Allison Gilbert, LISTEN, WORLD!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman
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[1:13]Allison and Julia Gilbert our authors of listen world how the intrepid
[1:17]Elsie Robinson became America's most read woman
[1:20]This is one of the episodes of 30 that are being guest hosted by fabulous women to help me out this busy
[1:27]fall in winter season
[1:29]Julia and a Goldman is the founder of mama den and creator and host of her own podcast
[1:34]Allison Gilbert is the award-winning journalist author of numerous books including past and present keeping memories of loved ones alive and
[1:42]Co-author of listen world how the intrepid Elsie Robinson became America's most read woman
[1:46]She is the host of women journalist of 911 their stories a 20-part documentary series produced in collaboration with the national
[1:54]September 11th memorial and museum she interviewed such luminaries as Savannah Gunthrie
[1:59]Maggie Haberman Dana Bash and Linda worth timer
[2:02]Allison is the official narrator of the 911 memorial museum's historical exhibition
[2:06]audio tour the only female journalist to be so honored
[2:10]She writes regularly for the New York Times and other publications on her blog
[2:13]She features Q&A's with some of the most notable names in our culture today including
[2:17]Ariana Huffington John Stewart Henry Lewis Gates Jr. Denny Shapiro Gretchen Rubin and Susan
[2:23]Allison lives with her husband and two children in New York
[2:25]Allison Gilbert thank you so much for the time i am so thrilled to be chatting with you and to
[2:31]discuss this amazing book listen world how the intrepid Elsie Robinson became America's most
[2:38]read woman you know as i read this book i devoured it and as a journalist like every page i
[2:46]was like how do we not how do i not know about elsie robinson how is she not taught to every
[2:53]woman young woman or any aspiring journalist to begin with so like let's just go back to the beginning
[3:01]she might have been america's most read woman who no one really knows about today so tell us who
[3:06]was elsie robinson elsie robinson by the way was the perfect person to commune with so
[3:13]to speak during the pandemic because she was all i read she is all i thought about and my co-author
[3:21]and i julia shears just fell in love with elsie robinson she was the William Randolph Hearst you
[3:30]know dynamo she was his highest paid writer she was the most read woman she had more than 20
[3:39]million readers for her column and her column was called which is why the book is called
[3:45]listen world and she had a lot to say about pretty much everything yeah and you know it's funny
[3:52]you said that you you wish that you could have talked to her during the pandemic when i as i was
[3:58]reading i thought my god so much of like she's timeless she wrote she was not only ahead of her time
[4:05]but she is someone who you could totally who you want to her her her opinions you want her to
[4:12]weigh in on all the world events happening right now it's really interesting that you say that
[4:18]because in a really personal way she was somewhat i don't want to overstate it because it
[4:24]sounds a little bit trite but i only found out about elsie robinson because my mom died i found
[4:32]a poem written by elsie hidden inside what are my mother's books after my mom passed away
[4:39]and i looked to elsie robinson over time once i discovered that she was a columnist
[4:45]for her advice for her advice on parenting for her advice on being a mom for her advice on
[4:52]tough love versus you know holding your you know child close and just kind of wrapping them
[4:58]in bubble wrap but then of course she writes about more than just family she wrote about racism
[5:04]and capital punishment and anti-Semitism and her take was somewhat unapologetic and she was blistering
[5:13]and just not very concerned with ruffling feathers and i truly appreciated that tone it felt
[5:22]very confident to me and beneath that self assuredness was just a lot of really important lessons
[5:31]that i internalized that i kind of brought to my own marriage that i brought to my kids and that i
[5:38]kind of looked to in my reporting when i write other pieces now and so she just had this like what
[5:44]you said a timeless sensibility that i just was captivated by i want to circle back to when you
[5:51]first and how you learned about elsie robinson but you know that sort of the blowing caution
[5:57]to the when you start the book where she is going to William Randolph her for a pay raise
[6:04]is just such a great way to begin what was so remarkable about that discovery i think goes to why
[6:12]no one knows elsie robinson's name today the only reason why we discovered what she
[6:20]had to say about her pay about the time off that she wanted about the grueling pace that she
