this right? chapter titles work like weapons, ammunition, partisan battle and this was both tone and content, it was so different from any holocaust story i have ever heard and that's how it began. that's how it all began. that's my answer. >> watch the rest of the discussion online booktv don't use the search box at the top of the page or the title of her book, the light of days.

>> without further ado, i'm delighted to introduce tonight to discuss her book, she will be in conversation with stephanie hi, kim. >> hello. >> hi, 70. >> hi. >> for those of you who don't know, sensational, hidden history of america's reporters, he was released yesterday, happy publishing day. highlight on a couple journalists at the heart of the gilded age. earlier books include chrysalis, marion and the secrets of the forces is tinkering with eating. stephanie is the author of a book called citizen reporters, she's written for numerous online publications including new yorker.com custodian.com and

los angeles review of books and currently lives in providence. kim and stephanie are going to 20 to 30 minutes and then we will open up to audience questions submitted through the button.he i will turn it over now. >> thank you, stephanie. thank you to the book store, this is such a pleasure to do this. i welcome the chance to travel back in time to the gilded age celebrate the publication of this book, congratulations, can. >> thank you very much, it's exciting to have it out in the world not i'm sure it then a long time coming and now that the world is going to open up again, it seems like the perfect time thank you to everyone who is t attending.

get get this conversation started by focusing on the beginning, could you tell us about how reporting got its start? >> yes, i started with the reporter of this era, she, as a young woman in pennsylvania finagled her way into a job at the dispatch without a lot of experience but that didn't hold her back. she is ambitious and in slightly more than a year, new york was the place to be, i'm going to go to new york and work for the best papers in the country's. sheo spent long months they're trying toon find a job, it was very competitive. everybody wanted to work for the same papers she wanted to work for and women were not in high

demand because it was very limited but she got her first assignment and her in at this, by volunteering to getting herself committed to spent ten days there and came out with this plosive exposé about the horrible way women were being treated and many off them werent even delete ill, they just need to be hearing english or families they wanted to get rid of so on the one hand, it was of value piece of journalism and on the other hand, she told in a way that was irresistible reading. she had a very personable narrator, she used a lot of themes and dialogue and the characters were sympathetic her

voice was funny, she had a lot of detail and there's a lot of paper so right after that, like in a year, all of these new papers wanted to hire young women to do something women. a lot of women were able to do this. >> that is fascinating. you touched on the fact that she was from western pennsylvania, one of the main subjects ofn my book also came from there and made her way to new york but worked in magazines in investigative journalism ratheri than an undercover newspaper reporter. it must have taken got to do what nelly bly did. she made her reputation pretty

quickly. >> what reallyen struck about yr book, there are incredibly vivid people, you don't learn about or if you have been to journalism school, even if you're interested in the gilded age, they don't seem to come up they are the source for many of the stories we think of as being part of this era of reform questioning authority. beyond nelly, a recognizable name, could you tell us a little more about the other women you wrotee, about. >> short, i'd like to highlight how fascinating it was to read your book after finishing writing this because polls a lot of the same events and describe same decades on the magazine side as opposed to the newspaper side and it was great to have

that cracked open. i was reading about another interesting journalist in western pennsylvania but yes, part of the fun of the book was undercover woman after woman who had an interesting life and did such amazing work. one of the people in the story was his character who never had an identity, to assist this reporter of the chicago times. within a year in december 1888, she went undercover to doctors offices throughout chicago and asked for an abortion and she said she went to 200 doctors printed like a series of article after article in the chicago

times of what she found. she found thatle abortion was there, this was surprising because it was illegal at the timel. it was extensively how terrible was that only editorial page it was condemnatory but at the same time, she talked about techniques the doctors used, medication she was offered and quite an education to leaders of the chicago times in terms of availability and different kinds of abortion women could get so it was really done on her story, she disappeared right after the end of the series so part of the book is figuring out who she was. another reporter also worked for the times, alan, she went into

factories where women worked in reporting on the conditions that. child labor, sexual harassment, unclean conditions and long hours. she was so successful that she lived the dream and went on to work for the new york world as the goal for many of these reporters. one moreep woman who wasn't working on this but was matthews, she was an african-american reporter and she got herrt start as a lot of these other women did, writing things you might find on the women's page m but became more f an activist over the course of herhe work until within a decade

