Oh My, Nellie Bly (EOTO 2)

Oh My, Nellie Bly

    May 5, 1864 Elizabeth Cochran was born in Cochran Mills (named after her father, Michael Cochran, and his farm land) Pennsylvania. Just six years after Elizabeth was born her father passed away leaving her and her 14 siblings with her mother. They left Cochran Mills and moved to Allegheny City, now known as Pittsburgh. Elizabeth attended Indiana Normal School (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania) for a semester, but dropped out as she could not afford the schooling. After leaving school, while living in Pittsburgh, an article was published in the Pittsburgh Dispatch titled "What Girls Are Good For". The article mainly argued that woman are primarily meant to carry and birth children, be homemakers, and other stereotypical women roles at that time. Elizabeth read the article and was so outraged by the argument that she wrote a response to the editor, she signed it "Lonely Orphan Girl". It must have been a pretty good response because George Madden, the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, offered Elizabeth an opportunity to write a piece for the paper, and "The Girl Puzzle", a piece about how divorce affects women and a call to reform divorce laws, was published under her "Lonely Orphan Girl" pseudonym. Madden was impressed again and offered Elizabeth a full time position writing for the paper. During this time, it was customary for women to write under a pen name, so Nellie Bly was born. 

   Nellie Bly started her work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch focused on the lives of working women and starting her investigative work. She went into factories and told the truth of what the lives of the women working were like. The owners and supervisors of these factories were very upset about her pieces that were being published, so she was reassigned to the "women's pages" which was essentially about cooking, cleaning, being a homemaker, etc. Bly was very unsatisfied with this reassignment, so she decided to travel to Mexico to serve as a "foreign correspondent" for six months. She told stories of the lives of the Mexican citizens and began to take notice of the amount of local journalists who were being imprisoned for their articles about the government. Bly began advocating for the journalists and protested their arrests which led to a threat of being arrested herself. After this threat, she decided to flee the country to return back to the Pittsburgh Dispatch and work the "women's pages" until she left the paper in 1887. 

    After leaving Pennsylvania, Bly headed to New York City in hopes to get a reporting job. Unfortunately, women during this time were not being hired to write for newspapers, but somehow Bly found herself in the office of journalism typhoon Joseph Pulitzer, the editor of The New York World, asking for a job. Pulitzer was not interested, but told Bly if she could write a story about the mental institution on Roosevelt Island he would hire her. He gave no other instructions, advice on how to get the story, etc., but Bly was determined and began her work to land herself in the institution. 

           Bly took on a fake name and took a room in a boarding house in New York. She convinced those living there she was a Cuban immigrant and insane. Bly would wonder the halls and the streets of the boarding house, refused to sleep, screamed incoherently, and even said she perfected her "crazy" look. After a few days the boarding house owners called the cops and Bly was on her way to Blackwell's Island. While on the island, Bly found that there were only 16 doctors for over 1,600 patients, there was cultural insensitivity towards the immigrants, tea tasted like copper, the bread was black, and spiders were in the food. Bly was tied down, beaten, held underwater, dragged by her hair,  and she was forced to take ice baths. After leaving the institution Bly's piece helped a grand jury investigate the institution, and a month later there were more employees, translators, and better living conditions. 

    Nellie Bly became the poster woman of investigative journalism; she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1998, she was one of four women who were put on postage stamps as part of the "Women in Journalism" set in 2002, and the New York Press Club has an annual Nellie Bly Club Reporter journalism award. She truly is an inspiration for journalists everywhere, but especially women journalist. 

Works Cited

• https://www.biography.com/activist/nellie-bly
• https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nellie-Bly
• https://www.biography.com/activist/nellie-bly