Kirk’s dilemma, fittingly enough, was that she really was a working woman. Though she continued lecturing on behalf of women workers and in favor of suffrage, and even served as the organization’s secretary for a time, she could not afford to lead the movement. Instead, she supported her household over the next two decades by writing brash columns in which she dispensed parenting advice and covered the latest goings-on in New York City’s salons and courtrooms (and, in one case, at a speed-typewriting tournament). During the same period, she also penned a novel of divorce rights (“Up Broadway”) and a stage comedy (“Flirtation”). By the eighteen-eighties, Kirk’s columns were in syndication, reaching millions of women through a hundred and fifty newspapers nationwide: “she is both paragraphic and breezy,” as one slightly mystifying Dallas Morning News headline promised. Working and travelling were especially important to Kirk, and she directed much of her ire at the absurdities of constrictive Victorian clothing. It was “the plain and positive duty of every woman” to shorten her skirt; Kirk urged her readers to take up biking and mountain climbing, and snapped that anyone lacking the courage to wear bloomers “would do well to remain in her rocking chair on the piazza and solace herself with her embroidery, novel, and pug dog.”
Kirk, who often pushed for newsrooms to employ more women, was confounded by questions from those who couldn’t break into writing. This inspired a slim volume, one so odd that Kirk had to publish and sell it from her home at 786 Lafayette Avenue, in Brooklyn: “Periodicals that Pay Contributors; to which Is Added a List of Publishing Houses.” The year was 1888. “I want to help the girls who feel they can write if they have a little encouragement,” Kirk later explained in one of her columns. “I know what uphill work it is.”
“Periodicals that Pay” was preceded by such all-around writing primers as “Haney’s Guide to Authorship” and the advice magazine The Writer. But Kirk’s book was the first to arrange markets systematically and advise readers on how to break into them—by noting what material they ran, and the names and addresses of their editors. Reading “Periodicals that Pay” today is a window into a world in which Strawbridge & Clothier’s Monthly and Brainard’s Musical World still roamed the earth. Some advice remains unchanged, though. Wildly pitching in all directions, Kirk warned, was a waste of time—and, back then, of postage: “The helter-skelter way of sending manuscripts to and fro … without an inkling of the character of the papers to be catered to is useful only to ‘Uncle Sam.’ ”
