Girl Sleuth (14 page)

Just two years before the Motor Girls were introduced, Henry Ford's mass-produced Model T debuted, along with Ford's cheeky marketing campaign: “You can paint it any color, so long as it's black.” Priced at $850, its immediate popularity with both men and women sealed America's fate as a nation of car lovers; suddenly a car was a fact of life rather than a luxury item. Cora Kimball gave little girls a taste of what lay ahead when they grew up, a kind of freedom unthinkable to their mothers' generation. Left alone with her gift at the start of the series, Cora bathes her newfangled “machine” in an affectionate gaze, exuding pure, rapturous excitement (and no small degree of technical knowledge): “The girl stepped over to a window and looked out. There, on the driveway, stood a new automobile. Four-cylindered, sliding-gear transmission, three speeds forward and reverse, long-wheel base, new ignition system, and all sorts of other things mentioned in the catalogue. Besides, it was a beautiful maroon color, and the leather cushions matched.”

It would be another few decades before a truly car-obsessed girl made it to the pages of a young adult book: In 1937 Noel Streatfeild's
Ballet Shoes
featured the charming Petrova Fossil, a girl who goes so far as to wear mechanic's coveralls for the entire second half of the book despite a career in dance; and in 1955 Beverly Cleary's intrepid Ramona Quimby took her favorite doll, Chevrolet, to show-and-tell. But surely no girl could fail to adore
lucky, modern Cora and the promise of her new vehicle. There were a few comments on the oddness of girls driving cars in the book, no doubt intended to bring a chuckle to readers who could no more imagine not being able to drive than they could not being made to go to school, but Stratemeyer made sure to put them in the mouth (and uneducated dialect) of a hayseed who relied on horses: “Wa'al, I'll be gum-swizzled!” exclaimed the farmer. “What's this, anyhow? Auto-mobiles? As I live! Wa'al, I swan t' goodness! An' gals a-drivin' of 'em! Ho! ho!”

The Motor Girls series—which took its heroines through plots involving stolen fortunes, family heirlooms, and other stock features of mystery books—went on to run for seven years and ten volumes. Cora and her pals were ever young and single, and in that sense they differed enormously from the heroines of girls' books in the previous century, most of whom were locked in some kind of domestic drama involving death or hardship. There were the long-suffering March girls of Louisa May Alcott's
Little Women
and the little band of siblings in the
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew,
Margaret Sidney's famous tale of a pious family fallen on hard times after the death of the father, but ever cheerful and Christian in the face of poverty. A classic example of the genre,
Five Little Peppers
was first published in 1881 and reprinted repeatedly, including in 1907, when one of Edward Stratemeyer's editor friends sent him a new holiday edition that he passed on to his daughters (both of whom, it should be said, enjoyed reading it). But in spite of the ongoing popularity of such old standbys, new entries into the world of girls' series books were gaining ground in the early part of the twentieth century as publishers realized they had a virtually untapped market before them. Forty-six new girls' series were started between 1900 and 1910, and another ninetyfour were started in the following decade. Girls who read were no longer considered poor relations to their brothers and pals: They had been discovered as a demographic, and the Motor Girls series was specifically designed to take advantage of that fact.

They were not, however, Stratemeyer's maiden effort in the field. Though he got started somewhat late—a slip that, he confessed in 1906, “comes of my ignorance concerning girls' books and those who pen them, for I have devoted nearly fifteen years of my life to boys' books and boys' periodicals”—he was quick to catch up. That year he began writing to various women authors, hoping to engage someone to write his first line of girls' books. “Among other things, we want one line of stories for girls,” he wrote to one candidate that same year. “If you know anything about my Rover Boys Series . . . you'll know exactly what I mean . . . We do not ask for what is commonly called ‘fine writing,' (usually another name for what is tedious and cumbersome) but want something full of ‘ginger' and action.”

The result of these efforts appeared in 1908 in the form of fourteen-year-old Dorothy Dale, who was, according to the subtitle of the first book in the series, “a girl of today.” “Dorothy Dale is the daughter of an old Civil War veteran who is running a weekly newspaper in a small Eastern town,” announced the first volume. “Her sunny disposition, her fun-loving ways and her trials and triumphs make clean, interesting and fascinating reading.” She is also missing a parent—her mother, who died giving birth to her youngest brother—and runs her home with the help of a loving housekeeper who is like a member of the family. Her devoted father refers to her as “Little Captain,” and her adventures take her from coast to coast, to boarding school, to the mountains and the ocean. At least they do until the second-to-last
book in the series, which proved to be the kiss of death for the young heroine:
Dorothy Dale's Engagement
was the first indication that little girls of the new century did not care to see their role models grow up and marry. Admitting to a friend that she's smitten, Dorothy says, “I have too much good sense to lose the chance of showing the man I love that he can win me, because of any foolish or old-fashioned ideas of conventionalities.” The conventionalities happen to be an enormous fortune Dorothy is due to inherit at any moment, which she happily agrees to forgo if she can just have her Gerry. Luckily, he makes a good business deal of his own, and at the book's end she pledges to wait for him to earn a fortune. In that instant, Dorothy's devoted readers lost interest and sales dropped off, a lesson the Syndicate never forgot. Much later Harriet wrote herself some general guidelines on writing stories for young people. Among the key points was this one: “Must appeal to children. This excludes love element, adult hardships. Marrying off Nancy Drew disastrous.”

