Journalist Nelly Bly went down in history as a woman who challenged the foundations of her time, and also decided to risk her own life to expose the vices of society. Here are the details of the life of one of the most daring women of the 19th century.
Nellie Bly, a journalist, traveler and fighter for social and gender equality, whose real name is Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was born in 1864 in Pennsylvania. A little later, young Elizabeth and her family moved to Pittsburgh. Life Cochran can hardly be called simple - her father, a former judge, died when Elizabeth was only six years old, and her mother had to provide for a large family of 12 children. Widowed, she again decided to get married. However, this marriage was destined to fall apart - the new spouse turned out to be a domestic tyrant and often beat Elizabeth's mother.
At one time, the girl planned to graduate from school and become a teacher, but the difficult financial situation in the family destroyed her dreams of education. In addition, at that time, education for a woman was considered completely optional - the skills of housekeeping were much more valuable.
In 1885, an article appeared in the local Pittsburgh Dispatch in which the author answered a question from one of the readers - a worried father who did not know what to do with his five unmarried daughters. Columnist for Erasmus Wilson titled his answer "What are women for", in which he said that working women are like monsters, and the only work suitable for the "weaker sex" is housework. The author also wrote that Americans should adopt the experience of the people of China, where selective infanticide of girls was practiced - three sons and two daughters were the norm for rich families, and two sons and one daughter for poor families. The "extra" children were simply dealt with.
Elizabeth as a child.
The published response angered Elizabeth so much that she decided to write a letter to the editor, in which she described in detail her position on the mission of women in society. To the girl's surprise, the publishing editor, George Madden, appreciated her text and offered her a job in the newspaper. This letter kicked off 20-year-old Cochran's career as a journalist. The girl decided to take a pseudonym for herself - at that time women often practiced this. Thus, an uneducated girl from a poor family, Elizabeth Cochran, became the journalist "Pittsburgh Dispatch" Nellie Bly. The pseudonym was chosen for the title of a popular song of the time by Stephen Foster.
Bligh began her newspaper career with publications on class inequality and unequal opportunities for men and women. Nelly published a long essay in which she wrote about the hard part of single mothers trying to earn money in any way in order to feed their hungry children. Bly also encouraged readers to think about how strongly belonging to a particular class affects the perception of a person in society. “There is a girl who wants to become a teacher. She has the desire to do this, the opportunity and the necessary skills. And there is a girl who has powerful friends. And the preference will always be given to the latter,”concluded Bly.
Born into a wealthy family, Nellie Bly knew what she was talking about. All the fortune that remained after the death of her father was divided among all her brothers and sisters. The divided money turned out to be negligible, and soon the family began to live in poverty. The girl's mother, faced with the loss of a breadwinner, fought with all her might for survival and grabbed every opportunity to make money, but she was constantly faced with the fact that many earning opportunities were not available to her.
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As for the problem of unequal opportunities for men and women, Bligh found a fairly simple solution to this issue - you just need to treat both sexes equally and provide them with equal opportunities. After all, the problem was not that the level of development of men and women was different from birth. The problem was that boys received much more opportunities to acquire the necessary skills, education, experience, while girls were encouraged to manage the household and give birth to children. Nelly ended her first series of articles with an address to readers: “Instead of engaging in endless discussions, let's just give women the opportunity to work. Find a woman who wants to work and provide her with such an opportunity. It will be much more effective than trying to solve the problem in words for years."
However, despite his efforts, Bly was increasingly encouraged to write on topics more acceptable to women, according to the editor. Nellie was assigned to write about flower fairs, women's hobbies and other "purely feminine" things. Therefore, soon the girl decided to leave her post and went to conquer new peaks in New York. After Bly resigned, she wrote a letter addressed to Erasmus Wilson, author of What Women Are For. In it she wrote:
In New York, Bligh was unemployed for several months. Four months later, the girl was able to get a job in the newspaper "New York World", owned by Joseph Pulitzer, the same, whose name is named Pulitzer Prize. At New York World, she has written groundbreaking and provocative writing on topics that excite her. So, she raised the problems of social and gender inequality, the problems of the attitude of staff towards patients in psychiatric hospitals, and exposed the abuse of officials. Over the years of her career in journalism, Bly became a "sensational lady" and received hundreds of letters every day from enthusiastic women who tried to figure out how she managed to achieve all this.
Literary critic Maureen Corrigan once spoke of Bly: “I understand the interest young women have in the person of Nellie Bly. I would also like to know how poorly educated and poor Elizabeth Cochran found the strength and courage to become the famous journalist Nellie Bly, famous for her social publications.
In 1886, the New York World editors invited Bly to participate in an unusual and dangerous experiment. Nellie had to pretend to be crazy and enter a psychiatric hospital on Blackwell Island as a patient, and after her release, write a detailed and complete report on the order of the institution, how patients are treated there, and whether the frightening stories that people tell about Blackwell.
