Refusing to Shrink Yourself: Nellie Bly
Episode Summary
Before she became one of the most famous journalists in the world, Nellie Bly was a young woman who refused to accept the limitations society placed on her. She was a pioneering journalist who exposed abuse, challenged powerful institutions, traveled around the world alone, and repeatedly proved that women can do anything they set their minds to–whether society likes it or not. More than just a story about journalism, her legacy is about curiosity, persistence, and challenging assumptions, and is surprisingly relevant more than a century later.
As a young woman, Nellie reads an article arguing that women belong at home, that working women in breeches are a "monstrosity," and instead of quietly disagreeing, she writes such a fierce rebuttal that the newspaper hires her. (3:07)
Her biggest story about the conditions inside Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum weren’t just about bad food and medical abuse, but moreso about the vulnerable women inside, and who society listens to and who gets dismissed and ignored. (9:13)
At the height of her career, she was still told that she couldn’t do something because she was a woman–and she continued to prove them wrong as she traveled the world solo without a chaperone and with remarkably little luggage. (12:28)
Listen Now (on Spotify)
Episode Transcript
Okay, I need you to go with me here: imagine being 23 years old. You’ve just moved to New York City, you’re broke, and you’re having a hard time finding work as a young woman with minimal experience in your field and no formal education past the age of 15.
But you’re scrappy, and you finally get a meeting with one of the biggest newspaper publishers in the country at a time when newspapers were THEE mass media hub of information and entertainment–I mean, the radio wasn’t even a thing yet and all the traffic jams on Manhattan’s streets were of the horse and carriage variety.
In this meeting, you pitch a story. And instead of accepting it, the publisher counter-pitches something else entirely. He wants you to go undercover and get yourself committed to an infamous mental asylum known for being overcrowded, unsanitary, and inhumane. But much of that reputation is only from gossip, and he wants you to report on the conditions from the inside while convincing doctors and orderlies that you’re actually insane. And after you experience the conditions firsthand as a patient and learn what’s actually happening inside those walls, you’ve gotta get back out.
No pressure. This sounds like an incredibly daunting task (because it is) It was colloquially referred to as the island of exile, if that tells you anything about the public perception of it.
And who accepted this assignment? Her name was Nellie Bly.
I’m Eleanor Elaine, and you’re listening to Not So Ladylike.
At 23, I was going out to the bars every weekend wearing a matte plum Kylie lip kit. And I’m trying to imagine in that era of my life, if one of my friends told me she got this assignment, I would assume I would never see her again. Because it sounds like once you’re in, you’re not getting back out. So I have to wonder, who was the woman who took on this task?
Before we get into who she was and what she accomplished though, I think it’s important to understand the world she lived in. 150 years ago, society was very different than it is today.
Nellie Bly isn’t considered remarkable just because she was a renowned journalist at a time when many people believed that women shouldn’t be journalists at all, but because her approach and the subject matter she reported on was something that wasn’t widely accessible to women, and it certainly wasn’t viewed as ladylike to share your thoughts as freely as she shared hers.
We’re talking about the late 1800’s when women were expected to remain within what was often called the “women’s sphere” of domesticity. If you were a woman with ambitions outside the home, if you had opinions, wanted a career, didn’t aspire to marriage or motherhood… society at large found that distasteful.
And yet, over and over throughout her life, Nellie Bly looked at those expectations and fully rejected them.
She traveled the world alone, she criticized governments, she pushed for reform, she reported from the front lines of war, and she did all of this at a time when the few female journalists there were were expected to write about fashion and gardening and social events.
The more I read about her, the more I realized that her story isn’t just about her journalism. It’s so beyond that, it’s about persistence and curiosity and above all else, refusing to shrink yourself.
To really understand who Nellie was at her core, we’ve gotta start with something that made her so furious that she wrote a scathing letter to the editor in response to an article entitled “What Girls Are Good For.”
And if you rolled your eyes at that title, you’re listening to the right podcast because same.
In the local paper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, there was a column written by a man known as The Quiet Observer who shared his opinions on human nature and society and things like that. “What Girls Are Good For” was written in response to a letter from an Anxious Father who wrote in with concerns about how to manage his five unmarried daughters.
And The Quiet Observer responded critiquing women seeking formal education, arguing that women were fundamentally unsuited for the professional workplace, and declaring that the working woman was a “monstrosity”–that’s a quote–saying there was no greater abnormality than a woman in breeches. This guy would haaaate bike shorts, which I’m wearing right now out of spite alone. He asserted that women were only good for bearing children and keeping house, and said that a woman’s primary duty was to marry and remain at home to make home a “little paradise”
So cue more eye rolls from me. I read this article and I thought to myself… home doesn’t sound much like a paradise for those women.
