Most-Read Woman in America Finally Has Her Story Told: FMC Fast Chat, Podcast of Fair Media Council

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Our guest is someone who is a friend and has chatted with us before. It's Alison Gilbert. Alison, thank you so much for being with us today.

I am so thrilled. Thanks for having me, Jaci.

Well, you're one of those people that make my job actually fun as opposed to work, so I really appreciate that. But we want to talk to you today in particular. I'm very excited about this topic because it's your new book, but it's a topic that I really think the followers of the Fair Media Council and our supporters will really key into and be really interested in because it's just It's a great read and it's such a great topic that it blows my mind that we don't know more about this topic. But first, I want you to tell, you know, just a brief synopsis about the book for people who may not know about it. It is called Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most Read Woman. If you can see my little screenshot here. If you're watching us on YouTube, you can see the COVID If you're not watching us on YouTube, please subscribe. But go ahead, Alison.

Elsie Robinson was a single mom who had absolutely zero contacts, and through her own determination, moxie, grit, became the highest-paid newspaper columnist in the entire William Randolph Hearst media empire. At her height she had more than 20 million readers, and just quickly to put that number into some kind of perspective, that's double the number today of current subscribers to the New York Times. So Elsie Robinson was exceptionally famous And her columns had America's attention.

That is insane that we don't know her name.

I know, she was incredible. And it really is a mystery that we try to solve, which is why has no one— why does no one remember Elsie Robinson? We have— I say we, I have a co-author, her name is Julia Shears. We have some theories. But yeah, she was incredibly well known in her day. Her span was from the '20s to the '50s where she was a household name, and then she died in '56 and poof, almost like she was never here.

That's crazy. It's not that long ago.

No.

So, okay, so let's back up, I guess, a little bit. Um, how did you even discover her to think about writing a book about her?

Well, it's a rather odd story when I share it. I only know about L.C. Robinson because my mother died. So my brother and I were cleaning out our childhood home after our mother passed away, and I was really young. This was nearly 30 years ago, and I was packing up her books. And a piece of paper fell out of one of my mother's books and fluttered to the floor. My mom had retyped a poem that was the most tough love, smack you across the face poem about grief and loss I had ever read. And it was attributed to Elsie Robinson. And I had no idea who Elsie Robinson was, but her writing just took my breath away. Basically, the message of the poem was, stop your bellyaching, feel lucky that you had a mother worth missing. It just, it just took my breath away.

Yeah. Okay, so that was 30 years ago. So somehow that stuck with you.

Oh, yes. I mean, this was a almost like a treasure map to figure out why Elsie Robinson, why this voice meant so much to my mother that she had retyped this poem, put it inside a book, kept it for so many years, didn't share it with me, didn't share it with my brother. I had never heard of Elsie Robinson's name. But trying to uncover the clues, what was it about this woman, Elsie Robinson, that resonated so so much with her. And it turns out that because Elsie Robinson was a nationally syndicated columnist for Hearst, she had written in her lifetime, we estimate, about 9,000— can you believe it?

Yes.

9,000 columns, essays, articles. She also did breaking news. And so her voice on a myriad of topics Racism, antisemitism, gender inequality, pay inequity, whatever the topic was that we, of course, still would find completely relevant today.

Mm-hmm.

I could get her opinions on, and then by extrapolation, because my mom had died so young, it almost felt that I was hearing perhaps what could very well have been my mother's point of view. These were biting columns. Elsie Robinson did not mince words. She was unapologetic in her opinions, and so I felt that I was hearing my mother a little bit as I was reading and researching and digesting these 9,000 columns that Elsie Robinson wrote throughout her career.

So now through your research, Yes. How did she become a columnist? Because back then, that wasn't very common for women to begin with, let alone for a woman to have such a pointed point of view of the world.

Well, it's really interesting, and I find this part of her story incredibly instructive. She made it happen. She had this great quote about who becomes a writer, and she would say, No one is anointed a writer. You declare, you become, you are a writer because you say you are a writer. And I feel like that's the same way in journalism. You become a reporter because you want to become a reporter. It is a calling for many of us. I put that, I'm with you. I'm a former TV producer for 20 years. And so I feel like she didn't feel like she required any special training. And so what her background was is that her child— she had one son and he was born in 1904 and he was chronically ill his entire life. This is relevant because to keep him busy, to keep him occupied and entertained, she would draw him pictures, she would write him stories. And so she knew she had this incredible talent as a children's writer and illustrator. So her first job was at the Oakland Tribune in Oakland, California, and what became a remarkable children's page.

