Nellie Bly, an American journalist and writer, was born in Pennsylvania in 1864 and died in New York in 1922. She was famous for her investigative reports. She was one of the first to lay the foundations of investigative journalism, revealing the horrors of mental hospitals in the United States in 1887.
Nellie is considered the most famous correspondent of her time, and news of her journalistic adventure topped the headlines of American newspapers in the 1880s. The two most famous reports for which she was known were “10 days in the madhouse” and “A trip around the world in record time” (72 days). She was the first woman She travels around the world without a man accompanying her.
She suffered orphanhood, poverty, and deprivation in her childhood, and struggled to obtain a suitable job, and to gain recognition and equality in professional work. She used her journalistic skills to fight discrimination based on gender and race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America, and led a campaign for women’s right to vote, elect, and public work.
Birth and upbringing
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, known as “Nellie Bly”; On May 5, 1864, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania, a year before the end of the… American Civil War Between 1861 and 1865.
Elizabeth was the middle daughter of 5 children of her mother, Mary Jane, the second wife of a successful village merchant named Michael Cochrane, and was 13th of 15 children in her family (the first wife died, leaving 10 children).
The girl grew up in the small village of Burrell in a large two-story house that indicates her father's social status. He was rich and owned a mill and a large store. He was also an honorary judge who was used by the Armstrong County judge to resolve some disputes thanks to his wisdom and the respect of the townspeople for him.
At home, they called her “Pink” because of her mother’s habit of dressing her in pink since the day of her baptism, and feelings of love and joy surrounded this spoiled little girl among her older brothers.
Little Pink was known to be active and energetic. She would wake up early to accompany her father to the store or play on the swing, while her mother was constantly looking for her to put her back to bed.
The child was attached to her father, who gave his name to the entire village, and she was curious to watch him every morning while he rested his hand on the trunk of a huge oak tree as he followed his vast farms. It was that scene that remained stuck in her memory, as her autobiographers mentioned.
In 1869, she left with her family to a huge house in the town of Apollo. The following year, her father died of sudden paralysis following a stroke. His loss caused sudden financial damage to the family, which discovered that he had not left any will.
The father's property was sold and the inheritance was distributed among the family members. The result was that the widow moved with her five children to a modest house. Since the age of six, Pink lost the life of prosperity that colored the first years of her life, and she knew the taste of orphanhood and the pain of deprivation early on.
After that, her mother married again so that she could support her family, but she separated from her new husband because of his addiction to drinking alcohol.
At the age of 16, Pink was still called Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, and dreamed of becoming a poet or writer, much to the dismay of her mother, who wanted her to become a governess.
It was said about her that she looked fragile in appearance, but hidden inside her was a fighter and inventor, and she was described as intelligent and courageous.
the study
Nellie Bly received an early education at home, but she received only a small amount of formal education, as she entered the Indiana Normal School in Pennsylvania, to become a teacher, and financial poverty forced her to leave school after one semester, and forced her to suspend her hopes of completing her education.
Journalistic experience
In 1880, Elizabeth moved with her family to Pittsburgh, and helped her mother run a modest boarding house for 5 years.
She began her career working full hours at the Pittsburgh News for $5 a week, writing 81 articles (many of which never saw the light of day) while working there from January 1885 to August 27, 1887.
After that, she worked in the famous New York World newspaper, from 1887 to 1890, and wrote 34 articles. Then she returned to work there after 3 years, until 1896, and conducted several investigations, and her name appeared attached to all of her articles, which was a rare thing at that time.
In 1890, she signed a contract with the New York Family Story Paper magazine worth $10,000 annually. She then moved to work for the London Story magazine in the period 1890-1895, during which she wrote 11 long fictional stories, many of which have been lost.
In February 1895, she moved to the Times Herald in Chicago, and worked there for only 6 weeks, during which she published 3 reports.
When she reached the age of 31, she married millionaire Robert Seaman, managed his dilapidated company, and then became its owner after his death, but she went bankrupt.