This article provoked lots of backlash from the Dispatch’s female audience, including Nellie Bly… who wasn’t Nellie Bly yet. At this point, she hadn’t begun her career in journalism, and was still known by her given name, Elizabeth Cochran.
So she responds with an anonymous letter to the editor so fierce and contentious that it actually impressed the managing editor of the paper so much so that he published an ad inviting whoever wrote the letter to come by the office for proper recognition. And who comes knocking? Our friend Elizabeth.
He basically told her that her passion was equally admirable and unsuited for print. But, he invited her to turn her infuriated letter into a rebuttal piece to be published in the paper.
Long before she became Nellie Bly, Elizabeth was already the kind of person who refused to accept someone else's version of reality that said women weren’t capable of anything they set their minds to. And this mindset and attitude would define her career and truly, her entire legacy.
And so her first printed piece of writing entitled “The Girl Puzzle” was printed in the Dispatch in 1885. Her writing focused on how society offered young men clear pathways to succeed and advance in their careers that weren’t given to young women. She advocated strongly for equal opportunities and equal pay.
Here are a couple short excerpts for you, though the full article is linked in the shownotes if you wanna read it for yourself:
→ “How many wealthy and great men could be pointed out who started in the depths: but where are the many woman? Let a youth start as errand boy and he will work his way up until he is one of the firm. Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn: why, then, can they not do the same?”
→ “Here would be a good field for believers in women’s rights. Let them forego their lecturing and writing and go to work; more work and less talk. Take some girls that have the ability, procure for them situations, start them on their way, and by so doing accomplish more than by years of talking.”
It’s clear that Elizabeth wasn’t one to sit around and wait for permission to do something; I mean, she actively questioned why permission was even required of her in the first place. And the editor of the Dispatch was so impressed with her work that he immediately commissioned another article from her, which was titled “Mad Marriages” and was a critique of biased divorce laws and the socioeconomic impact of domestic violence and failed marriages on women, and this was the article that necessitated a pen name.
So up until this point, she was writing under the name “Lonely Orphan Girl” which is how she signed that first letter to the editor that began her career. But her editor decided she needed a real pseudonym.
During this time in history, female journalists hid their real names to maintain credibility, and after a staff writer offered up the name “Nelly Bly” inspired by the title of a popular song at the time (which, side note, I’ve had stuck in my head for the entirety of my research and writing for this episode) Anyway, she was from then on known as Nellie Bly.
And with this new name and the success of her first two articles, she became a full time staff writer for the Pittsburgh Dispatch which started her career as a journalist AND where she began going undercover for her articles pioneering this type of investigative journalism.
Every time she encountered injustice, she went looking for firsthand evidence.
Her first published piece as a staff writer was about the exploitation faced by women and children at a local factory. But she didn’t just interview workers to get the scoop; she posed as a poor woman looking for work and experienced the factory conditions for herself to better report on them.
She found dangerous working conditions, low wages, and large-scale exploitation… all things that employers would rather the public not know about how they operate behind the scenes.
And while this article was a huuuuge hit with readers, it wasn’t so much a hit with the businesses who advertised in the paper. One even threatened to withdraw their ads because of her reporting, and because of that pressure, she was reassigned to the women’s pages.
Now, at this point in history, the women’s pages of the paper were focused on domestic life, society, gossip, and fashion. They were in a separate section from the “real news” and mostly existed to gather a female audience for advertisers and were really moreso for those businesses than the readers.
And if there’s one thing I know about our girl, it’s that every time someone tried to place limits on what she could do, she started looking for a way around them. In her words, “I was too impatient to work long at the usual duties assigned women at newspapers, so I conceived the idea of going away as a correspondent.”
She wanted assignments with more grit and impact, so she went to her editor and negotiated to serve as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, determined to, in her words, “do something no girl has done before” And so she did.
I read parts of her writings from this time (though I had to skip everything about the bullfights bc it was so graphic) and for months, much of her reporting was full of observations about daily life in Mexico.
But as usual, she couldn’t help herself. Towards the end of her time there, she got more critical of the press being censored and the government. It seems to me that no matter what, anytime she saw injustices–whether at home or abroad–she reported them as she saw them… even when it got her into trouble. She wrote about some newspaper editors in particular who were jailed for criticizing those in power and as her reporting became more controversial, it eventually crossed the desk of someone in power and she was threatened with imprisonment, so she returned to the United States.
At this point, we’re starting to get an answer to our original question.
What kind of woman agrees to infiltrate a notoriously harsh asylum? The same kind of woman who gets in trouble for criticizing a foreign government.
But when she returned to the States, she found it really difficult to be taken seriously in this male-dominated field, and wanted more than to write about the “women’s sphere” so she left Pittsburgh for New York City.