Dorothy's misguided betrothal did not come until 1917, however, by which time Stratemeyer had plenty of other girls' series in the works. As always, he was ahead of all his competitors in this new field, largely due to his wise marketing techniques. One of the advertising catalogs he worked up for his books included a special section called “Books Especially for Girls” that reassured parents and booksellers that he understood their problems in finding reading material they could trust would be up to their standards. “To get good books written for girls has always been a difficult problem, the reason probably being that many girls prefer to read boys' books or to jump to the regular novels of the day—the latter a particularly bad habit, since their minds are not sufficiently developed to sort out the good from the bad among what are commonly called ‘the best sellers.'” Stratemeyer continued to have strict policies when it came to content. As he wrote to the author of the Motor Girls books when she turned in a manuscript that departed from his wishes: “I have never permitted a murder to occur in any of our boys' books and naturally would not permit that sort of a thing in a book meant for girls from ten to fifteen years of age. Nothing is said of such a thing in the outline given for the story.”

S
TRATEMEYER HAD A
new reason, on top of all the usual ones, to be wary of too many unsavory scenes in his books. Childhood as a whole, no longer just children's books, was suddenly coming in for more examination than it had ever borne before. “It is the Century of the Child,” boomed the
New Republic
magazine in the fall of 1926. “Childhood has ceased to be a terra incognita taken for granted. Like the North Pole, it has become worth much adult attention.” Theodore Roosevelt had established the White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1909, designed to deal with “all children, in their total aspects, including those social and environmental factors which are influencing modern childhood.” Thanks to the Child Labor Act of 1916, which limited the working age to fourteen, and the advent of labor-saving devices like vacuums, electric irons, and refrigerators—by 1927 nearly two-thirds of American homes had electricity, and running water was a given—kids were working far less both in and out of the home than they had in previous years. Where they had once held factory jobs and turned over their pay to help support their households, they now went to school and had time for idle pursuits.

The golden age of radio dawned just in time to help them fill their suddenly relaxed days. By 1924 two and a half million American households owned a set, and children's programming proliferated on the airwaves. Shows like
Buster Brown's Radio Club, Uncle Don,
and Sunday night bedtime story hours were immensely popular as children followed their parents' cue and gathered around the family radio. These entertainments—along with the unrivaled success of nickelodeons patronized almost exclusively by children after school and on the weekends, without their parents—were the first signs that young America had been recognized as a segment of society worth not only paying attention to, but serving. But even as they were given ever more independence from the burdens of adulthood and marketers began to zero in on them, children were also being viewed as innocents who needed to be protected from the ills of the grown-up world. By the end of the 1920s, parenting had gone from a duty to an all-consuming profession of sorts. One middle-class woman who spoke to researchers in 1929 practically bragged to them: “I accommodate my entire life to my little girl.”

A large part of this newly intense interest in raising children found its expression in education, and as schooling came to the forefront of childhood—with fewer children working, they had more time to go to school—so did opinions about how and what children should be taught, including what they read. New magazines devoted to analysis and criticism of children's reading and books sprang up, like the
Horn Book
and the
Bookman.
Publishing companies were setting up children's departments, an annual Children's Book Week designed to bring attention to the best and brightest new books and authors had been established, and the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott awards for children's books were launched. The previous eight years, according to the author of the
New Republic
piece, had seen “a trebling of the numbers of children's books published annually.” In 1925 alone,
by one estimate, more than twenty-five million children's books were printed.

None of this attention, however, was designed to encourage the sales of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. For along with the rise of children's literature had come a renewed effort to demonize series books. Various critics had been harassing Stratemeyer as far back as the turn of the century, but even their sustained effort could not much affect the financial fortunes of books like Stratemeyer's. Still, they made their voices heard. The year Stratemeyer started his company, a well-known child psychologist published an article pointedly titled “What Children Do Read and What They Ought to Read.” A decade or so later, a book called
The Guide to Literature for Children
opined that “much of the contempt for social conventions for which the rising generation is blamed is due to the reading of this poisonous sort of fiction.” But perhaps the biggest potential blow came in 1914, when Franklin K. Mathiews, chief scout librarian of the Boy Scouts of America—then 127,000 members strong with enormous influence over the habits of American families—published a screed entitled “Blowing Out the Boys' Brains.” In the language of the battlefield, the widely circulated piece deemed series books nothing short of sinister, permanently life-altering forces. “The harm done [in reading them] is simply incalculable,” Mathiews moralized. “I wish I could label each one of these books: ‘Explosives! Guaranteed to Blow Your Boy's Brains Out.'”

In addition to being righteous and pedantic, Mathiews and his ilk were absolutely right about one thing: Series books were enormous moneymakers. Even when the Newark Public Library had removed all of Stratemeyer's books, along with Horatio Alger's and Oliver Optic's, from its shelves in protest earlier in the century, it had done little to hurt him. “Personally, it does not
matter much to me whether or not my books are now put back on the shelves of the juvenile department,” he wrote to the chairman of the library's book committee at the time. “Taking them out of the Library has more than tripled the sales in Newark.” Matters remained much the same throughout the 1920s. At a New Jersey Federation Women's Club Convention in 1921, Magdalene Stratemeyer heard a speech lambasting her husband delivered by the head of the Brooklyn Library children's department. She reported back to Edward, who found himself in a quandary. The talk had been given by none other than his old nemesis, the same woman who had contrived to excise his work from the Newark Library in 1901, and Stratemeyer now considered suing her for libel. There was a problem, however, which he confessed to Lenna in a letter: “Maybe I'll scare her into something. But in order to get damages I have first to prove them—and
how
can I prove such talk hurts the books while the sale keeps up?” Indeed, the following year, the Stratemeyer Syndicate earned $9.1 million, $1 million of which was from sales of a single series, the Outdoor Girls.