She stopped her career in 1896, but returned to work in 1914, covering the Russian Eastern Front during First World WarShe was the first correspondent for the New York Journal, and by 1919, she returned to New York and wrote regularly for this newspaper. She also published 5 reports in the Washington Times in 1920.
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She remained on the New York Journal staff until 1922, and during her 8 years of work, she published about 11 various reports.
Bly wore countless masquerade masks and became a source for Americans to inform them of the truth about their country. She achieved many achievements in her “meteoric” career, which she laid out over nearly 20 years in 3 basic stages:
- The beginning was written by an orphan girl
Elizabeth started publishing at the Pittsburgh News under the name Nellie Bly, inspired by an old song of the same name by American songwriter Stephen Foster, a name she used throughout her life.
Her speech, “outraged by an article in which the writer judged working women as monstrous,” was her gateway into journalism, where editor George Madden admired her argumentative and literary skill, though he assessed that she had “no proper grammar,” said Brooke Kruger, author of Bly's biography.
A newspaper sent a call to the writer of the response signed “Written by an orphan girl” to reveal herself and accept a writing job in the newspaper. In this unexpected way, at the age of 21, Nelly began her journalistic career with an article entitled “The Girl’s Mystery.”
The first of her articles, signed under her new name, appeared on January 25, 1885, under the title “Crazy Marriages.” She then worked on completing a 7-part series, “Our Working Girl,” and was writing a column about her observations about society.
Her bold writings, which contributed to increasing the newspaper's sales, disturbed some officials, so she was transferred to the art and theater section. Then, the young reporter went on a trip to Mexico, where she wrote 11 reports about the people, culture, and corrupt government there, only to find herself threatened with arrest, so she left the country.
Upon her return, she did not find a job available in the newspaper other than reviewing theatrical performances, so she accepted it under duress instead of writing in the society columns. She later left work when she was not allowed to write what she wanted.
- Nellie Brown…the crazy girl
In 1887, Nellie moved to New York City, and began her most glamorous and famous era as a correspondent for the New York World newspaper, whose sales exceeded 200,000 copies, a record at the time.
She was 23 when she began her first journalistic assignment with a historical expose of the horrors of the famous Blackwell Island mental asylum, in whose terrifying world she lived undercover for 10 days.
Her report appeared in its first part, entitled “Behind Asylum Bars” and the second, entitled “Inside the Insane Hospital,” with subtitles: Such as: “Nellie’s experience in the Blackwell Island Asylum,” “How are the city’s miserable wards fed and treated?”, “The horrors of cold baths and cruel nurses,” and she described it with another title, “A human mousetrap… Getting in is easy, but getting out is impossible.”
Nelly wrote about her own experience when, with little evidence, doctors declared her insane after three tests. They considered the dilated pupils resulting from her short-sightedness to be a symptom of someone who used cannabis, and declared her a drug addict.
Thanks to her investigation, New York allocated $1 million annually to care for the insane, and she wrote in the introduction to her book “10 Days in the Insane Hospital,” “So I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the poor wretches will receive better care because of my work.”
- In the footsteps of Phileas Fogg
Nelly was at the heart of another adventure novel that made headlines, when she set off in 1889 on a journey narrated by the hero of Jules Verne's novel, “80 Days Around the World.”
She was the first woman to travel around the world without a man, and her 28,000-mile journey was covered in meticulous detail. On January 25, 1890, she completed her journey in 72 days.
Over the following years, Neely returned with articles on police corruption and a violent labor strike in Pullman, Washington. It exposed a corrupt politician who was known for receiving sums of money to garner the support of representatives, to stop unwanted draft laws, and made 7 doctors vulnerable to ridicule, when she obtained from them 7 different diagnoses for a disease she claimed.
She conducted an interview with the suffragette Susan B. Anthony, the political activist Emma Goldman, Belva Anne Lockwood, the first woman candidate in the US presidential elections, the wives of the election candidates, and interviews with the wives of ministers in Benjamin Harrison's government.
