Excerpt
“Who was Vic Steinberg – fortune teller? Shop girl? Seamstress? Vic Steinberg wore many disguises but no one except her close friends and colleagues knew her real name. Vic was a rare phenomenon: the woman newspaper columnist. And more than that, she was the only reporter at her paper to have her own byline. In the Victorian Age, a time when women were destined for marriage and home-making, women columnists were almost unheard of. Vic worked for the Toronto News, a paper that middle- and working-class people read because they had a liking for sensational stories, local gossip, and crime. When the paper hit the front porches, readers would turn to her column before reading the news of the day. In 1890s Toronto, who else could take women to places they had never been – the sweatshops, the men’s smoking rooms, the taverns? Vic Steinberg entered these places without fear, then reported back with a special blend of humor and curiosity that made her readers want to know more.
Vic didn’t care about the dresses women were wearing that season, or who was holding a garden party this summer. She had no interest in women’s hats or the latest kitchen gadgets. Instead, she was determined to go to places where women of “class” did not go. She could only do these daring things if she kept her identity a secret. Disguising herself gave her the freedom to blend in with people from all walks of life. Sometimes she explored Toronto dressed as a man, but she always wrote from a woman’s point of view.”