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Nellie Bly: Writer for Rights

Sheridan Hennessy

Junior Division

Historical Paper

Paper Length: 2,432 words

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The modern psychiatric care system, in which doctors see patients’ conditions as treatable and try to help them feel better, is relatively new. There was a time when doctors’ main focus was punishing the mentally ill and protecting other people from them. Over time, people realized that the feelings of people with psychological issues were no different than those of people without them. One of the reasons for this change was a woman named Elizabeth

Cochrane, better known by her pen name, Nellie Bly. In order to write an article about an insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island, Nellie Bly pretended to be insane and infiltrated the asylum. After her release, she exposed the brutal treatment of the patients. From the very beginning of her career, Nellie Bly was the voice of people whose problems other people dismissed. In her time, groups such as women, the poor, and the mentally ill were even more subjugated by society than they are today. Nellie contributed greatly to breaking these social barriers. She argued that these people should not be content with their situation - they should demand to be treated like human beings.

Nellie Bly lived in Pennsylvania and New York in the 1800’s. During her lifetime, the women’s suffrage movement was beginning in Europe, soon to spread to America. In addition, the Industrial Revolution was occurring, during which manufacturers focused strongly on making a profit, sometimes neglecting the welfare of factory employees. Many workers in factories, especially female workers, were paid unfair wages. Women were considered inferior to men, and it was much easier for a man to work his way up to a higher-paying position than it was for a woman (Macy, pg. 20). Female reporters existed, but they were mostly limited to articles on fashion and gardening. People had a similarly prejudiced attitude toward the mentally ill. People in insane asylums were treated brutally, and practically anyone with a psychological disorder Hennessy 3 was seen as a danger to society. The poor were also a marginalized group. Unnecessary operations were performed on patients without their consent in dispensaries, places where the poor could receive free medical treatment (“Visiting the Dispensaries”, thegrandarchive.word press.com). In addition, many women in Blackwell’s Asylum were poor. Many people did not value the well-being of the poor as much as that of the rich, so they believed that poor people should feel lucky to have food and shelter at all.

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, on May 5,

1864. Her mother, Mary Jane Cochran, already had ten children from her first husband when she married Michael Cochran, with whom she gave birth to Elizabeth and four other children

(Atwell, pg. 66). The Cochran family moved to the nearby town Apollo when Elizabeth was little. In 1870, when she was only six years old, tragedy struck. Michael Cochran died of illness, leaving no will. Two and a half years later, Elizabeth’s mother married Jack Ford, a drunken, abusive war veteran whom she divorced after five years (Macy, pg. 14). After seeing what resulted when her mother had to depend on Ford for income, Elizabeth resolved that she would not let sexist people limit her opportunities. This idea would appear frequently in her newspaper articles, in which she exposed the plight of factory girls and other people who were subjugated by society.

Elizabeth studied at Indiana State Normal School to be a teacher, but her inheritance ran out after half a year (Macy, pg. 17). In 1880, she moved to . Her career began at age eighteen, when she wrote to a newspaper called the Pittsburg Dispatch in protest of an article ​ ​ entitled “What Girls Are Good For” (Macy, pg. 18). The article claimed that a woman’s job was to stay at home and that working women were indecent. Elizabeth responded by saying that there Hennessy 4 were many women who needed to work in order to make a living, and they could not always depend on men to take care of them. The editor, George Madden, printed an ad in the newspaper asking for her name. Elizabeth came to his office, and he gave her the opportunity to write an article about working women (Macy, pg. 19-20). Her pseudonym was Nellie Bly, the title of a song by . She wrote an article about Pittsburgh factory girls and another about women’s difficulty getting divorced (Atwell, pg. 66). “Let a youth start as an 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?” she wrote in her article called “The Girl Puzzle”

(Macy, pg. 20).

Bly traveled in Mexico as a foreign correspondent for the Dispatch. At the beginning of ​ ​ her book Six Months in Mexico (published 1888), she describes her visit to the Mexican town of ​ ​ ​ ​ El Paso del Norte. The culture in this town was brutally traditionalistic. Smallpox was rampant because the people denounced vaccinations for the sake of religion. Prison conditions were horrible and the news reported by the press was altered to benefit the government (Six Months in ​ Mexico, 1888). Bly was eventually forced to leave the country because of the negative things she ​ was writing about dictator Porfirio Diaz.