[6:28]had to endure writing column after column for all of her papers across the country is because
[6:35]we found a letter in the William Randolph Hearst archives at the bankroft in california and no
[6:44]other researcher who was doing a piece let's say or a book about William Randolph Hearst probably
[6:50]even cared about this one letter written by a columnist whose name they didn't recall but in this
[6:58]letter she talks to William Randolph Hearst in a way that i i don't know about you i found it to be
[7:05]shocking yeah talk to your boss in such a upfront i mean i would say a little bit confrontational
[7:14]way but she was so kind of confident in her value of what she was worth to the Hearst Empire
[7:23]that it was kind of emboldening for her and she went for it and she wasn't fired after that
[7:30]letter she got what she wanted because he sent her on his whirlwind tour immediately after
[7:36]and put her up at the warwick which is one of his hotels in New York City and through a huge
[7:41]luncheon in her honor so in some ways her boldness worked oh my god i wish i had read that
[7:49]before going into previous contract negotiations like i really felt like that that letter should
[7:54]just be required reading for anyone who's going into advocate for themselves when i read it the
[8:01]first time i was like oh like i i gassed i literally gassed out loud because i could not believe
[8:07]first of all as a researcher you know the discovery of this letter but also because it wasn't
[8:14]the only one she was just as forthright when she talked to her other bosses so she we found
[8:21]other letters too to her boss her editor the publisher at the oakland tribune out in the bay area
[8:28]and this is kind of a repeat rinse wash behavior she did it again and again and i should say
[8:36]all her bosses by the way they were all men and so she didn't double back and kind of recalibrate
[8:44]this was how she behaved by necessity because there were no other people to go to there were no
[8:52]women allies perhaps that she can kind of go to these were the men these were her bosses and
[8:57]she wanted to get what she was worth yeah and i feel like as a trailblazer just her life was
[9:04]incredibly it was just remarkable also and you look at the the path that she took and you're like
[9:12]you think to yourself about all the women in history who we've learned about and you know they
[9:18]just had to overcome so much to wait to break these ceilings and i just thought of that i mean
[9:26]she was a minor if you could tell like talk a little bit about like the path that she took she
[9:32]started in california well you know she at this is related to your question so at her core
[9:40]she was a mom the reason why this is important to talk about is that she would do anything
[9:46]for her son who was chronically ill so her marriage was just just unraveling it was
[9:54]loveless it didn't provide her joy it didn't provide her solace it was just cold
[10:00]And just she wanted more out of life,
[10:02]not just for herself, but for her son.
[10:04]And so she left at a time when women were not
[10:08]leaving their husbands, right?
[10:10]So in 1912, she was like, I am out of here.
[10:13]And she left.
[10:14]But what gave her and her son happiness together
[10:20]was that Elsie had this incredible
[10:22]proclivity for writing children's stories.
[10:24]And she was a remarkable artist.
[10:27]She drew these incredible illustrations.
[10:30]And so she took, and here's the lesson for all of us.
[10:34]She took what gave her joy, what she knew
[10:37]she had talent in doing, the writing and the illustrating.
[10:41]And she brought those talents to the Oakland Tribune
[10:45]where she was living.
[10:46]And she's like, look, here's what I have.
[10:49]You do not have a children's section right now
[10:52]in your paper.
[10:53]Let's do one.
[10:55]And so she sold them on the idea of a children's section.
[10:59]She became Aunt Elsie of the Oakland Tribune.
[11:03]And she was working in a mine at the time.
[11:07]Yeah, so right before then, when she was trying
[11:11]to really hone her craft, you're right.
[11:14]Thank you for bringing that up again.
[11:15]I had forgotten you asked me that great question
[11:18]about the mine.
[11:19]She had no money.
[11:20]She had left her husband.
[11:21]She was desperately poor.
[11:23]She had to make ends meet.
[11:24]She had to feed her son.
[11:26]And so she went to the gold mines of California.
[11:29]We found out it was exactly the Ruth Pierce mine.
[11:34]I can tell you how we found out about that.
[11:36]It's a whole other story.
[11:37]But for three years, she was a common laborer,
[11:42]600 feet below the surface of the earth,
[11:46]running away from dynamite blasts, digging with shovels
[11:50]with the wheelbarrow, creating in the rocks,
[11:53]and searching desperately for that gold streak
[11:57]where the gold was.