Nellie had many different questions about women and society's view of them, and she always wanted to know: How do they live and work? Where are they supposed to be? Why do they get paid less than men in factories, fields, farms?, and other professions.
“Nelly Bly's method”
Before her death, Nelly said, “I never wrote a single word that did not come out of my heart.” Media experts say that she was special because she included her thoughts and feelings in everything she wrote, as her voice seemed to be speaking on the page.
Nellie stood out because “in addition to her courage and enthusiasm, she always conveyed a social dimension to her work,” says Krueger, and her book, “10 Days in the Lunatic Hospital,” became a classic in social journalism.
The journalistic method, which bears the name “Nellie Bly Method,” has become a method of exploring the environment from the inside, a type of investigation that requires the qualities of boldness and ingenuity.
Bly was known as a curious reporter who did not hesitate to take risks. What she wrote was called “fearless journalism,” and it was said that she represented the adventurous journalism also known as “gonzo journalism,” which included, among other things, the journalist being the “hero of his or her reporting.”
Critics considered Nelly a model of a journalist as it should be, or as the Italian writer Nicola Attadio said in his book “Where the Wind Is Born (A Free American Girl),” she was “a journalist who could create a relationship between herself and the reader. She was not interested in anything other than conveying what she saw to the reader.” As is”. Therefore, her focus on others is what helped her stories endure long after the pages of newspapers had disintegrated.
Nellie was also the most prominent person who used undercover journalism, and the mental hospital report is considered one of the first examples of secret investigation and what falls under investigative journalism in the history of American journalism, as she believed that her role was not behind the desk; Rather, in forbidden places to reveal the facts.
Kruger says of her, “She knew how to choose the story that would push her to the forefront,” and she emerged from the “house of madness a heroine,” as she was not only making the news, but becoming news.
Honors
- In late 2021, a statue of Nellie was erected at the north end of Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt Island), designed by sculptor Amanda Matthews and called “The Girl's Mystery”, a reference to the title of her first article published in 1885 in the Pittsburgh News.
- In 2019, Lifetime magazine released a thriller based on this experience that Nellie went through.
- In 2015, American director Timothy Hines released the film “10 Days in the Insane Hospital,” which also depicts Bly’s horrific experience in the hospital, and the American actress Carolyn Perry played the starring role in it.
- Nellie's name has been in the National Women's Hall of Fame since 1998.
- Nellie's experience was the subject of a 1946 musical.
- Arthur “Trey” Fritz founded Nellie Bly Online, dedicated to Nellie's life and journalism.
The most important books
Nellie published a list of books based mostly on her newspaper reports; The most important of them are:
- “10 Days in the Madhouse,” published in the New York World, was later collected into a book in 1887, containing 17 chapters of 35,000 words.
- In 1933, Neely's report on a mental institution was repeated by the Chicago Times with the headline “7 Days in the Lunatic Asylum.” In 1975, a correspondent for the Capital Newspaper completed a report similar to its report, when he entered a mental hospital in Maryland, and wrote about his six days there.
- “6 Months in Mexico” (1888), written by Nelly during her early journalistic career, describes the time she spent as a foreign correspondent in Mexico in 1885.
- “Around the World in 72 Days” in 1890, published shortly after her mission to circumnavigate the world, completed the journey in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, setting a record, by which the protagonist of the fictional novel circumnavigated the world in 80 days. Then George Francis Train conquered it on his first circumnavigation in 1870, completing it in 67 days. Then in 60 days on his third trip in 1892. By 1913, Andre Jaeger Schmidt, Henry Frederick, and John Henry Myers had broken this number, completing the trip in less than 36 days.
- The Central Park Mystery, her only novel, was published in 1889, but it did not achieve the same literary success as her journalistic reporting.
Death
Nellie Bly died on January 27, 1922, of pneumonia at the age of 57, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
In a column published the day after her death, journalist Arthur Brisbane said she was “the best reporter in America,” and it was said that what she left was no more than $1,000.