she was writing about human trafficking from the south, employment agencies to the north and offered themge jobs and started with the settlement house to help them findp work ad get them anak education and help take care of their kids in some cases. >> it is striking the way you put this book together, he started a woman writer who has identity, just a girlnt reporter and then nelly, more famous but many of these other women were really needing unglamorous and un- famous lives as they did their work. something, that is the history of ordinary people, i think it is challenging to write because i imagine you had to draw from a

lot of primary sources, nobody has written a book like this before. can you tell us about that research process? i found myself very curious about it. >> yes, it was interesting because the previous one i have written about was an artist as a naturalist materials i could go to, these were all writers. there is a ton of writing but one of the questions of the, how much is the persona presented in the writing? a lot of times they were creating an interesting character on stage, how much was really a reflection of who they actually were i tried to use the writing and line up with journals they had were letters they had and in some cases there

was a lot. one of the reporters working in the tradition in reporting, wonderful material in this history center, there's letters of her where she talked about don't mention how ambitious i am but i will tell it to you, my dear friend and it's like well, they were very ambitious. [laughter] but she felt it was oral history she didra but other than that, there's hardly anything. wonderful writer, exposed a lot of things, helped establish these sectors, we know beyond her writing published in the papers, this mysterious order, one of my favorite sources i

came upon is his scrapbook which someone put together in 1898 and the person who put it together, a lot of these women came together in massachusetts, pretty much all the reporters in new york went up there to cover it in one way or another and this person was editor of the local paper and he hated all these women coming to new york writing what he thought were like yellow journalism, trashy stories, a scrapbook that's just newspaper articles about what he found appalling of the tile strike the calling card in their and jokes about how terrible female reporterse are and it's

valuable because a lot of these papers are digitized, you need to access them with the writer's name but a bunch of the really important ones are, like the chicago times, new york journal tied a lotl of these reporters, the library of congress, it was great to have these crumbling old newspapers that don't exist anywhere else altogether by this obsession of this particular editor so that was greator to s. >> i think that is a nice link for us although it happened close to where i am now. the other geographically close story i came up a few times in your book, the case on elizabeth jordan, both covered in salt

river this period of time was one with gender dynamics were changing rapidly and not all that rapidly i was researching, reading the paper, it was amazing the number of letters to her someone had written dear sir and then had to cross out the search and right madame because that was muscle memory if you are doing something professional more to do with journalism, it was the exception and not the rule that you would be writing to a woman. ... or made it happen, but how did

that -- how do you see that interplay and how possibilities women were changing then and whether the -- it happened fast enough to be of advantage to the women reporters of this book. >> well, it was really interesting because this particular genre embraced the fact they were women and used that to their advantage. so unlike a lot of prominent novelists of the time. who adopted male pseudonyms to be taken seriously these women were unabashed they were women. you see nellie bly, like, tacking about -- joking about ore vanity and her hair and how handsome sow found the doctors and really hard to pretend to be mentally nil front of him, and that was very much like a tool that she had in her toolbox.

the other thing about being female was that they were able to report on female dominated spaces. nellie reply -- what's nellie bly was able to get committed to asylum because was an asylum for women and nell nelson was able to expose abuses of factories because she was a woman, and this girl reporter of the chicago times says it very overtly in her reporting. cease like, did i imagine i would start my reporting life on an assignment like this? no, but a man could not have done it and it's true. a man would not have gotten the same response. the chicago trend started out sending a male reporter who said i have sister who is in trouble and all the doctors and wives wanted to see the actual woman in question before they would give any advice. i think the downside for them --

>> so, both of those things made their writing very desirable and made people want to read it. talking about things which hand billion talk about before in this very deliberately charming way. but the downside was that, like, they weren't taken seriously then and they didn't present themselves as particularly serious, and they aren't taken particularly seriously now, and i think that is one of my tasks of the book, is like, what happened if they called their bluff and take them seriously. >> how far were that's writers outliers from the conventional course their lives would have otherwise taken? >> if you think of what the conventional -- hard to tell what the conventional course is. what we have is what remains.

