A memorable passage in “Listen, World!” a rousing new biography of pioneering Bay Area journalist Elsie Robinson, details the torturous daily ritual of getting dressed as a teen in turn-of-the-19th century Benicia: encasing herself in undershirts, stockings, underdrawers, petticoat and a corset so she could present herself as a proper Victorian maiden.

Robinson later described that whale-boned corset with a mix of humor and horror: “Armored like a war tank, reaching from armpit nearly to knee, to be laced until your tonsils cracked. I had a 19-inch waist. Where did I put my insides?”

Robinson shed those restrictive garments after she escaped an oppressive marriage to a rich but puritanical Vermont widower. Returning to California in 1912 and forced by circumstances to support herself and her young son by mucking in a gold mine, she donned a loose skirt fashioned from tent canvas, a man’s flannel shirt, boots and sombrero.

After World War I, the newly divorced mom hunted for writing jobs at San Francisco newspapers, joining the throngs of other women on Market Street, who now moved freely in loose-fitting frocks and bobbed hair, “so swift, so sleek, so competent,” as she wrote in her 1934 memoir, “I Wanted Out!”

For biographers Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert, Robinson’s evolving fashion sense becomes a metaphor for her lifelong resistance to the restrictions placed on women in the first half of the 20th century. Breaking out against these restraints, the future 20th century icon forged a highly successful career as a fiction writer, children’s author, illustrator, poet, reporter and nationally syndicated columnist for William Randolph Hearst.

Beloved by generations of children for her “Aunt Elsie” children’s pages, which she began at the Oakland Tribune, Robinson became the highest-paid female writer in Hearst’s newspaper empire and America’s “most-read woman,” as the subtitle for “Listen, World!” attests. The book’s title comes from Robinson’s most influential column. Every day, 20 million Americans opened the paper to read what she had to say about current events and culture in her “Listen, World” column.

What’s startling is that Robinson’s groundbreaking legacy has largely been forgotten.

During an authors’ talk at the Oakland Public Library this fall, moderator Liam O’Donoghue, who hosts the East Bay Yesterday history podcast, said he’s familiar with most of the major figures in Oakland history but had never heard of Robinson. Scheeres and Gilbert say she fell prey to the forces that often relegate women’s lives to the bin of “lost history.”

Quoting at length from Robinson’s memoir and other writing in their book, they show that the syndicated columnist wasn’t just a beautiful, thoughtful writer about her own life. She also was ahead of the curve in addressing issues that still occupy us today: racism, antisemitism, the death penalty, labor rights and economic inequality.

More than anything, Robinson challenged her era’s views on women. Decades before Betty Friedan and other second-wave feminists explored the drudgeries of domestic life and wrote frankly about sexuality, Robinson described her sexual curiosity as a teen girl  – once peering into a shack along Benicia’s wharf to see a prostitute servicing a client. She recounted her confusion about her wedding night and the terror of childbirth, when Victorian ladies were given next to no information about the mechanics of reproduction. Throughout her life, she encouraged women to seek personal fulfillment outside the traditional confines of marriage and motherhood.

She had the attention of 20 million Americans a day, yet no one ever collected her works into an official archive. Scheeres and Gilbert painstakingly built a paper trail by hunting through microfiche copies in libraries and the archives of prominent men she worked for, including Hearst.

That search began more than 10 years ago after Gilbert’s mother died. When Gilbert was going through her mother’s books, a typewritten copy of a breathtakingly honest poem about grief and loss fell out. It was attributed to a writer named Elsie Robinson. Curious, the New York-based Gilbert began looking for more information.

What Gilbert and Bay Area writer Scheeres discovered as they teamed up on the project was the story of a woman who seized on the promise of the California dream. Robinson’s parents were settlers, and her independent spirit was nurtured by the bohemian, frontier-town culture of Benicia and a working class family who valued education, including for their daughters.

Unfortunately, financial hard times made it impossible for her parents to send Robinson to UC Berkeley. At 17, she saw no future for herself unless she married. That’s when she crossed paths with Christie Cowell, a 27-year-old widower visiting from Vermont. Like Jane Eyre, Robinson fell for this sad, handsome man, writing, “Sickly and a widower: Was there ever a girl who didn’t adore tragedy?”