Wow. Wow. And you said she had no connections. Do you have any idea how she actually made the leap? Was it she sent some illustrations in and someone saw it and said, this woman has talent?

I love this story. So in 1918, she took a, you know, a bird's-eye view of the market in the Bay Area and the San Francisco papers, which were the busier, sexier, bigger ones. They all had children's pages. She tried to get a job there, but they were, you know, they didn't need her help. They were all good. So she took a look at that landscape and then she went across the bay to the Oakland Tribune that didn't have a children's section. She brought some of the work that she had done not only for her son. She had start— she had started getting a little bit published, a little bit published, and she went in, spoke to the editor, showed him her work, and he gave her, um, her first shot.

Oh my God.

It was incredible. This is 1918, and I should say, in terms of that grit that I was talking about before, The 3 years prior to this, so between 1915 and 1918, she could not make ends meet. She was forced to work— well, by choice she went to go work, but by circumstances she was forced to work because she had no other choice— in a California gold mine. She was the only woman on a crew of men working to kind of find the gold specks, working 600 feet below the surface of the earth. incredibly dangerous work. Men and women, uh, would not go there unless they had to go there. People died. They would fall down these shafts to their deaths. And even before she got there, a man with his young child, that boy did in fact die. So she knew the risks and she went anyway. And for 3 years, She would work all day in the mine. Now talk about a side hustle. And then at night, after washing the dishes, coming back from the mine, taking off all those clothes, getting somewhat clean, as much as you could in a shack, uh, then she would start typing on a manual typewriter with a candle. I mean, this sounds so cinematic, but it is true. And start mailing in her manuscripts. to get published to publishers in Boston and to New York, and then just wait because it was the mail, and she would hope to get published, and she did. So for those 3 years, right before she landed at the Tribune, she started getting a little bit of success.

And as you're talking, I can't help but think, I don't think we make people like that anymore.

I mean, she was a workaholic. She was determined. She was not going to be dissuaded from this goal of living this bigger life. She was a woman in a time where women were contained and constrained. They did not have a platform to make the world know what was making them angry, what they wanted to change, and she wanted more. She wanted her voice to be Heard. And I just, at every turn, I found the Elsie Robinson story inspiring and really a roadmap, to be quite honest, of how it's possible to just bulldoze your way into a field when you don't know anybody because you want to, because you see yourself there. And I find that to be just the kind of lift that sometimes I still appreciate for sure.

No, absolutely. And it's almost, you don't know what you don't know, so it can't stop you.

Yes.

That attitude.

Yes.

Now, do you know anything about her early life, or did she have a husband? What happened there that she became this single mom?

Oh yeah. So she had a husband. She married him really young. Uh, he was an incredibly religious, uh, man. He came from a very religious family in Brattleboro, Vermont. And she found that marriage to be isolating. She found that marriage to be suffocating. She, you know, one of her great— she has so many great quotes, but I'll paraphrase one for you right now. She would say this: why did life stop being interesting for women when they became wives, whereas men when they became husbands kept living this rich, fulfilling life? This is the kind of question that she kept, you know, questioning, right? This is the kind of question that she would ask and that she wrestled with and I think informed many of her readers. Why accept that? And by the way, some of her best quotes about gender equality some of them were published a decade before Gloria Steinem was even born.

Right.

And so I feel like the Elsie Robinson voice has been overlooked, and my co-author Julie and I are so thrilled to make sure that she gets her due, that, that her voice is reclaimed. And I think she's a part of that history of feminists, of journalists, of early women pioneers in the news industry.

Yeah. Now, her actual columns, were you able to find those?

Oh yes. Well, that's why we were able to count about how many there were, about 9,000. So she was published across the country. So she worked for Hearst, so she was published in Hearst papers across the country. But in addition to that, what made her readership go even more high is that she was also published in those newspapers that carried Hearst syndicated content. So it was Hearst papers, yes, but then there were millions more who read her Listen World column in their local papers.

Yeah. So is this the kind of thing you have to go through microfiche?

Yes. Oh my God, yes. I mean, talk about painstaking research. There is no Elsie Robinson archive. So we literally had to do our digging ourselves. There was not one repository that we could go to. Like, for example, when you research someone— we were talking about William Randolph Hearst— if you were researching a book about William Randolph Hearst, and of course there are biographies about him, Mm-hmm. you can go to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, and find so much documentation about him because it's already been amassed. It's already been curated into one collection. There is no such Elsie Robinson archive. So yes, we had to do that labor ourselves. This is the first biography ever written about Elsie Robinson.