we we etiquette books and articles talk about the women in question, but how much like the actual lives that women led, i don't know that we actually know. i think those might be one step more conservative. certainly these women did not write for the most respectable papers. early on in her career nellie bly goes around to the big papers, "the new york times," "the sun" and the most -- and we don't really hire women for anything but the society pages. so, it takes a paper -- or sometimes women have an easier time in the west and i mean western pennsylvania or the midwest. but it's really surprising how many of these women came from there. like, not many women came up through boston or through new

york. so the papers that were hiring these women tended to be -- i use the word mockly but the trash 'er paper trashy wherer papers like hearst who said he want to do whatever its takes to beat and -- if people say i'm not respectable but i'm going to win and women were part of his strategy to do that. that's so fascinating and i think you get the sense, as i was writing about magazines, very segregated world. the women's magazines and these genteel contributors who sat home and wrote columns about housekeeping and answering advice and then you have the magazines that men would read on their commute to the office. there were two -- but they were two different worlds, and gradually in the gilded age, general interest magazines

become much more popular, i think there's ad -- as the frontier vanished and the country was settled by nonnative people, and schools were set up, there were all these literate people who wanted to know what was going on, like they wanted to read about the society around them. so it's so interesting to hear how women could infiltrate certain papers but definitely not all of them. like there was that elitism in the newspaper world, but once your characters break in, what did you find were the obstacles to their -- in their careers and were there any -- those that ended up leaving journalism, could you kind of talk us through that, that this wasn't necessary lay life-long or

career-long task. >> yeah. i mean, i think that the obstacles were, one, i think particularly early on some of the women felt like once a paper hired one woman, they were like we have or woman, we don't need anymore. you had a -- but i think for at least the stunt reporters who i'm talking about who tended to be white, relatively young women, one of the biggest on obstacles but toes was next of respectability, and that they wanted to write something interesting, they wanted to do these experiments. things which were quite physically risky, but they had to stay on the respectable side

of the line and as a journalist respectability was tied too credibility. once you sell out of the sphere of respectable womanhood, like you just weren't considered to be a credible voice on anything. so i think balances that line was really tough for a lot of women. the less respectable work paid more, and sometimes was physically dangerous, and later on in the late 1890s you have some women saying, i didn't really want to do that kind of work anymore, but it sure paid a lot better, and my other option is writing boring things, boringly for these women's pages, which is going to be able help me -- isn't going to be able to help me support my poor mother which many of them were helping to support their poor mothers. that was a big hurtle and also financial hardship.

there was among this cohort of women -- it's interesting. they're all unique but all quite similar demographic include. all born like during or right after the civil war. a lot offeror -- of or -- orphans or didn't have a father figure to take care only them or support them financially and the hurdle they had to make some money and that was the driving fact for your a lot of on them as well as wanting to live an interesting and meaningful life. >> didn't talk about ida embarrassment wells but you treated earlier today about if you ever confused ida tarbell with ida b. wells and that happens when i tell people i've written a book that is focused on ida tarbell, they will often start talking effusively about

ida b. wells but your work kind of revealed a new side of her. i'd never -- just -- even including her in the cohort of a stunt reporter was a different angle and so just -- if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about your research on ida b. wells and how she fits in to the book. >> yeah. clearly such a fascinating and brave and inspirational character and i didn't -- i tried to be very clear in the book that she and victoria matthews were not really stunt reporters. stunt reporters were really, again, like white women, of these white-owned, hugely popular papers of the time, like "the world" and the "new york

journal" and they ida. wells owned her own press and published a lot of books in one of the more moving moments of the book, victoria earl matthews and this cohort of women in new york racessed money to fund the approximation of ida b. wells' first book after her press is smashed and she's driven out of memphis where she lived, because of the nature of her lynching reporting if wanted to it would but women who lived the heart of their times and making disinstant know vacations in investigative journalism but at the same time and it was interesting to see -- there are also pretty much the same age and it was interesting to see how similar societial factors were working on them. there's this one moment,

realization i had that nellie bly and nell nelson and ida b. wells get married within a a few months of each other in the summer of 1895 and it's pure speculation on my part but die think it has something to do with the age they're reaching. they were all in their early 30s and this massive financial crash of 1893, which was still rippled -- rippled still being felt at that time and maybe just the question of is this conventional path more open to me for some kind of security and should i take it now if i have the opportunity. >> that's so interesting, and so much of what you are -- how you're describing journalism then could apply to now could apply to today.

