Elsie Robinson wrote candid, open-minded advice and opinion columns for 20 million readers every day from 1921 until her death in 1956. Who? You could inquire. This is the question that journalists Allison Gilbert and Julia Scheeres want to address in their new book, “Listen, World! “How Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman.”
It is not news that there is a scarcity of women’s histories. But Robinson’s obscurity is all the more astonishing when you consider her popularity as well as the dramatic biography behind her hard-won sagacity. Already the highest-paid female writer at her organization, she leaned in and informed her employer, the formidable George Hearst, that she deserved more. As a result, he hosted a luncheon in her honor.
Scheeres and Gilbert aim to resurrect Elsie, fill in her biography, and set her in the pantheon of women we should know about using “I Wanted Out!”, Robinson’s 1934 memoir, and her columns and letters. The outcome is an entertaining story that doesn’t gloss over Robinson’s considerable struggle and constraints as a woman with great desire but few resources.
Elsie’s journey begins in the 1880s Gold Rush in California, a place she describes as “the most brilliant show on earth.” At 19, she marries a brooding, patrician New England widower, who claims to save her from punishing domesticity but immediately proves to be a disaster. Then there’s the birth of a loving, chronically ill boy, which leads in a flight back West, where Robinson thinks the dry climate may treat his crippling asthma.
Robinson must accept legal responsibility for a married male psychiatric patient with whom she has collaborated on a children’s book, hoping to find the connection her marriage lacks. The two live peacefully together in a lonely, dying gold mine in California, where Elsie begins to write seriously. Her modest success selling short stories is insufficient, and she works long, exhausting, but ultimately liberating days as a miner, likely the first woman to do so. “The initial woman was made of the same materials as the original man, and for the same task,” Elsie asserted in an early piece.
When her estranged husband files for divorce, the case becomes national news, and Robinson, fearful of losing custody, writes a poignant letter to the local newspaper outlining her case. Robinson, who is single, broke, and in San Francisco, considers sex work but instead makes a last-ditch effort to sell her writing, pitching stories door to office door. When one editor bites, a columnist is born.
The novel begins to veer off course here, glossing over Robinson’s second marriage to a man who spends all of her money (she died with only $1,500 in her bank account). And the authors only speculate briefly on why a woman who was so popular that her “take on everything from how to be happier to the spread of communism was devoured by Americans across the country for decades” is no longer a household name: sexism, yes, but also Robinson’s failure to properly archive her own work.
Despite the fact that she rarely wrote openly about her personal life in her swift and varied articles (the death of her son was a rare exception), Robinson comes through loud and clear because of the authors’ wise excerpting choices. (In a typical home truth, Elsie states that love isn’t a “woman’s entire existence” unless she’s a fool.) However, the lack of other voices from readers, colleagues, and acquaintances makes it difficult to determine the extent of her influence. At moments, “Listen, World!” reads more like a carefully annotated, if pleasant, memoir than a biography.
Still, much like her devoted audience, spending time with Elsie Robinson never gets old, nor does one stop wondering how many more women with similarly intriguing stories have been lost to history.
