As a lifelong newspaperwoman, I thought I was familiar with the pioneering women in my profession, such as Nellie Bly or my idol Ida B. Wells, journalistic unicorns for their time.

A century later, there are lots of female journalists, but still a dearth of us in top newsroom positions. I can’t imagine what it was like as truth-tellers in what must have seemed a hostile environment, and I’ll always be grateful for them laying a path not just for journalists like me, but women in the workplace.

Last year, I learned of another groundbreaking female journalist, Elsie Robinson, whose dramatic story seems the perfect fodder for books and a Netflix series — an early marriage to a wealthy man that ended in a scandalous divorce, a sickly son she supported as a gold miner, and finally, at 41, a job as a syndicated columnist with a daily audience of 20 million.

In this age where people are recreating the rules of work and success, Robinson’s efforts to make a life for her son as a single mother and to make a difference in the world is so relevant. And her story is finally being told in “Listen, World!: How The Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most Read Woman,” a biography by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert.

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Next week, on Thursday, Jan. 19, Gilbert and I will be at Fells Point’s Greedy Reeds from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., talking about the book and Robinson’s legacy for writers like us.

“She had America’s attention,” Gilbert said of the California-based journalist, poet, author and political cartoonist who wrote about everything from homemaking to breaking news to racism and capital punishment, boldly defying expectations. “She encouraged readers to respond to her points of view and let it rip!”

Gilbert first came across Robinson’s words on a “thin, old piece of onion skin paper” tucked into a book in the home of her late mother Lynn Tendler Bignell, who had typed out one of Robinson’s poems, simply titled “Pain.” What she read was “the most tough-love slap across the face poem about grief I ever read. It was like my mother would have been having coffee with me, counseling me about her own death.”

For the next few decades, learning about Robinson became “a passion project” for Gilbert, a former CNN producer, a regular New York Times contributor and co-editor of the book “Covering Catastrophe: Broadcast Journalists Report September 11.” She is also the official narrator of New York’s 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s historical exhibition audio tour.

She discovered that Robinson, who found herself divorced and penniless after being accused of infidelity, toiled as as a mine worker while honing her writing and supporting her son. She eventually found herself at the Oakland Tribune newspaper writing about everything from a children’s column to relationship column called “Cry On Geraldine’s Shoulder.”

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But it was “Listen, World!” — a column that covered searing topics such as racism, capital punishment and women’s identity — that was picked up by media mogul William Randolph Hearst. While she became widely read, there were some readers, mostly men, “who took umbrage even at the name of her column. They thought ‘How dare you tell me what to think, what to listen to? Why don’t you stay in your lane and write about marriage and parenting?’” Gilbert said. “And she was having none of that.”

Columnists have a unique role in a newsroom because you’re being trusted to give your opinion on topics mundane and massive. It’s a huge responsibility, and people who don’t agree with you are going to try to discredit you. I’ve literally had people demand my credentials to prove I’ve earned a right to an opinion.

That’s ridiculous, of course, but I didn’t let ignorant people get to me. Neither did Robinson, who was not only ahead of her time as a writer, but also in marketing herself. She was “exceptional at what we would call branding,” Gilbert said. She drew political cartoons that accompanied her columns, negotiating to be paid for them both and eventually becoming the highest-paid female journalist working for Hearst.

“She made sure that her bosses — all of them were men, of course — knew her worth and understood what she brought to their bottom line, that she brought in readers,” Gilbert said. “She knew her value and wasn’t shy about it. She supplied proof of her numbers.”

And that’s solid advice for any employee, particularly for women, who are still paid 77 cents on every dollar paid to men. We know, going in, that we have to fight to close that gap — and having receipts of our accomplishments, as the kids say, is crucial.

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Clickbait doesn’t always equal quality, but Robinson apparently had both. The book, for Gilbert, is significant for Gilbert not only professionally but personally. During her research, she and co-author Scheeres spent time in Hornitos, California, where the writer lived. There, they found an ancient typewriter in the back of a closed-down post office, believed to have been the one Robinson learned to type on. It’s such a poignant find, given that Gilbert’s own mother had typed out Robinson’s words herself, perhaps, cosmically, for her daughter to find.

“The two women I most want to have dinner with are Elsie Robinson, and my mom,” Gilbert said. “I miss my mom so much, and I just would have loved to have known Elsie.”

But maybe, in the only way she can, Gilbert made sure that generations of future writers and women who know their worth, get to know her too.

leslie.streeter@thebaltimorebanner.com

Leslie Gray Streeter is a columnist excited about telling Baltimore stories — about us and the things that we care about, that touch us, that tickle us and that make us tick, from parenting to pop... 

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