i think maybe that's a link we should talk about, is the legacy of these reporters and their -- where they -- how they made their way into newspaper journalism and what -- where could we find their legacy today? >> yeah. i mean i think it's multifaceted. i think you see their legacy in emerging journalism, you see their legacy in investigative journalism, you see it somewhat in memoir, where you're creating this strong -- the strong first person narrator to tell the story in the narrator's life is interwoven and you see their legacy in the character of the

girl reporter which might be the thing that lasted longest. at love their names disappeared. think when people say plucky girl reporter everyone node what that character and is that character in itself is very inspirational, whether it's lois lane or the american girl dolls, it is really inspired a whole lot of women just kind of the notion of this brave, courageous, curious creation. i think legacy of the era and maybe not such a good way is that women's pages still exist. a lot of times they're coded as other things like the best file section or a collection of our articles which we're going to put together, special interest to women, and i really think that is an unfortunate leg that

we're -- we still see from that early time when the women's pages were really pioneered. i think women's business is everyone's business, and if there's an amazing female politician some shouldn't be in the style pages, where often she is. she should be on the front page and women's health, which these reporters covered a ton, it's concerned a concern to everybody there's my little minny up op-ed. >> it's amazing the format of the magazines has rye manies the same as the world has changed, the world that's being reported. that's really interesting and going back to -- i just also find myself nodding because i found the same thing researching citizen reporters, that there are all these causes and topics

associated with being a woman that ida tarbell consciously shoved away from her and refused to talk about, including suffrage. she didn't support the right of women to vote because she didn't want to be a fighead for that cause, which is a very -- obviously a gendered cause. she just wanted to ben an investigative journalist, not a woman journalist but just to do this type of work, and i think i'm going to be noticing that much more sharply now that women's journalism and journalism are sadly kind of still two different categories if you look at the news stands. i realize the time is ticking and that there will be people with questions so maybe now is a good time to open it up to the audience. >> yes, that would be great.

>> that's a good plan. i really enjoyed this conversation and i feel like this is just ready to be made into a tv series or a movie or something. this would be an excellent series, i feel like. do you know if anything do any of these women's lives have been turned into television or done anything for tv? >> i think multiple different versions of nellie blys story. don't know but the women who came the heir wake. a lot of less about them. there's ban lot of nonfiction about ida b. wells. >> yes, right. i can see this as a podcast series also. >> oh, yeah. i. >> start one. >> okay. >> i'm curious for the women that were married, do we have any idea or knowledge what their

husbands thought of their work? were they supportive. >> it varies. all the women's stories were individual. if you think but the three i mentioned. nellie bly married a very rich, very old man, kind of thinking that she was going to i think retire from reporting, but then within a year things started to go sour between them and she was back reporting. i think maybe a way to make her own income or assert her independence and she would return to reporting throughout her life. she would do various things and brake away -- break away from it but kept coming back and reported on world war i among other things. nell nelson disappeared the minute she got married. got a beautiful house in new jersey and had two daughters and i don't know that she wrote again. they have her suffrage teas and

things like that. she married a pulitzer sort of right hand man actually who then hearst hired away from him. so he remained very involved at a very high level in the newspaper business, but she wasn't doing any writing herself, and ida b. wells, despite having four children, i think started editing a newspaper, like, the day after her wedding pretty much. she went in and out of doing journalism but also i think the pretense she is going to leave it behind was very thin. but then just to think about, like, other women that had three divorces of women who married very young and then, like, their careers took off and really overshadowed their husband or they were always away, and so stunt reporting produced a lot of failed marriages as well.

>> i see we have a question in the q & a button, steph any, do you want to ask that one? >> miya says i have copy of sensational and so excited to read it. can you talk but the relationship between the girl reporters, were they friends, rivals? dithey hang out together? i love that. >> that's a great question. is a already mentioned that victoria matthews had been hugely supportive of ida b. wells at this fraught period in her life and i would say of all the people i look it's, victoria matthews seems the most into building a community of women. again, she organized the benefit for wells, she organized the settlement houses to real. >> -- really support young women who are moving up from the south. >> a number of women in the new york world at the same time and

the perspective we get on them is through the eyes of elizabeth jordan, who was a reporter there and then went on to become an editor at harper's bazaar and then harper book. she was reporter and did a lot of report little but at the height of the stunt reporter craze i'll kotkin it in 1896 she was at the world basically hiring stunt reporters and assigning stunt reporters and framing what that page was going to look like. as she talks about sort of coming in as like aknee neo fight to the world and all committed when he starts there and looking at the legends of like bly and nell nelson and she interacted with them very much but more like they were these figures passing in the halls but -- famous figures passing in the hall buzz the world did hire

quite a number of women and there's a wonderful picture of jordan and all of these other female reporters at the world and one of them is like holding a kitten and they're like sitting aside a messy desk and you get the idea there was quite a bit of camaraderie among them. >> that's a good question. was wondering that myself, too. were there any stories that didn't make the cut? >> oh, gosh, that's good question. i've been so deep in the final draft of this book for so long. well, there's one reporter named ada paterson who came quite later and was known as the nellie bly of the west and did some reporting in denver. so she was definitely somebody who i could have gone deeper into if i wanted to. there are people who kind of get a passing mention who certainly could be fresh fleshed out more.