[11:59]And she was the only woman at the Ruth Pierce mine,
[12:03]all the other workers, of course, were men.
[12:06]And so Elsie had grit, man.
[12:08]She really dug deep when she needed to.
[12:11]And that, by the way, that experience
[12:14]became tons and tons of wonderful anecdotes
[12:19]and stories for her fiction,
[12:21]because she didn't only write her column.
[12:23]She was also a fiction writer.
[12:24]She was a poet.
[12:26]And she used that experience like we all do
[12:28]in our writing to craft other stories.
[12:31]I love how you wrote the book by incorporating her own voice.
[12:38]She had written a memoir, but so much of,
[12:41]she led to, she led a public life and a private life.
[12:45]And so while you hear her voice throughout,
[12:48]for example, when she moved,
[12:49]when she left her husband in Vermont,
[12:52]and then moved back to California,
[12:54]she moved back with a man named Robert.
[12:58]But then she stops writing about Robert.
[13:01]And you try and fill in some of the holes,
[13:03]but there are some things that are just left to history.
[13:09]There were some amazing breadcrumbs that Julia,
[13:13]my co-author, and I followed about Robert.
[13:17]There was no doubt there wasn't a fair.
[13:19]There is no doubt that Robert had his own history
[13:23]and baggage, shall we say?
[13:25]He had his own story, but he represented for Elsie,
[13:30]kind of this hope and this artistic flair
[13:34]that her husband lacked.
[13:36]I mean, her husband who she left
[13:38]just kind of kept her really buttoned up
[13:41]in a very formal New England existence.
[13:44]And she just wanted this escape.
[13:46]And that's what Robert represented to her.
[13:49]But in some cases, I don't know if you thought this
[13:51]when you were reading Listen World,
[13:53]but almost a foil.
[13:55]I think Elsie really used Robert as her kind of excuse
[13:58]to kind of get out and to follow the path back west.
[14:02]I think Elsie really saw him as a ticket
[14:06]to kind of latch onto his trip back out west.
[14:09]And in many ways, I think they're a fair,
[14:12]was just something that brought them together
[14:14]a time where both of them were just at the depths.
[14:18]Yeah, that's an undercurrent, I think,
[14:20]a theme that runs throughout her life is seeing doors
[14:25]and going through them and not wasting opportunities.
[14:29]You know what, I love that you picked that up.
[14:31]I find that too.
[14:32]I feel like Elsie was full of a pull up your,
[14:38]like what's that saying when you pull yourself up
[14:39]from the bootstraps?
[14:40]She was not about looking her wounds.
[14:42]She was not about crawling under the covers and hiding.
[14:46]I am sure she had those moments like we all do.
[14:50]I do, but she was someone who saw the horizon.
[14:54]She was someone who saw the future,
[14:57]who knew that it was worth fighting for.
[15:00]And she had many demons and many bad days.
[15:05]She called them mud holes, you know,
[15:07]that we all get sucked down.
[15:10]We all need to kind of navigate away around these mud holes.
[15:15]But if you can, you reach the mountain top, she says.
[15:19]And I just love that quote too.
[15:21]And then attitude like it came through
[15:23]and her writing without her needing to divulge
[15:26]too much of her own story
[15:29]and her own personal details.
[15:32]Can you tell me?
[15:33]Yeah, I was just gonna say,
[15:34]you mentioned how Julie and I use so much of Elsie's own words.
[15:40]And I think there is a real reason for us doing that.
[15:43]I don't think we could write better than her to be quite honest.
[15:47]She was such a great writer, so sharp-tongued,
[15:51]so swift of mind, so declarative and what she had to say.
[15:56]And so what we did is that we just kind of braided
[15:59]her thoughts, her points of view throughout the entire book.
[16:04]So then we knew that readers would not go
[16:08]to find her original writing.
[16:11]We knew that the likelihood of people going to find
[16:15]her 1934 memoir is probably nil.
[16:20]So we give it to you so you don't have to do any of that work.
[16:24]And we use her voice to propel.
[16:27]I hope you think you agree the story forward.
