Elsie Robinson was born in 1883 into a down-at-heel family in a blue-collar California town.
Restless and rebellious, the tall, square-jawed teenager dreamt of going to college but seemed doomed to the life of a repressed Victorian housewife, miserable in her marriage and thwarted in her hopes.
Yet she would become, in the words of Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert, “one of the most prominent and powerful writers in America,” the highest-paid woman columnist in the mighty Hearst empire.
In their lively biography “Listen, World!
She urged women to dream big: “I’m tired of hearing the differences of men and women emphasized and exploited.”