She moved to New York in May of 1887, where she received a letter from the Dispatch ​ ​ claiming that a woman had asked them if New York was a good place for a woman to start a career in journalism. Nellie took this as an opportunity to interview the editors of New York’s six most important newspapers for the article. This would allow her to introduce herself to the editors and get an idea of how they felt about female (Noyes, pg. 2). Many of them gave sexist responses, such as Charles A. Dana, the editor and publisher of the Sun, who said that ​ ​ Hennessy 5 women could be skilled writers, but “we would not feel at liberty to call her out at one o’clock in the morning to report at a fire or a crime…(w)e never hesitate with a man.” (Noyes, pg. 4). In

September, Bly’s purse was stolen. She desperately needed a way to make a living, so she went to the office of a newspaper called the and applied for a job (Noyes, pg. 10). ​ ​ Nellie talked her way into the editor-in-chief’s office by describing her interview with the heads of other newspapers, making the staff worry that her idea would go to one of them if they did not let her talk to him. Nellie suggested to John Cockerill, the editor, that he let her travel to ​ ​ Europe and come back on a ship, in order to expose the brutal conditions endured by immigrants.

John Cockerill vetoed this idea, but suggested a similar one: she could pretend to be insane in order to infiltrate Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for Women. Bly bravely agreed to this idea, even though Cockerill had no plan for how he was going to get her out (Noyes, pg. 13). She got herself committed to a boarding house for women, using the name Nellie Brown.

When she arrived, she pretended to be scared of the other women. In reality, they were frightened of her, except for a compassionate woman named Mrs. Caine, who stayed in Nellie’s ​ ​ room with her when she pretended to be too anxious to sleep. She was taken to the police station, where she pretended not to know who she was or how she had come to New York (“Ten Days in a Mad-House”, digital.library.upenn.edu). From there, she was taken to Bellevue Hospital. The doctors in the hospital asked her some questions, but seemed to have already concluded that she was insane based on the fact that she had been sent there (Winchester, medium.com). Doctors in ​ ​ that time period lacked psychological knowledge, so their diagnoses of insanity were often wrong. She was then sent to the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island. When she arrived at the asylum, she was shocked at what she witnessed. Hennessy 6

There were about one thousand and six hundred people crammed into the building, which was meant to hold only one thousand. The doctors and nurses were cruel and inept, and their

“treatments” were far more likely to drive a sane person mad than to make a mad person sane.

The food and water were contaminated. Patients were forced to sit on benches without talking or moving for twelve or more hours because creating therapeutic activities was apparently too hard for the physicians (Maranzani, biography.com). Nellie later wrote about being forced to take a cold bath and then put to bed without being properly dried off (Winchester). The inmates were beaten, sexually assaulted, and forced to pull carts like mules. Some of the women were not insane at all - many were committed because they were poor, or because they were immigrants who could not communicate in English (Maranzani).

An idea that was often expressed by the physicians was that the treatment the patients were receiving was charity, and they should be grateful for it. Nellie would later write about how this concept of charity was used to describe medical dispensaries. In dispensaries, doctors would perform operations on patients without their consent. One doctor even tried to forcibly amputate one of Bly’s tonsils when she disguised herself as a patient in order to infiltrate a dispensary

(“Visiting the Dispensaries”). One could argue that the underlying theme of her writing was how marginalized groups had to endure cruel treatment and were told that they should be grateful for it. Not only were the people who told them this not forced to endure these hardships, but they were often the ones who had limited these people in the first place and forced them to depend on them. Bly had witnessed this attitude since she was a child, growing up in a society in which men told women that they needed their help to survive. In reality, some of the men, like Bly’s stepfather Jack Ford, did not treat the women kindly at all, and the women would have been Hennessy 7 better off in a society where they were free to take care of themselves. Similarly, the doctors should not be admired for giving poor people highly inept care in asylums in which they would not have had to live if society had not denied them opportunities.