[16:30]So instead of us as the authors just telling you
[16:35]what Elsie experienced, we allow Elsie to tell you
[16:39]what Elsie experienced from her column,
[16:41]some of them back from, you know, 1918, 1922, 1924,
[16:46]you know, throughout her entire career
[16:49]until she died in 1956.
[16:51]And at the time she was the highest paid woman
[16:54]in the Hearst Company, is that right?
[16:56]Yeah, right.
[16:57]So she was made the highest paid woman writer.
[17:00]She was somewhat of a unicorn.
[17:02]So the reason there are many, I believe.
[17:05]But one of the primary reasons I think she was able to get
[17:09]that kind of financial backing is because she also drew
[17:14]in many cases her own accompanying editorial cartoons,
[17:19]her own political cartoons.
[17:20]We had talked about how she began,
[17:23]that she had this incredible facility
[17:25]for drawing cartoons for her son George when he was young.
[17:29]That kept going.
[17:30]And so it's very rare, even today,
[17:34]for a writer to also include their own cartoons.
[17:40]Normally what happens even today is at our writer writes
[17:44]and an illustrator illustrates.
[17:46]And an illustrator will get the assignment
[17:49]about what a piece is about and provide that artwork
[17:52]to accompany somebody else's column.
[17:56]But in Elsie's case, she did both.
[17:58]And I think that commanded quite a price tag.
[18:02]I don't want to give too much away
[18:03]because her life really was marked by,
[18:06]you said grit, perseverance, and tragedy as well.
[18:10]But at the end of the day,
[18:12]why don't we know more about her?
[18:14]Why?
[18:15]Oh my gosh, I have so many theories.
[18:17]Yeah.
[18:19]That's the best, that's the number one question.
[18:22]And I'm so glad you asked that.
[18:23]Like here's one, here's one answer that I could not believe.
[18:27]Both of my kids went to public school.
[18:30]And so this really was shocking to me when I learned this.
[18:35]The National Women's History Museum has done a report,
[18:39]an exhaustive report.
[18:41]And what they found is this,
[18:43]that in US public schools,
[18:46]kindergarten through 12th grade,
[18:49]only 24% of all historical figures taught in the classroom,
[18:57]our women.
[18:59]Elsie Robinson would have a lot to say about that.
[19:02]That's incredible.
[19:04]Yeah.
[19:05]Today we're talking now today in 2022
[19:09]and only 24% of all the historical figures taught
[19:13]in our schools are women.
[19:15]Terrible, it's a disgrace.
[19:17]It's a disgrace.
[19:18]And so, and I learned the reason why,
[19:21]one of the reasons why that's the case,
[19:23]if you think about it,
[19:24]and it kind of made sense to me once I learned,
[19:27]is that the way we learn history,
[19:30]the way our kids learn social studies
[19:33]is by and large, very masculine.
[19:37]And what I mean by that is this,
[19:39]this is what the education experts say.
[19:40]This is not my opinion.
[19:42]This is what the educational experts say.
[19:46]When we learn about war and peace,
[19:49]when we learn about the economy,
[19:52]when we learn about geographical lines shifting
[19:55]as a result of, let's say, war and peace.
[20:00]All of the people who are kind of at the center of those seismic shifts tend to be men.
[20:09]Where as if we were thinking and learning and teaching about other big shifts that take place, whether it's voting rights or immigration or the arts or journalism,
[20:25]labor rights, civic lessons, those areas tend to be where women shine, where women have had leadership roles, and those are not taught as regularly in our social studies classrooms.
[20:43]And I find that to be a part of the reason why Elsie Robinson has been forgotten.
[20:48]Do you think that part of that is because as women we don't do enough advocating for ourselves and standing up and and like singing our own praises?
[20:59]You know, I think that it goes far larger than that. This is systemic. This is what educators are looking at right now.
[21:09]There is a council of social studies educators throughout the country. They are working on changing the common core curriculums throughout the United States.
[21:20]This goes so far beyond blaming us.
[21:25]I need to blame women just thinking because you talk about, you know, how we need to think there's a wonderful line at the end of the book where you said there's a lesson here for all of us about taking control of how we'll be remembered by future generations if only within our own families.
[21:41]And you talk about how Elsie Robinson, you know, she wrote her memoir, but there were some, you know, there was some carelessness not on her part, but that, you know, the onus is also on us to be able to tell our story.
