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| Nellie Bly c. 1890 |
Nellie Bly (1864 - 1922) was the pen name of pioneer
female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who was first noticed and
hired by a newspaper editor after she wrote a strong letter to the
editor in response to a sexist article. According to Wikipedia, "The
editor was so impressed with Cochran's earnestness and spirit that
he asked the man who wrote the letter to join the paper. When he learned
the man was Cochran he refused to give her the job, but she was a good
talker and persuaded him. Female newspaper writers at that time
customarily used pen names, and for Cochran the editor chose 'Nellie
Bly', adopted from the title character in the popular song 'Nelly Bly'
by Stephen Foster."
Bly, who lived in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania at the time, was naturally inclined to cover stories of
working women and the labor conditions of female factory workers. In
rebellion against the pressure from her employer to cover
home-and-garden sort of topics, she quit her job and moved to Mexico to
serve as a foreign correspondent to the newspaper. Never one to hold
back, she wrote critically of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, and then had
to move back to the U.S. after being threatened with arrest. She was
once again assigned typical women's stories and in frustration left the
newspaper and moved to New York City.
After a few months barely scraping by in New York, Bly found work doing an undercover investigative assignment for the
New York World.
As a groundbreaker in the field of investigative reporting, she was to
feign insanity in order to be committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on
Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island). The asylum had a reputation
on the street for brutality and neglect, and Bly was to observe
conditions first hand in the role of an inmate, and then write an
exposé. The year was 1884, and she was now a mere 20 years old. Her work
was first published in the
World, and then she republished it as a book to satisfy the demand of a public who were asking for copies.
In
order to ensure that she would gain entrance to the asylum, Bly
practiced the behavior and mannerisms of insane persons. She then,
continuing her strategy, checked into a working-class women's boarding
house on lower Second Avenue (see footnote). There she conducted herself
in such a way that the home's matron called the police, and Bly
appeared before a judge and convinced him she was insane.
In her own words:
I
took upon myself to enact the part of a poor, unfortunate crazy girl,
and felt it my duty not to shirk any of the disagreeable results that
should follow. I became one of the city's insane wards for that length
of time, experienced much, and saw and heard more of the treatment
accorded to this helpless class of our population, and when I had seen
and heard enough, my release was promptly secured. I left the insane
ward with pleasure and regret–pleasure that I was once more able to
enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought
with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me,
and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself.
But
here let me say one thing: From the moment I entered the insane ward on
the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I
talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the
more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be by all
except one physician, whose kindness and gentle ways I shall not soon
forget.
Her first stop was Bellevue Hospital where
she was to be evaluated, and then was transported on a boat -- under
awful conditions -- to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. Both hospital
and asylum were freezing cold, food for the patients was scant and
atrocious, and nurses kept inmates awake all night by talking and
clomping around in loud shoes. But most egregious of all was what seemed
to be a common practice by doctors of declaring women insane who likely
were only down on their luck, based upon only the most cursory verbal
examinations. Bly was deemed "hopelessly insane," a diagnosis arrived at
after a simple conversation a doctor held with her during which she did
nothing in particular to "act insane." She reported that she overheard
other patients being asked similar questions, answering as any normal
person would, and also being deemed insane. Bly wrote, "After this, I
began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever
had before, and a greater one for myself."
Bly
wrote up many details of the treatment and incidents she witnessed at
the asylum, and her work "Ten Days in a Mad-House" can be read at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html.
With no special journalistic training, she had taken on a distasteful
and even dangerous assignment and aced the tricky job of simultaneously
pretending to be a real inmate while also staying aware and observant of
others at all times. Her write-up makes an engrossing read and gives us
tremendous insight to the status of women, particularly those in the
working class, in the latter part of the 19th century.
And
her work had tremendous impact. The public soaked it up and politicians
were put in the hot seat. When she republished her work in book format
she noted in an introduction:
SINCE my experiences in Blackwell's
Island Insane Asylum were published in the World I have received
hundreds of letters in regard to it. The edition containing my story
long since ran out, and I have been prevailed upon to allow it to be
published in book form, to satisfy the hundreds who are yet asking for
copies.
I am happy to be able to state
as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent
thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per
annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So I have at least
the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the
better cared for because of my work.
...
In
another major adventure, in 1890, Nellie Bly took on a challenge to
compete against another female author to beat, for real, the fictional
record set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's
Around the World in Eighty Days
-- and on the 73rd day after her departure she won the challenge by
arriving back at her Hoboken, New Jersey starting-point after making her
way around the planet almost completely unchaperoned.
In
1895 she married a man 40 years her senior, a wealthy industrialist,
and after his death she became an industrialist and inventor (of the
55-gallon oil drum still in use) in her own right. But after being
bankrupted by employee embezzlement, she returned to reporting, covering
the women's suffrage movement, and the action on the Eastern front in
World War I. She also had a continuing interest in the plight of the
downtrodden in society, and adopted or looked after a number of orphaned
children.
In 1922, at the age of 57, Nellie Bly died
of pneumonia, but her spirit lives on and she set in motion a huge
legacy of exposing greed and incompetence in order to better the
circumstances of those "at the bottom" of society. In 1998 she was
inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2002 she was one of four
female journalists honored with a U.S. postage stamp. A New York Press
Club award bears her name, an amusement park is named after her, and a
"4-D" film has been shown in the Annenberg Theater in Washington, D.C.
dramatizing her experience in the asylum.
FOOTNOTE: The
Temporary Home for Females was located at 84 Second Avenue. It was
actually a web search for "84 Second Avenue" out of my interest in that
building itself that led me to the story of Nellie Bly. The building at
that address is only a few doors away from where I live and has been an
object of my interest since I moved to my current location in 1977.
Several people have written articles or blog posts about the place, and I
do have more to add to what folks have thus far recorded, being one of
very few people who have actually been inside the building and talked
to its present-day occupant. Another day I will take up that topic (and
will try to remember to come back and add a link here).