During this time, she sent freelance articles back to the Dispatch about her struggles of finding work as a female reporter. And this is when her determination landed her that meeting with the publisher of the New York World, who suggested that she report from inside the mental institution, Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum–which actually made perfect sense for her, not just because of her chutzpah, but also because of her experience with similar undercover investigative work like she’d done before.
Her reporting, later turned into the book “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” led to a grand jury investigation of the asylum she was at and ultimately led to much needed and overdue improvements in patient care, thanks to an additional one million dollars from the city which wouldn’t have happened without her work.
She began this “delicate and difficult mission” (her words) after practicing staring wide and unblinkingly in the mirror. And with only 70 cents in her pocket, she went to a boarding house for working women and had to first convince them that she was insane.
Her first night in the home, she refused to sleep, saying to anyone that would listen that everyone else looked crazy and she wanted to find her lost trunks. She was so off-putting to the rest of the women in the house that one of them in the room next door had nightmares about her that were so bad that she woke herself up from screaming.
The very next day, the matron of the house tried to persuade her to leave the home, but Nellie wouldn’t budge and went on and on about her missing luggage until they finally sent for a couple police officers to take her to the station.
She successfully (and incredibly quickly) convinced the women at the boarding house that she was insane, but now she had to convince the officers, a judge, and a doctor to send her to the asylum… without acting like that was her goal.
But if someone could do it, it’s our girl Nellie. And she did–she was able to jump through the hoops with each official until finally she reaches the insane ward. Once she was inside, what she discovered was horrifying.
So she’s writing, of course, about her experiences and the lives of the other patients in the asylum with her. She even called the asylum a “human rat-trap” And she’s also delivering a firsthand account as an undercover journalist.
She had to eat disgusting dinners (which consisted of things like half-rotten chunks of meat, cold boiled potatoes, and a slice of bread with a spider in it), and witnessed firsthand abuse from nurses who would tease and torment patients for their amusement, and when they had had enough of that, would turn to physical abuse.
There was one quote amidst how horrible the conditions were that made me real life laugh out loud when I read it because it felt so relatable. So she was seeing this good-looking doctor one day and she said, “It was a terrible task to play insane before this young man, and only a girl can sympathize with me in my position.” Her legacy is one of pushing back against society’s expectations and daring reporting, and at the end of the day… she was also just a girl.
One of the things that struck me the most as I was reading her account of her time in the asylum was that many women who were there seemed to be there just because they were vulnerable.
Many were immigrants, unable to speak English, were impoverished, and suddenly this story that she’s telling becomes not just about the conditions in one asylum, but also about who society chooses to believe and who gets dismissed and ignored. It’s incredibly clear that some people’s voices carry more weight than others.
So after ten days inside, the newspaper arranged for her release and the resulting series of articles became this book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. And after the grand jury investigation which she testified at, as you know, funding for patient care increased, conditions improved, and our Nellie Bly became nationally famous for her work. It’s easy to see why, too.
She didn’t just report the news in the same ways it had been done before, she put herself inside it.
And after changing journalism forever, some people might relax for five minutes. But not our girl Nellie. She went to her editor and proposed a trip around the world inspired by the book Around The World in Eighty Days, with the caveat that her goal was to beat that fictional record.
Her editor basically told her that the idea wasn’t original, and even so, it was an assignment that was better suited for a man. Actually, his exact words were, “Impossible! You are a woman and you’d need a protector and even if it was possible for you to travel alone, you’d need to carry so much baggage…so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this!” And you already know how she responded to that line of thinking.
A year later, she was summoned to the editor’s office and was asked to start her journey around the world in two days. And obviously she said yes. She had a dress made that could withstand two and a half months of travel, wrote goodbyes to her friends, and packed a single bag. She said, “packing that bag was the most difficult undertaking of my life” – which is also how I feel anytime I have to pack light. Not my strong suit either.
And she set off from New York on a ship to Europe! She stopped in France and spared an evening to visit with Jules Verne, the author of Around The World in Eighty Days, and his wife.
As their visit was winding down and it was time to bid the Vernes au revoir, Madame Verne kissed her goodbye on both cheeks, as is customary in France, and then offered her face in reciprocation. This is another quote from Nellie that made me real life laugh out loud, she said ,”I stifled a strong inclination to kiss her on the lips and show her how we do it in America. My mischievousness often plays havoc with my dignity, but for once, I was able to restrain myself.”
And if that isn’t relatable, I’m not sure what is.
So from France, she traveled mostly by train and all along the way there were fans and supporters cheering her on. Nellie expected the trip to take 75 days, but she made it back in just over 72 beating the fictional record by over a week. And much like her expose on the Blackwell’s Island Asylum and her time as a foreign correspondent in Mexico, she compiled her articles into a book to reach a wider audience, which I listened to a lot of while doing this research.
But get this–when she returned, she didn’t get a raise or even a bonus for this work. And most stories told about Nellie Bly and her life stop the story here at the height of her career, but she wasn’t finished writing her legacy.