[21:57]And so I was just thinking of it's a lesson that women, you know, beyond the systemic barriers that we take a page from Elsie Robinson.
[22:09]And, you know, advocate for ourselves to fight for ourselves and to sing our praises.
[22:17]I think what you're talking about is very true. I think when it comes to how our families will remember us.
[22:25]So many times where I think as moms are, you know, anyone we kind of shy, maybe from being in front of the camera, maybe we don't feel pretty that day, maybe we feel fat that day.
[22:39]And we just want to have the picture of our kids and not be in that picture ourselves.
[22:44]That's a way of kind of editing ourselves out of that kind of in perpetuity experience that other generations might have of us.
[22:55]And so I think that's the part, you know, let Elsie Robinson isn't, you know, she doesn't get off scot free by not being remembered, you know, she did not donate her archives, her papers to historical society or a library or an archive.
[23:13]And those documents go that's the great mystery, you know, we have archives of some incredible women, incredible men throughout this country in repositories, you know, coast to coast.
[23:26]But Elsie Robinson's were scattered.
[23:29]And so I feel like that's the lesson that you're talking about right.
[23:33]And that's the only thing that we own our own paper trails and to make sure that we tell our spouses or our significant others or our children, what's actually the most important to us.
[23:44]Said way more articulately in my.
[23:47]I want to go back to how you discovered Elsie Robinson, you said it was after your mother passed away and also you've said that this took 11 years to write and research talk about the process of it.
[24:00]Yeah, so my mom passed away very shortly after I graduated college.
[24:07]And my brother and I went back to our house.
[24:10]And we were cleaning out her belongings to get our childhood home ready for the next stage, which was for us selling it.
[24:17]And inside one of my mom's books, there is this piece of onion skin paper, remember that old onion skin paper.
[24:26]Well, she had re typed a poem that was called pain.
[24:30]And it was about grief and loss.
[24:33]And it just was like a slap across my face.
[24:37]Like that moonstruck moment member that movie moonstruck would slap out.
[24:41]It was snap out of it.
[24:42]It was like that, where it was just like be grateful.
[24:46]You had a mom worth missing was kind of the message of this poem.
[24:50]It was like stop your belly, you're so lucky you had a mom worth missing.
[24:55]And that tone struck me in that moment, because my mom was also kind of very tough.
[25:03]Lovey, you know, if I had a question when I was growing up that had a spell something, she would say, go look in the dictionary, you know, she was not going to cuddle me at all.
[25:12]And so the poem that I read that was attributed to someone named Elsie Robinson spoke to me, because it was almost like my mother would have said these very words.
[25:25]And that is what set me on the path.
[25:29]On and off on and off over the course of many years, I started gathering more and more intel about Elsie Robinson.
[25:38]And then 11 years ago, I had a heart to heart with my literary agent and I said, this is the book that I want to write next.
[25:49]to heart cell, I must say, not because my literary agent didn't believe in the story, because once you read that memoir.
[25:59]It's hard not to believe in the Elsie Robinson story.
[26:03]But many authors are advised, well, is it Abraham Lincoln?
[26:08]Everyone knows Abraham Lincoln, is it Julia Child? Everyone knows Julia Child, meaning that a biography tends to be written about someone whose name we know.
[26:20]And because Elsie Robinson's name, nobody knew he was just preparing me for a tough road to sell this biography to a publisher.
[26:33]We had our work cut out for us. And so that was 11 years ago, I struggled with how to tell the story. There are many ways I was experimenting with how to kind of recast her amazing kind of rags to riches story, this kind of trope that we're all familiar with.
[26:52]And I just wasn't able to kind of nail it and it took me many attempts. And finally, I realized, you know what, I need to bring in a partner.
[27:02]I need to find someone, a writer who is going to help me as a team to tell this story in a way that I can't do on my own and enter in the best collaborator, the best partner, a dear friend now, Julia shears.
[27:21]Book has her handy work all over it. We were this incredible team. We wrote this entire project via Google Docs.
[27:30]And so where she was incredible, never together. You were separate. No, Julia is based in California and I'm based in New York.
[27:39]Wow. That's the only time that Julia and I were actually together in person reporting on the book was when she had mentioned, this is I should have mentioned this earlier, you mentioned when LC Robinson was a gold miner in California.