That is so crazy to think about, you know, and there's so many people today that don't even know what microfiche is, so they wouldn't even know to look there. Now, as you're talking, I can't help wondering You know, I know the topic started with you while you were very young, but when it actually— you decided to turn it into a book, is this kind of one of these things the pandemic happened and you finally said, let's make a book? Because I'm just— I'm seeing 2 things happening now that we're coming out of the dark years of the pandemic. Everybody either is having a baby or they've got a book that they're on tour with now. So it's one or the other.

I would say about 11 years ago, I went to my literary agent and I declared that the L.C. Robinson biography was one that I had to share, that I really wanted to work on. So it was a slow burn. I would say that, of course, the COVID time period allowed me to hunker down. It's when the contracts were signed with the publisher. It's when we went into high gear. But it's been, it's been many, many years.

Okay. And was it a hard sell? With the publisher?

Yes, because nobody knows her name. In fact, what's so ironic, I'll share this with you, it was a hard sell. My agent had a really hard time, a tough time cut out for him. But I'll tell you, this is so fascinating. So one of the ways that you sell a book is that you try to convince a publisher why now? Why do we need a book about this particular topic now? If you can answer the why now question when you write a book, you're really kind of getting yourself closer and closer to selling your book idea. But there's something else that was missing from this proposal was instant name recognition. So it might be easier to sell a book proposal, let's say, about— or a biography about Hearst. Oh, got it. I know who he is. Or Abraham Lincoln. Got it. I know who he is. Okay. Beyoncé. Great. Got it. Know who she is. But it's Elsie Robinson, who?

Yeah.

And so that was the other hurdle. But here's the interesting thing. We've been very lucky, Julia and I. This book has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today. I mean, it's an embarrassment of riches that none of my books have ever enjoyed. So I'm kind of really appreciating this moment. And what were those headlines? The headlines in the newspaper, in all of these papers more or less, was Elsie Robinson, who? So the very concern that a publisher had was actually the very interest that every newspaper more or less what they led with in their book reviews. I find that fascinating.

It really is. And it just, you know, when we think about the women's movement in general and issues related to women in the workplace, I wonder how many more Elsie Robinsons are out there.

Well, that is the question. I believe that there are many. Here's one of the reasons why this type of book I feel is important. It's very easy to do another book, let's say, about a Nellie Bly, right? Someone whose name is more familiar. Because if you are a student in high school, let's say, and you can find a previous book that could inform your school report, clearly that's where you're gonna go.

Right.

You don't have time in a school year to go do, normally speaking, your own hardcore research, as you have said, on microfiche, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's just more time-consuming.

Yeah.

So this is cyclical, right? If you don't have time to do that kind of hardcore digging, then we are gonna keep recycling the same historical figures in our school reports, in our PhD dissertations, and in our biographies. I think it takes time to then pull back the curtain on other women's stories that have not been told, and that takes effort.

Yeah, and the one thing I'm finding interesting as you speak about Elsie is even though she lived what sounds like a really hard, even horrible life— I mean, to think about working in the mines Really? Honestly?

Actually, I'm gonna— I'm gonna tell you something. I'm gonna say something that's really gonna be surprising to you. What Elsie would say, that was the best time of her life.

Why?

It was not the worst time. It was the best time because she was living with authenticity. She wasn't living this constrained life of a Victorian woman who had to act a certain way and be a certain way and not have have interests that were equal to men, but she worked alongside men and she had freedom of movement and thought. There was liberation she found. There was camaraderie that she found. And so Elsie would actually say that she lived a remarkably rich life because she got to be in situations that other women were not, and she felt actually liberated by it.

So that must be why the inspiration comes through, because everything you're talking about, it, it's basically a story of overcoming the odds to be what you want to be or who you want to be, you know.

Yes, yes. And no matter what— yes, I agree. So the, the real lesson in the Elsie Robinson story, to me, the real reason to pick up a copy of Listen, World! may not be because you yourself want to be a newspaper columnist.

Yeah.

The reason to pick it up is because no matter what your dream is, no matter what your goal is, to develop that fortitude, to kind of keep your eye on that remarkable prize, and to see how she did it, there are lessons learned in that level of resolve.

Yeah. Now, you said you and your co-writer have a couple of theories as to why we don't know who she is.

Yeah, yeah. So—

What are some of your working thoughts on this?

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked. Thank you for asking. So I'll start here. Um, there was a study that was done By the National Women's History Museum.

Okay.

And what they found out in their reporting is that when you look at the American educational system and you look at how students learn social studies, Okay. if you examine the K-12 curriculum, of all the historical figures That are taught coast to coast, only 24% are women.