Brave Bly agreed to the experiment and began preparations. She had to convincingly portray madness in order to get to the hospital. The girl began with her outward appearance - she did not wash and did not brush her teeth, wore torn and old clothes, did not comb. Also, every day Nelly rehearsed in front of the mirror, looking at herself with an empty, detached look for several hours. In her diaries, she wrote that she herself became scared of how her face looked during her "rehearsals": bulging eyes and empty eyes really made her look like a mad person. In addition to working on her appearance, Bly consulted with psychiatrists and specialists in this field to better understand the nature of mental disorders.
Having prepared, Nellie began to think how exactly she could get into the walls of the hospital. She wandered the streets of New York, and later came up with the idea of settling in a temporary shelter for working women. Once there, Bly began to behave asocial, attracting the attention of others, talking to herself, did not sleep and constantly looked in the mirror. Her plan succeeded - the inhabitants of the house began to get nervous and worried about their safety and called the police.
By a judge's decision, Bligh was assigned a medical examination at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital. She was examined by a council of five doctors. Four of them considered Bly sick, and only one doubted her illness, considering her a fake. Despite the not unanimous decision, Nellie Bly was sent to the New York City Lunatic Asylum for treatment. In her notes, the girl noted that the fact that even doctors could not determine whether she was really crazy or not is very scary, and casts doubt on the diagnoses of absolutely all patients.
The hospital Bly entered was located on Blackwell Island (now Roosevelt Island). This psychiatric hospital was supposed to be unique due to the humane methods of treating patients and favorable conditions of detention, but the place where Bly was brought was completely unlike anything like that. Due to funding cuts, the hospital was in decline, and inmates from a nearby prison worked as orderlies.
At the Bly hospital, another examination was prescribed, after which the patient's diagnosis was confirmed, although this time Nelly claimed that she was not sick and behaved differently. In her notes, Bly wrote that she was horrified by the state of the clinic and the patients who looked more like homeless people. The journalist also described the patients who are with her. Most of them are perfectly normal, healthy women who were forcibly placed in a hospital by their relatives.
Christina Ricci as Nelly Bly in * Escape from the Madhouse: The Nelly Bly Story *, 2019.
The conditions of detention that Nellie Bly described are more similar to the detention of highly dangerous criminals than patients. On the very first day after Nellie's arrival, she and the other women were taken to a shabby dining room, where they were offered a piece of stale bread and five prunes for supper. But it gets worse. After dinner, all the women were sent to the bathroom, where they were forcibly stripped and forced to climb into the icy water, while simultaneously pouring three buckets of the same icy water onto the women. Patients were beaten, starved to death, not allowed to sleep, strangled, specially brought to hysterics.
The journalist wrote that if an absolutely healthy woman is sent to such an institution for a month or two, it will make her disabled. The so-called treatment at this clinic included ice baths, a ban on talking, reading books, drawing and other entertainment options, cruel corporal punishment for any offense or unnecessary word, and psychological abuse. Any healthy person will go crazy with such a regime. Bly complained several times to doctors about her mistreatment, but the only reaction to her words was her transfer to the wing of the asylum called "The Lodge", which held the most dangerous patients, according to the staff.
Ten days later, the torture of Nellie Bly was completed - the New York World sent their lawyer to rescue the journalist. The hospital staff, who realized that they had been mocking the famous journalist all this time, apologized and tried to justify themselves, but Bly could not find an excuse for such actions and released the first materials. These articles described all the atrocities of the medical staff, all the horror of the conditions of detention, information about the incompetence of doctors. The article had the effect of a bomb exploding and at one point turned Nellie Bly into the heroine of her time.
However, Bligh was worried about only one thing - whether the situation would change for the better. Her feat bore fruit: the state began to allocate more funds for the maintenance of the hospital, and most of the medical staff was fired. A month later, the journalist again visited the hospital and found that most of the violations had been corrected, the sadistic doctors lost their jobs, and the patients' lives became much better.
The journalist later described her experience in the asylum in the book Ten Days in a Madhouse, which became a bestseller.
In 1888, Bligh decided on a new adventure - a trip around the world. The goal of the journalist was to break the record of the hero of the book by Jules Verne "Around the World in 80 Days". Nelly had planned to travel around the world in 75 days, and her editor gave the go-ahead. At the beginning of her journey, Bligh traveled to France, where she met Jules Verne himself. After there were the countries of Europe, Yemen, Japan, Singapore, Ceylon. From every part of the world where she stayed, Nelly sent her traveller's notes to the New York editorial office, which were published in her edition. Bly broke Phileas Fogg's record 80 days and made the journey in 72 days.
After Bly returned to the United States, it was difficult for her to conduct secret investigations, since almost the whole world knew the famous American journalist by sight. In 1895, she married a wealthy businessman, Robert Seeman, and after the death of her husband she headed his business. However, the company soon went bankrupt, and Bly returned to her career as a journalist. Her most recent work was covering military events on the Eastern Front of World War I.
Nellie Bly died in 1922 of pneumonia. Her name will forever remain in the US National Women's Hall of Fame, and the image of the courageous journalist is still used in popular culture. So, the prototype of the desperate journalist Lana Winters from the second season of the series "American Horror Story" was Nellie Bly.
In today's world, where women are still encouraged to do household chores instead of careers, and where men still receive high wages in some industries, and opportunities for growth and development are uneven, Nellie Bly's fight for gender and social equality is still relevant., even 120 years later.