[27:56]And so that town where she was a gold miner is now a ghost town completely. And Julie and I had to go see this ghost town for ourselves.
[28:07]And so I fled to California, we got into a car, we got, we drove hours and hours into this kind of incredible deserted area.
[28:17]This ghost town together, because that's how those chapters that was the only well, those stories, because that is such a rich part of her story, her being in this town called Hornetos.
[28:30]And they put hills of the Sierra Nevada. So she and I went to this ghost town together.
[28:35]Do you think publishers today are still as reluctant to buy books like this about women, especially who are unknown or do you think that there's, you know, a movement of foot to try and get these names out there like to combat the 24% statistic that we talked about.
[28:57]No, what do you think I think they should be right.
[29:01]Yes, I think so too that's, you know, it's a really hard question for me to answer. I know in this particular case, the LC Robinson story was a definite hard sell.
[29:13]And I hope that if there is, and I cross my fingers at this book of lands with a receptive audience. I hope it softens that path for future writers of women's histories.
[29:28]That's my hope would be I would love this to kind of clear out, clear out the cobwebs.
[29:35]So more of these stories can be told.
[29:38]to two final questions. Of course, you can't read this and think, okay, when is this movie, when is this going to be turned into a movie. So who would play LC Robinson?
[29:48]Oh, that is such a good.
[29:51]That is such a good question. Oh, I have my fantasies. What do you think? Oh, God.
[29:57]You know what I was thinking of Mr. British act?
[30:00]dress. I just listened to her in a book of on tape of the night library. Oh, shoot. What is her name?
[30:11]Yeah. Okay. Let me, let me look it up and and you tell me as I'm looking at it.
[30:16]All right. Take, take too. Right. You know, I think boy, the fantasy of the
[30:21]Elsie Robinson story coming to the big screen or little screen, I think is something that would
[30:29]exceptional and exceptional not just because she herself is such a great story and the fact that
[30:34]she worked in a goldmine, you know, a lone woman amongst, you know, so many men. I mean, there's so
[30:40]many just incredible parts of her story that would actually be great for that medium. But I actually
[30:48]hope it reaches people in that way because it'll just allow more little girls to see a powerful
[30:57]woman own her destiny. And I mean that completely. There was not one part of Elsie's story
[31:05]where someone came to her, knocked on her door, opened it and said, come with me. I will make you famous.
[31:13]You know, come with me. You don't have any contacts. You don't have any money. But I will show you
[31:19]the light and I will magically lay out this magic carpet for you to come be this acclaimed
[31:26]newspaper columnist. Of course, that's a fantasy. No one does that. So if Elsie's story can help
[31:33]other little girls see for themselves that you create a destiny that you can go knock on someone's
[31:42]door yourself, knowing that you have that Hutska, knowing that you have the kind of credentials to
[31:50]back it up and the talent, I would love there to be, as you said. Thank you for saying that, a
[31:56]movie or, you know, a streaming, you know, series because I think her story has lessons that
[32:03]tell many of us. What? Carrie Mulligan is who I was thinking of. Oh, interesting. I like it. I like it.
[32:12]And finally, you know, Allison Gilbert, we talked about Elsie Robinson. If we want to learn more
[32:16]about Allison Gilbert, where do we go? What's next? Oh, thank you. Very much for asking that. Just
[32:23]Allison Gilbert dot com and I'm on social everywhere is a Gilbert writer. And I honestly love to hear
[32:31]from folks. So if you're listening, please do reach out. That's, you know, so many times and hours
[32:37]we're just alone writers in our room, you know, isolated. And so now's the time I get to share
[32:45]Elsie, I get to kind of explain what I've been working on for so long and kind of share this
[32:51]magical woman that I've been proud to kind of get to know over these last few years. And so if I
[32:57]can share, if I can talk, we can, you know, banter back and forth about your experience of listening
[33:03]to Elsie Robinson and learning about her. Boy, I would love that. Well, I think Gilbert Bravo and thank
[33:10]you. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to
[33:15]Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibbowens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[33:21]Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[33:26]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact,
[33:30]texture sound for the sound editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing
[33:35]this fantastic intro and outro music.