people were doing these all over the country and once i had my hands full i didn't let myself get too involved in anywhere else -- anyone else but that was a discover of the book, it wasn't five women who were doing this. it was really many, many papers from coast to coast. who were hiring women to do this kind of work. >> interesting. what do you want people to take away from this book and from these women's stories? you mentioned earlier the kind of one of the things that has stayed with us over time that isn't necessarily a positive thing is these women's columns and how people -- women are kind of thrown into fashion, the fashion side of things or -- we make a lot of assumptions about what women read and where our -- women politicians, where they might appear in a magazine, but

what else is there that you kind of hope that people take from this? >> do i have enough fingers on my hand? one is the contribution that these women made, both to investigative journalism and what we think of as creative nonfiction or literary nonfiction. a whole section in the book of how i talk about how people usually talk but the genesis of creative nonfiction and that it's essentially like man's man's man and don't really feel like these women started a lot of the things which are what another what we think of as creative nonfiction. two is stephanie was talking about this a little bit but the way that there were so many, so many and it's not like in history we get, like, nellie bly and ida embarrassment wells and i'd da tarbell doing interesting

things. women are always wanting to live interesting lives and being treated as fuel human beings no water what time period you check in so it's interesting to look at all of these individual women's struggles to do that. and then i think three, to really question the way we value women's work. i think that the reason these reporters were forgotten was they were writing in the female dominated genre about women and i still think that we hold that work in lighter esteem than we do either writing about men or writing by men. >> right. so i know that your book just came out. so i almost hesitate to ask this question but i'm curious if there's anything floating around in your head about what you might work on next or a new direction. >> well, so, one of the goals of the book was to find out who the girl reporter was and i got a

certain distance along that path, and actually i have some new leads so i think i'm going to -- an appendix in the paperback. i'm going to poke around on that a little bit. >> that's fun. >> that's so tantalizing. great to hear. >> i just going back just a minute. i am curious how you first came across the women. did you come across them in school or later on? how did you first hear about these women. >> i was -- so reading the work of nellie bly and it was very engaging, as i mentioned, and then id aed a has heard of the girl reporter through a book by leslie reagan called when abortion was crime and that put the two stories together, and then there's also really wonderful book by jean lutz called front page girls which talks but stunt reporting as a genre and the combination of

those three books, where i really realized, oh, this wasn't like one person doing these kind of things. this was a decade of women doing these kind of things. >> that's neat. might be some good future reading after this one. well issue think we are almost out of time but i always like to end with a question and i'll ask this for both of you. what are both of you reading right now? what's on your night stand? >> well, i just finished stephanie's book. right up until this morning. >> thank you. >> it's wonderful. can't stress that enough how much i enjoyed learning about tarbell and her journey which was again like -- not exactly the same as these women but to dramatically different. >> i keep wishing this is how

happened but i wish i'd been able to read your while i was researching my book. that would have been huge and so fun, and i have been on a fiction reading streak so i'm just finishing a november called the glass hotel. >> that's been a popular one, excellent. this has been really fun. i'm looking forward to finishing the book myself and i have a few people i'm friends with thatter in journalism and reporting world i plan on gifting this book to. just did pop links to both sensational and citizen reporters in the chat for anyone interested in purchasing them, and thank you both so much. this has been a great event. >> thank you. >> you're welcome, thank you for having me. >> of course, thanks, everybody and have a great night.

>> here's a look at the best selling nonfiction books according to "the wall street journal." topping the list is bill o'riley and martin dugard's history of organized crime in america. killing the mob. followed by oprah winfrey and -- busier's book on childhood trauma titledded what happened to you. after that is fox news anchor shannon bream's profiles of women from the bible. next is the premonition. michael lewis report on the disagreements between medical experts and the trump administration over how to deal with the covid-19 pandemic.

and wrapping up our look at the best selling books according to "the wall street journal," is amanda goreman's the hill we climb, printed edition of the poem she recited the inauguration of president joe biden. you can watch the programs anytime at booktv.org. >> we're excited to have gash brail winnant here and introduce gabe i'd like to introduce samir sonti, professor of labor and urban studies at sl just a book and arts editor at -- and a co-host of the recent reinventing solidarity podcast and i'll turned over to samir. >> thanks michael and thanks for everyone for putting this together. i'm really delight teed be here today with gabe