But in Vermont, neither Crowell nor his parents warmed to Robinson’s “uncouth” California ways, and they made her life as a young wife miserable. As much as Robinson later downplayed “the maternal instinct,” she found a purpose when she gave birth in 1907. She adored her blond-haired boy, George. It was for him that she first took up a pen to write and illustrate stories, though she also wanted, she said, “to understand people, to grasp life, to make some ordered pattern out of all this seeming waste and confusion.”

George gave Robinson another reason to leave her marriage: He was diagnosed with severe, debilitating asthma, and she wanted to raise him in California’s warmer climate. But she fled at a time when only one percent of marriages ended in divorce, thereby “taking ownership of her life in a way that few women of the era dared to contemplate,” Scheeres and Gilbert wrote.

Robinson and George were accompanied to the West by Robert Wallace, a darkly handsome writer and former mental patient, for whom she illustrated some children’s books. They likely were lovers, according to Scheeres and Gilbert, although Robinson never copped to it, probably because she feared losing her son if her husband proved adultery.

The three ended up in Hornitos, a once-thriving mining town in the dry, rolling foothills west of Yosemite National Park. Wallace hoped to strike gold and become rich. That never happened, and at some point, he evaporated from Robinson’s life. Left alone to support George, she went to work in a mine, taking up dangerous and backbreaking work that was usually reserved for men.

But the labor and the company of cowboys, gamblers, miners, hobos and others “who traveled fast and light,” was liberating for the writer. At the end of each day, after putting George to bed, she wrote stories by candlelight, using an old typewriter borrowed from a friend, the town’s Black postmistress. Robinson’s stories, which she sold to national magazines, featured free-spirited protagonists, like the socialite who debated whether to tell her new rancher husband she wasn’t a virgin.

When the Hornitos mine closed at the end of World War I, freelancing couldn’t offer Robinson a steady income. Facing starvation, she returned to the Bay Area in the fall of 1918 to find work. After San Francisco’s three main newspapers turned her down, she took the ferry across to Oakland, where she walked into the newsroom of the Oakland Tribune to pitch her services. The editor saw something he liked and offered her $12 a week to write a children’s column.

“I had my first newspaper job!” she proclaimed. “I would not have to go on the streets. And my boy and I could eat!”

Robinson’s column became popular so swiftly, the Tribune soon expanded it into an eight-page section called Aunt Elsie’s Magazine. The magazine soon spawned “Aunt Elsie” clubs in 65 California towns whose members held parades and competed to publish their stories and illustrations in the paper.

Aunt Elsie is the only part of Robinson’s legacy that endured past her 1956 death, when her column was continued by another writer. And Aunt Elsie is still remembered fondly in some quarters today. At the Oakland library event, 76-year-old Diana Sychr stood up to say she grew up reading Aunt Elsie’s columns in the 1950s and delighted in once getting a letter back from the author.

But from that start with the Oakland Tribune, Robinson branched out into homemaking and relationship columns, and became a national figure when she launched “Listen, World!” in 1921. Soon, an editor at San Francisco’s Call and Post, a Hearst paper, lured her away, paying her $95 a week. A year later, Arthur Brisbane, the legendary editor of Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, vastly upped her salary to write for him – her $20,000 a year salary would be equivalent to $350,000 a year in today’s dollars.

But just as Robinson reached the pinnacle of success, George, then a 21-year-old student at Sacramento Junior College, died during an influenza epidemic. Elsie wrote about the “heart-breaking sorrow — fresh-rending pain” in losing her only child and “loneliness beyond all measure of imagining.”

Yet, she kept writing. Through the Depression, Hearst sent her to cover major national news stories, including the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and she scripted a popular NBC radio show that depicted fictional couples looking to save their marriages. After securing permission from her editor to work remotely, she wrote from a cabin she bought outside Sonora. She also penned her memoir, which was critically acclaimed by major U.S. newspapers for its frankness and courage and serialized by Cosmopolitan magazine.

“She turned to narrative storytelling as a grief-stricken 46-year-old columnist for the same reason she turned to it as a lonely, 26-year-old wife: ‘To save my life,’” Scheeres and Gilbert wrote.

Robinson concluded her memoir by writing: “Was there ever an adventurer really born ‘brave?’ Was there ever an adventure that was not bought at the price of fear and agony? Are not the bravest also the terrified? I know it was so with me.”

BOOK TALK

“Listen, World!” co-author Julia Scheeres will read from the book and talk about Elsie Robinson’s life and legacy with Bay Area News Group writer Martha Ross at 4 p.m. Jan. 21 at the Book Passage in Corte Madera; www.bookpassage.com/corte-madera-events.

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