Nellie Bly: Journalist

World Press Freedom Day is celebrated in May. This week’s RW is Nellie Bly (1864-1922), a female journalist who was a war correspondent, went undercover to expose abuses within a mental asylum and pioneered investigative journalism. She paved the way for generations of women reporters.

When it came to pursuing a story, Nellie Bly made a career out of going to places women never went. In the 1880s, she covered topics that were off limits to women because they were considered too difficult to understand or unseemly or unsafe for women to cover. Bly shattered that sexist notion from the first moment she became a freelance reporter.

In the late 19th century, the few women who wrote for newspapers used pen names to disguise their identities. So, before Nellie Bly used her own byline, she was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, born into a wealthy Pittsburgh family on May 5, 1864.

Her father, Robert Cochran, was a successful businessman and local judge. Her mother, Mary Jane Kennedy was a widower. When Cochran was six, her father died. There was no will, and the family’s fortunes dropped dramatically. Her mother remarried but her new husband was abusive and by the time Cochran was 14, they were divorced. Her mother’s bad luck in marriage likely influenced Cochran’s already feisty and independent nature and views about surviving in the world.

At 15, Cochran enrolled in a boarding school with the aim of becoming a teacher upon graduation. But those dreams dried up when money for her education ran out. Even in a big city like Pittsburgh, options for work for a young woman were limited to factories, housekeeping, tutoring and being a nanny, none of which appealed to her.

It was 1885 and the American suffrage movement was stirring debates about the roles of women in society. When Cochran read a column in The Pittsburgh Dispatch that a woman’s “sphere is defined and located in a single word – home,” she was both incensed by the narrow tone and arrogance and inspired to write a letter to the editor.

Her letter caught the attention of the editor, and he asked her to write an article in response, giving her definition of “the Women’s sphere.” Cochran questioned why women, especially widows, divorcees or indigents who needed to support themselves could not apply for the same jobs as men. It was Cochran’s first published piece. Another one about divorce and the need for reforming divorce laws followed. The two stories generated enough controversy, comments and letters and were enough of a showcase of her pluck and talent for a job offer. Her editor chose the name Nellie Bly, from a Stephen Foster song as her byline.

Bly’s natural instincts were to pursue stories that no one had thought worthy of investigating, such as a series about factory girls and their lives after work. At The Dispatch, she developed interviewing techniques which were direct, blunt and reflected an intense interest in her subjects.

Covering traditional women’s stories was too tame for Bly’s ambitions. She was determined to do “something that no other girl had ever done,” she told her editors, and that was to spend six months as a foreign correspondent in Mexico. Bly didn’t speak Spanish and English was not widely spoken in Mexico but she was set on making this assignment her fast track to fame. She befriended English speaking diplomats, editors and experts in Mexico City and filed lively dispatches about the culture, customs, people and government with the intent of overturning stereotypes about the country.

Her stories about the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Diaz, which did not include sources and had a heavy dose of opinion, would not have passed today’s standards of journalism. But it was gutsy reporting for a young female reporter and made Nellie Bly a star back home. With her reputation on the rise, she moved onto bigger opportunities in NYC in 1887.

Her goal was to work for The New York World, the newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. He had made it into the 19th century equivalent of a tabloid, specializing in “stunt” or “new journalism.” Stories carried sensational headlines. Crime, scandals, plenty of illustrations and a distinct expose tone were the hallmarks of the trend. The boldly provocative, thrill inducing style was exactly what Nellie Bly liked.

But four months after arriving, Bly was still jobless and close to being broke. It took her best persuasive skills to land a meeting with the editor of the The World. He rejected her proposal to write about the experiences of an immigrant by traveling steerage class on a ship. Instead, for her tryout, he wanted her to feign insanity and have herself committed to the notorious Women’s Lunatic Asylum to write about the experience. The result was “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” a two-part expose of patient abuse, overcrowding and inhumane conditions. Other newspapers had reported on the same problems and the city was making plans to improve conditions. Yet it took Bly’s reporting to create a public uproar that boomeranged throughout the city. Her stories, written from an inmate’s perspective, put a personal spotlight on the issue, adding more pressure for changes, something that Bly, never shy, took credit for.

The following year, in 1889, Bly’s next big assignment was an attempt to outdo the global journey popularized in the book, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. She wasn’t their first choice because she was a woman and the editors said women didn’t travel light or alone. They changed their minds when she showed up with a piece of luggage smaller than today’s carry-on bags for airplanes.

Crossing continents and oceans by ship, burros, horses and rickshaws, she made the trip in a record 72 days. Aside from her stunt journalism, Bly produced some solid pieces of reporting in her career. In a time when few women could get front page bylines, she did by landing exclusive interviews with anarchist Emma Goldman, suffragist Susan B. Anthony, union organizer Eugene Debs and covering major events such as the Pullman railroad workers’ strike.

In 1895, Bly, now 30, quit journalism to marry millionaire tycoon Robert Seaman, the 70-year-old owner of an iron and steel manufacturing company. When Seaman died eight years later, Bly became president of the business and made her own mark on it, creating patents for inventions and updating company processes. She also eliminated piecework and began paying employees a weekly salary. Her experience and compassion for the striking Pullman workers influenced her to create an employee benefits program that included a recreation center, library, showers, an on-site mini hospital, and employee dining room.

By 1914, however, the company was in legal and financial trouble. Bly was headed for Europe on a fund-raising mission to save the business when World War I broke out. Finding herself in the center of the action was an opportunity of a lifetime that revived Bly’s journalistic juices. She was the first woman to report from the front line in Hungary and Austria, and at one point was detained for a short time, when she was thought to be a British spy.

Fearless, tenacious, with an eye and ear for detail and connecting with her subjects, Bly carved out paths for future women reporters by being herself throughout her career. She never accepted no for an answer and believed she could cover any story as well as a man. She trailblazed an early form of investigative journalism.

Bly died of pneumonia in 1922 at the age of 57. One of her editors at the time called her, “the best reporter in America.”

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project