ABSTRACT
On 28 June 1911, readers of the New York Times were greeted by the headline ‘Nellie Bly Fighting for Financial Life . . . Lost $1,400,000 by Forgery’. What followed were the tribulations of steel-barrel manufacturer, Elizabeth C. Seaman (known also as the ‘girl’ reporter, Nellie Bly), one more story in her three-year legal ordeal to save the company originally built by her husband Robert that she had made into a profitable and thriving concern. About the fraud perpetrated against Seaman, the Times concluded: ‘That’s An Incident In A Business Where Men Are As Kind To A Successful Woman as Wolves Are To Rabbits’.1 Two weeks later, the New York Evening Journal, the newspaper that had formerly employed Nellie Bly, reiterated this point when it declared about her business problems, ‘Men That Wouldn’t Cheat Each Other . . . Seem to Take Delight in Cheating Women’.2 These particular headlines pointed the finger at a business milieu in which the women were marked as prey; here men were to women as wolves to rabbits. Seaman’s drama was not exceptional but one in a series of sensational trials which showcased the vulnerabilities of women who dared to enter and compete successfully in the business world and financial markets. Likewise, neither the courts nor the legal system were helpful to women’s money-making efforts; the justice they sought proved elusive.