At 50 years old, she went on to become one of the first female correspondents reporting from the front lines of WWI while living primarily in Austria-Hungary, often under fire in the trenches or from field hospitals. She wrote over a dozen articles about the atrocities of war, once again focusing on the human cost and the people suffering beneath systems of power whose stories might otherwise go untold.
And in typical Nellie fashion, she continued doing what she’d always done: going places women weren’t expected to go, asking questions she wasn’t supposed to ask, and documenting realities that powerful people would rather ignore.
When I started researching the life and legacy of Nellie Bly, I fully expected to come away thinking she was brave and admirable. And duh–she absolutely was. But that isn’t what stuck with me about her life story. What stayed with me was how often she rejected presumptions and gender norms.
→ Women belong at home? Why?
→ Factory conditions are fine? According to who?
→ Patients are being cared for? But are they really?
Over and over again, Nellie Bly refused to accept someone else’s version of reality without investigating it for herself. Whether she was exposing abuse in an asylum, criticizing political corruption, traveling around the world, or reporting from a war zone, the thread connecting all of it was her refusal to stay in the lane other people assigned to her.
And maybe that’s why her story still hits so hard more than a century later. The details have changed and possibilities for women have expanded exponentially, but the pressure is still the same.
Nellie’s story is a reminder that the limits that are placed upon us aren’t always real, and sometimes they’re just assumptions waiting for someone to challenge them. And thankfully for us, Nellie‘s legacy is of a woman who did just that.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Not So Ladylike. You can follow me on Instagram @eleanorelainephoto and you can find the show notes and all my sources for today's episode at eleanorelainephoto.com/episodes. And as always, those links will be in the description for you as well. Before you go, do me a favor and leave a five-star review wherever you're listening. And share this episode with a friend if you enjoyed it! Any friend of yours is obviously a friend of mine. I will be back soon with another episode for you. But thank you so much for hanging out here with me in the meantime. Loveyoubyeeee!
Episode Source Material
Biographical Material:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nellie-Bly
International Women’s Day: Celebrating Nellie Bly https://newslit.org/news-and-research/international-womens-day-celebrating-nellie-bly/
https://www.nps.gov/people/nellie-bly.htm
Nellie Bly: Pioneer Journalist Extraordinaire by Ellen Mahoney https://ellenmahoneyauthor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Nellie-Bly-ArticleWestern-Pennsylvania-History-MagazineSummer-2017.pdf
The Story That Launched Nellie Bly’s Famed Journalism Career by Hannah Keyser https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63759/story-launched-nellie-blys-famed-journalism-career
Nellie Bly by Arlisha R. Norwood, updated by Mariana Brandman https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly-0
Nellie Bly – The Journalist Who Endured Ten Days of Hell to Expose an Abusive Mental Treatment System by Nate Hohl https://reachma.org/blog/nellie-bly-blog-post/
G-2 Questions Nellie Bly by Lori S. Stewart https://www.dvidshub.net/news/463075/g-2-questions-nellie-bly-4-feb-1919
Read Her Articles + Books:
The Girl Puzzle:https://www.thegirlpuzzle.com/_files/ugd/4fef5f_b7180394c67748e580a4bd8cc245d66a.pdf
Six Months in Mexico: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Six_Months_In_Mexico
Ten Days in a Madhouse: https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html
Around the World in 72 Days: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Seventy-Two_Days
Learn More:
Nineteenth C. Women’s Sphere by Alexis Anderkin https://wsu.tonahangen.com/citizen/?page_id=89
The Cult of True Womanhood by Barbara Welter https://english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson/PDF/WelterBarbaraCULTWOMANHOODinAQ1966.pdf
“The Melancholy of Women’s Pages”: Readers, Features, and the Rise of Ad-Sponsored Media by Julia Guarneri https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-american-history/article/melancholy-of-womens-pages-readers-features-and-the-rise-of-adsponsored-media/F3050A8480A998ABF2407F88BEDC6997
Erasmus Wilson's "The Quiet Observer", 1900-1901 https://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3Aus-ppiu-dar193743
The Girl Puzzle is published by Kate Braithwaite https://kate-braithwaite.com/2019/01/25/otd-1885-the-girl-puzzle-is-published/
"All the Single Ladies": Women-Only Buildings in Early 20th c. NYC by Nina E. Harkrader https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/all-the-single-ladies-women-only-buildings-in-early-20th-c-nyc
Blackwell’s Almanac Issue Number 7; published by Judith Berdy and edited by Bobbie Slonevsky https://rihs.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-August-Blackwells-Almanac.pdf
https://www.nps.gov/places/blackwell-s-island-new-york-city.htm
https://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/blakwel1.html
Little Orphan Nellie by Laurie Penny https://thenewinquiry.com/little-orphan-nellie/