After ten days, John Cockerill was finally able to get Nellie released from the asylum.

She then wrote about her experiences in a series of articles, which she compiled into a book called “Ten Days in a Madhouse”. Since modern surveillance technology did not exist in her time, the government could not monitor and regulate businesses the way it does today.

Therefore, many of the things she revealed in her articles were completely new information to the government. After her articles were published, a grand-jury panel visited the asylum to investigate. The asylum staff must have been tipped off, because fresh food and water had been brought in and the patients who had told Bly about their treatment had been released or transferred. However, the jury believed Bly, and a bill was passed to increase funding for mental institutions by about one million dollars. The abusive staff members were fired, and translators were hired to allow foreign patients to communicate (Maranzani).

But Bly’s career did not stop there. She infiltrated many more places in disguise and wrote about her discoveries, including matrimonial agencies, bribe-prone lobbyists, and baby-selling (Toth, link.gale.com). For an article on police courts, she interviewed prisoners ​ ​ about their motives for committing crimes and whether they planned to change their ways. She discovered that many of the people who committed crimes did so while they were drunk and several of them did not see the point of reforming, since the police kept arresting them even after they had stopped committing crimes (“Why Don’t Women Reform?”, thegrandarchive.word press.com).

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Not only did Nellie Bly revolutionize journalism, but in 1889, she took on her most ambitious task yet: breaking the record for how fast a person could travel around the world. The idea was inspired by the voyage in Around the World in Eighty Days by (Atwell, pg. ​ ​ 65). The staff at the New York World told her that a woman could not circumnavigate the world ​ ​ ​ ​ because she would need a chaperone and want to carry too much luggage (Phillips, grantland.com). Bly, however, began her trip on November 14, unaccompanied and carrying only one suitcase. She finished her journey, which had taken seventy-two days rather than eighty, on January 25, 1890 (Fessenden).

When Nellie was thirty-one, she retired temporarily from writing after marrying a wealthy manufacturer named Robert Seaman. Forty-two years her senior, he ran a factory that made steel containers. He died soon after their marriage, leaving her to take over his company.

According to biographer Brooke Kroeger, Nellie’s period as the owner of the company was

“marked by more enthusiasm than acumen” (Edwards, www.vox.com). However, she did give her employees better working conditions than any other business owners at the time (Bagieu).

She also invented a new type of milk can, along with many other devices. When the company went broke, she returned to journalism (Edwards). During , she traveled to Austria and became the first ever female war correspondent. After five years, she returned to the United

States, where she wrote in support of women’s suffrage (Bagieu). Nellie Bly continued writing until she died of pneumonia in 1922, at the age of fifty-seven (Edwards).

Along with practically creating investigative reporting, Nellie Bly helped break down the barriers in people’s minds and make them more tolerant of marginalized groups, such as women, the poor, and the mentally ill. She used her articles to show how badly these people were being Hennessy 9 treated, and that “superior” people should not ignore their situation just because they were different from them. She argued that people should not be grateful for charity if they were being treated cruelly, especially if the people providing the “charity” were the ones who limited their opportunities. She refuted the idea that women should depend on men for income. Above all, she showed that a person should follow their dreams, even when everyone tells them it is impossible.

For this reason, she played a crucial role in creating the still flawed, but much more open-minded society in which we live today.

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Annotated Bibliography

Atwell, Mary Welek. “Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane.” Encyclopedia of Women in World History. ​ This source discusses Bly’s life from beginning to end, with detailed descriptions of her ​ childhood in Pennsylvania and the articles she wrote for the Pittsburg Dispatch. It tells about her ​ ​ trip around the world, the struggles she endured as manager of her husband’s company, and her reporting in Austria during the first World War.

Bagieu, Penelope. “Nellie Bly: .” Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World. New ​ ​ York: Roaring Brook Press, 2018.

This secondary source is a summary of Nellie Bly’s life, from her articles in the Pittsburg ​ Dispatch about poor working conditions in factories to her trip around the world in 1889. It ​ describes her stunt in the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island and her brief period as president of her husband’s steel container factory after his death.

