Robinson had spent her entire career seizing opportunities and defying convention. In 1918, she noticed that the Oakland Tribune didn’t have a children’s section and convinced the paper to hire her to create one. She both wrote and illustrated the stories. “Aunt Elsie’s Magazine” became a sensation, spawning “Aunt Elsie” clubs for kids across California. When she learned that parents were also fans of her work, she launched two popular advice columns geared at adults. In 1923, she scaled the much larger market of San Francisco with a third column, “Tell It to Elsie,” for the San Francisco Call and Post.
Robinson had always relied on her tremendous moxie to navigate life. In her early 30s, as a broke, single mom in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, she’d talked her way into a gold mining camp where, for three years, she wore spiked boots and cheated death 600 feet below the earth’s surface—the only woman on a motley crew of prospectors. She spent evenings bent over a typewriter, trying to develop her skills as a writer.
Robinson remained just as fearless at 56 in her chastisement of “The Chief”—a man who lived on California’s central coast in a castle sprawling enough to accommodate 50 to 60 overnight guests. She’d dealt with male bosses for her entire career and refused to be intimidated by them.
“If I hadn’t improved on my stuff in nine years, I’d have been out on my ear in exactly eight years and 11 months,” she had told her editor. “I know the comeback. ‘But we give you a really staggering sum for a woman writer.’ My answer is simple. I am not a columnist. I am a factory. You’ve not been getting a feature. You’ve been getting mass production for nearly 20 years.”
What happened next suggests she was either placated or promised a future pay increase. Perhaps both. We know she wasn’t fired. Hearst continued to send her to cover the major stories for his papers, including the 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and he threw a luncheon in her honor at the lavish Warwick Hotel in New York.
Robinson kept writing at a finger-numbing clip for another 16 years, publishing as frequently as six days a week—producing approximately nine thousand columns and articles during her 40 year career. She was the most widely read female columnist of her day and reached double the number of current subscribers to the New York Times. She was also one of the first and only columnists in the country to draw her own blistering editorial cartoons to accompany her writing.