Okay.

So if you don't learn about women and their importance, then you can't understand those stories, be informed by those stories, be moved by those stories, and then go on to do your own, you know, book report It's kind of like we were talking about before, but if it starts so young, and of course if girls don't see themselves represented in these histories either, it can have long-term consequences of how the vision that some of these young girls have for themselves and their own ambitions. And so one reason is how we are taught history in our schools. It's what they— what the experts would say is that the curriculums are what they call doggedly masculine.

Okay.

And what they mean by that is that we tend to learn in this country in social studies about war and peace, land acquisition, politics, economy. Those are places where historically women have been excluded in the leadership roles. Where women have tended to excel— the arts, civil rights, labor rights, on and on, even of course journalism— those subject matters are devalued in our educational systems and they're not taught as readily.

Okay, all right. Any other theories?

Oh yes, I have. I'm curious about your thinking about why Elsie would have been forgotten. Of course I have more theories. What do you think?

You know, well, if I want to take what you just said, maybe Elsie's forgotten because she terrified men so much they didn't know what to do with her. I mean, working alongside men at a time when women didn't do that just really must have You know, I said, this is not normal. And the need for normal, you know, the need for everything to be kind of equal and the same, I think often plays out over an individual's creativity or a celebration of their individuality.

So interesting.

That's what I'm hearing. But again, you know, that's just me. I could be wrong. Um, but You know, I do wonder, I'm assuming her best friends were men?

Well, what's really interesting is that all of her bosses— I'm going to take off my scarf as we're talking. If you're watching on YouTube, you will know it's just getting a little hot where I am. Um, uh, all of her bosses were always men, and so she never had a female superior. She had to navigate the world of work always through the lens and the kind of aperture of working for male bosses. And that not— is not necessarily a point of friction that she would say was necessarily holding her back. Clearly, she became the highest-paid woman writer in the entire Hearst universe. And so she did well by her bosses. She brought in eyeballs to their newspapers. They respected her work. And so I feel like she was able to navigate those corridors really well.

Okay. And what do you think, you know, because we're at a very interesting place with journalism right now in the world and the way it's changed, but I'm wondering what today's journalists could learn from Elsie.

Oh, I love that question. Here's what I love most and why we began Listen World with this story. In March 1940, she was absolutely through the roof annoyed, pissed off, really feeling so incredibly underappreciated by her bosses. She hadn't had a raise in 9 years. She felt that she was being overworked. She felt that she needed a vacation and hadn't had one. And so she took her case to, let's say, her immediate supervisor, her editor. And we have this paper trail. We know that it happened. We found these letters. And she pleaded her case. When she didn't have the response that she wanted, She felt confident and cocky enough and full enough of her own capabilities. She went directly to William Randolph Hearst himself, and then she really went down this letter to tell him why she was deserving of more. She fought for what she was worth and then enumerated what that would look like. And she brought evidence of what she has done that contributed to the bottom line. And I find that level of fortitude, that directness, that kind of aggregating of information to support your case when you're going for a raise—

Yeah.

That to me is an incredible lesson that is so present. I mean, we can all use that when we go in to talk to our bosses about getting paid more.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And really, the, the ability to be able to prove your worth, I, I think, is the part people kind of— either they, they can't present it, or they don't think that I need to do it because they know me, they know my work, they must, they must know how valuable I am. Where—

Or they make it too personal. And Elsie was never going to do that. She was never going to say, but my family, but my needs, but my home, but I need to buy a car, like whatever it is. It was never about personal Elsie. It was about the Elsie Robinson Listen World column. It was her brand.

Okay. And on that note, we've got about 30 seconds to wrap up. So what is it you want people to know that maybe we didn't touch on?

Oh my gosh, please go to elsierobinson.com. You can learn all about Elsie Robinson there. I would— there's a timeline that we put together. And to support young writers, Julie and I have put together a Society6 page with some Elsie Robinson merch, and all of that supports 826 Valencia in California for kids who use writing to express themselves, to be the next generation, hopefully, of journalists. And these are under-resourced students. So go check out— I think the store is called Elsie Robinson Says on Society6, and you could support these kids.

Oh, thank you. That is amazing. Thank you for telling this story. It's so important people know it, and for all that hard work over those years of going through all that, you know, really distorted research to pull all this together.

Oh, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. And listen, I feel like we're all in this together, and if we can lift up one woman's story like Elsie Robinson's, as you have so clearly pointed out, There's going to be more. And isn't that just a gift?

The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suite-radio.com.