Bly, Nellie. “Six Months in Mexico.” New York, American Publishers Corporation, 1 Jan. 1888,

digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/mexico/mexico.html.

In this primary source, Nellie Bly writes about her journey to Mexico, beginning with her trip from El Paso, Texas, to El Paso del Norte, a Mexican town right across the border from El

Paso. She describes the brutally orthodox, traditionalistic way of life in El Paso del Norte, such as refraining from vaccinations for religious purposes. She also exposes the terrible treatment of

American prisoners in Mexican prisons.

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Bly, Nellie. Ten Days in a Madhouse. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/ ​ ​ madhouse/madhouse.html.

In this primary source, Nellie Bly tells the story of how she spent the night in a boarding house for women and faked insanity. Mrs. Caine, a kind guest at the boarding house, stayed in

Nellie’s room with her during the night when she pretended to be too anxious to sleep. She was then taken to a police station, where, during her trial, she pretended to have lost her memory of who she was.

Bly, Nellie. “Visiting the Dispensaries.” The New York World, 2 Dec. 1888, ​ ​ thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/visiting-the-dispensaries/.

This article is also a primary source written by Nellie Bly, this time about her undercover reporting on medical dispensaries (places where people who could not afford regular healthcare could go to receive treatment). Similarly to her article on mental asylums, it exposes the doctors’ lack of consideration of the patients’ well-being. In one dispensary, she disguised herself as a patient and a doctor tried to forcibly amputate one of her tonsils, and in another, a woman told her that a physician probed her baby’s ear through his nose.

Bly, Nellie. “Why Don’t Women Reform?” The New York World, 17 June 1888, ​ ​ thegrandarchive.wordpress.com/why-dont-women-reform/.

In this newspaper article, Nellie Bly infiltrates a courtroom and a prison and talks to some of the prisoners, trying to discover their motives for committing crimes and whether they feel remorse for their actions. She learned that many of the prisoners did not see the point of reforming, since the police would continue to turn them in even after they had stopped breaking Hennessy 12 the law, just to look like they were doing something. She also discovered that most of them had committed crimes while they were drunk.

Edwards, Phil. “How Nellie Bly Became a Victorian Sensation and Changed Journalism

Forever.” 5 May 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/5/5/8548361/nellie-bly-journalist.

This secondary source, also a summary of Nellie’s life, describes her main achievements

- her asylum stunt, her trip around the world, her time as a war correspondent in Austria during

World War I, and her management of her husband’s company. It describes how her legacy still survives today because of her focus on making a difference in the world and helping others, as well as acquiring fame.

Fessenden, Marissa. “Nellie Bly’s Record-Breaking Trip Around the World Was, to Her

Surprise, a Race.” Smithsonian Magazine, 25 Jan 2016, ​ ​ www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nellie-blys-record-breaking-trip-around-world-w

as-to-her-surprise-race-180957910/0.

This article, also a secondary source, describes Nellie Bly’s trip around the world, in which she was hoping to beat the record set by a character in Jules Verne’s novel Around the

World in Eighty Days. It also discusses another journalist, , who was competing with Bly to see who could travel around the world first. Bisland ended up finishing her trip four days behind Bly.

Goodman, Matthew. “Prologue.” Eighty Days, Ballantine Books, 2013. ​ ​ The portion of this secondary source that I read is about how Nellie Bly began her journey around the world. It describes how she traveled from New York to Hoboken, New Hennessy 13

Jersey, and boarded the Augusta Victoria, the ship that would take her to London. It also ​ ​ summarizes the route she planned to travel in seventy-five days.

Macy, Sue. Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly. National Geographic Society, 2009. ​ ​ Bylines, a secondary source, discusses the entire life of Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth ​ Cochran), but the portion I read gives detailed information on her childhood. It describes her father’s death, her mother’s abusive marriage, and how Elizabeth began her career as a journalist by writing a response to a sexist newspaper article.

Maranzani, Barbara. “Inside Nellie Bly’s 10 Days in a Madhouse.” Biography, A&E Television ​ ​ Networks, LLC, 24 June 2019, biography.com/news/inside-nellie-bly-10-days-madhouse.

This secondary source provided information on the methods Bly used to get herself committed to an insane asylum, the many ways the inmates were mistreated, and the changes made in society after her article exposing the cruelty of the asylum staff was published. It describes how, after the article came out, government funding for mental institutions increased enormously, conditions in the asylum were improved, and the treatment of the mentally ill shifted its focus from punishing people to helping them get better.

Markel, Howard. “How Nellie Bly Went Undercover to Expose Abuse of the Mentally Ill.” PBS ​ Newshour, 5 May 2018, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-nellie-bly-wen ​ t-undercover-to-expose-abuse-of-the-mentally-ill.

In this secondary source, the author writes about how Nellie got herself committed to an insane asylum, the brutal conditions she observed while she was there, and the changes made due to the article she wrote about it. These changes included increased government funding for Hennessy 14 mental institutions and a general change of attitude toward people with psychological issues.

Rather than fearing and punishing them, people began to try to learn what was causing their problems and how their illnesses could be treated.

Noyes, Deborah. “More Than Anyone Would Believe.” Ten Days a Madwoman, Penguin ​ ​ Random House LLC, 2016, pp. 9-15.

This chapter from the same source tells how Bly entered the office of the New York ​ World, seeking a job there. The idea of her infiltrating the asylum was proposed by editor in ​ chief John Cockerill, and Bly agreed.

Noyes, Deborah. “Strange Ambition.” Ten Days a Madwoman, Penguin Random House LLC, ​ ​ 2016, pp. 17-20.

In this chapter, Nellie Bly checks into a boarding house for women and begins to act insane. She pretends to be afraid of the other women in the asylum and too anxious to sleep, terrifying them so much that one woman has a nightmare about her.

Noyes, Deborah. “The Gods of Gotham.” Ten Days a Madwoman, Penguin Random House LLC, ​ ​ 2016, pp. 1-7.

From this secondary source, I learned about how Nellie attempted to make a name for herself when she first moved to . She interviewed the managers of several important New York newspapers about their views on female journalists (and received some sexist responses). She then wrote about their answers in the Pittsburg Dispatch, the newspaper ​ ​ for which she was writing at the time. This chapter also included a description of life in Apollo,

Pennsylvania, where Nellie lived as a child. Hennessy 15

Phillips, Brian. “72 Days, Six Hours, and 11 Minutes: How a Pioneering Journalist Won a Race

Around the World in 1889.” Grantland, 14 Nov. 2014, ​ ​ https://grantland.com/the-triangle/nellie-bly-around-the-world-in-seventy-two-days/.

This secondary source is about Bly’s trip around the world, along with some background on her previous accomplishments, such as her infiltration of an insane asylum and her reporting on the imprisonment of a journalist in Mexico. It tells about the process of planning the fastest route and Bly’s fascinating adventures in foreign countries.

Toth, Emily. "Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist." The Women's Review of Books, June ​ ​ 1994, p. 9+. Gale In Context: High School, ​ ​ https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16087676/SU

IC?u=cinc48953&sid=SUIC&xid=109be4a8.

This secondary source describes Nellie Bly’s infiltration of the asylum on Blackwell’s

Island, her marriage to Robert Seaman, her time as a war reporter in Austria, and her trip around the world. This article repeatedly mentions Brooke Kroeger’s biography of Bly, from which the author acquired the information needed to write it, and Kroeger’s methods of writing.

Winchester, Beth. “What Nellie Bly Exposed at Blackwell’s Asylum, and Why It’s Still

Important.” Medium, 26 Apr. 2016, https://medium.com/legendary-women/what- ​ ​ nellie-bly-exposed-at-blackwells-asylum-and-why-it-s-still-important-4591203b9dc7.

This source describes Nellie Bly’s time in the women’s insane asylum on Blackwell’s

Island, the injustices in the psychiatric care system at the time, and the long-term impact of her Hennessy 16 article. It also describes how the treatment of the mentally ill evolved in later years, such as the

1940’s and 1950’s.