Women Did It Better: Nellie Bly

By Elizabeth Lane

The crusading journalist known as Nellie Bly was a real-life heroine in every sense of the word. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864, she was the third child of a wealthy Pennsylvania judge and his second wife. She was raised in comfort until the age of six, when her father died. Unfortunately he left no will providing for his second family. Elizabeth's mother and her five children were thrown into poverty.

In desperation, her mother married an alcoholic who abused her. When she later filed for divorce, Elizabeth testified at the trial. At fifteen, Elizabeth entered normal school, hoping to become a teacher and support her mother. But with her family so poor, she was only able to attend one semester. She then moved to Pittsburgh with her mother. For seven years she helped run a boarding house, taking other work when she could find it. She dreamed of becoming a writer.

That dream came true when she read a series of columns in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, from a popular writer who wrote that women belonged at home doing domestic tasks and called the working woman "a monstrosity." Elizabeth's spirited rebuttal about the plight of women and girls who had to work so impressed the paper that they hired her and gave her the pen name "Nellie Bly" after the Stephen Foster song. Her first story was about poor working girls. Her second called for a reform of the state's divorce laws. The paper, however, wanted to confine her to the women's page, writing about social events and fashion. Bly convinced the editors to let her be a foreign correspondent in Mexico, where she sent back stories about the lives of the Mexican people. On her return, however, she was again confined to the women's page. That was too much. Nellie quit and struck out for New York.

After knocking on doors for six months, she talked her way into the office of the New York World. The editor, possibly to brush her off, challenged her to write a story about the patients housed in a New York mental institution. Impersonating a mad person, Nellie came back from Blackwell's island ten days later with stories of beatings, ice cold baths and forced meals that included rancid butter. Her story stirred the public and politicians and brought money and needed reforms to the institution. At the age of 23, Nellie Bly had begun to pioneer a new kind of investigative journalism.

In the years that followed, she exposed corruption and injustice, always taking the side of the downtrodden. Her fame also opened the doors of the rich and famous, and she profiled many celebrities of her time. The peak of her fame came when she took a whirlwind trip around the world in 1889 to beat Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days." Traveling by ship, train and Burro, she made it back to New York in a little over 72 days, cheered by huge crowds.

At the age of 30 Nellie Bly married a 70-year-old industrialist named Robert Seaman. After his death ten years later she ran his business until it went bankrupt. Then she turned back to reporting. Picking up where she left off, she championed worthy causes, including finding homes for abandoned children. She died from pneumonia in 1922, at the age of 57, after a life that would rival any work of fiction.

Tragic Tales: The Tenements and the Muckraker

By Karen Mercury

Jacob Riis emigrated to New York in 1870 from Denmark. Unable to find work, he was forced to spend the night in police station lodging houses. His experiences led to ground-breaking writing with the New York Evening Sun, establishing our version of "muckracking" journalism, busting things open before the public was even aware of them. "The poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate."

Riis went into the slums of New York City at night. He was the first to use "flash powder" to light up the interiors of these dark dens. Teddy Roosevelt, the NYC Police Commissioner, read Riis's How the Other Half Lives, a monumental life's work, and shut down lodging houses. Thus although the conditions he reported were indeed tragic, Riis's commitment to social reform helped re-shape how politicians and the well-to-do viewed their responsibility toward the city's poorest citizens. He wrote:

It was the stir and bustle of the trade, together with the tremendous immigration that followed upon the year of 1812 that dislodged them. Large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.

While reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath mouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.

The proprietors frequently urged the filthy habits of the tenants as an excuse for the condition of their property, utterly losing sight of the fact that it was the tolerance of those habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were alone responsible.

Professions: Pioneering Female Writers

By Isabel Roman

An excellent site for more female journalists is Women's Herstory Month. For each of the 30 days, there's a different woman celebrated. Check it out.

Nellie Bly: If you know only one pioneering female journalist, it's her. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864, her first taste of journalism was prompted by a sexist column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She wrote a rebuttal and the editor was so impressed, he asked her to join the paper. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and the editor chose Nellie Bly, a misspelling of the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster.

Bly focused her early work on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. Times being what they were, editorial pressure pushed her to the women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening. Bored, she traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent.

At 21, she spent six months reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. When Mexican authorities learned of her report, they threatened to arrest her. Safe at home, she denounced then dictator Porfirio Díaz as a tyrannical czar who suppressed the Mexican people and controlled the press.

Upon her return, she left the Pittsburgh Dispatch for New York City. Penniless, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's The New York World. She agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island). Ten days later, Bly was released from the asylum at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. Physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions, and Bly assisted. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and called for increased funds for care of the insane.

After her Around the World in 72 Days, she married millionaire Robert Seaman and took over his manufacturing business. She died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922, at age 57.

Ida M. Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was known as one of the leading muckrakers (investigative journalist) of her day. Best-known for her 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company, listed as #5 in a 1999 list by the New York Times of the top 100 works of 20th century American journalism. The inspiration came from her father being bankrupted by oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and was a contributing factor in the antitrust actions against the Standard Oil Trust which eventually led to its breakup in 1911.

She didn't like the label Muckraker and wrote an article "Muckraker or Historian" justifying her efforts for exposing the oil trust.

This classification of muckraker, which I did not like. All the radical element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced.

Tarbell died of pneumonia at a hospital in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1944 after being in a coma since December 1943. She was 87. The Ida Tarbell House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. On September 14, 2002, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Tarbell as part of a series of four stamps honoring women journalists.

"Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists — with it all things are possible. Ida M. Tarbell

Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an African American sociologist, civil rights leader, and a women's rights leader active in the Woman Suffrage Movement. She attended summer sessions at Fisk University in Nashville, a Black Historic College, and at age 24 wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."

In 1892 she published a pamphlet "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," and along with the 1895 "A Red Record," campaigned against lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women", she concluded that Southerners concocted the rape excuse to hide their real reason for lynching black men: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks but also their ideas about black inferiority.

In 1893, she and other black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, organized a boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The pamphlet to be distributed during the exposition, "Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition," detailed in English and other languages the workings of Southern lynching's and a handful of other issues impinging on black Americans. She later reported 2,000 copies had been distributed. Afterwards, Wells decided to stay in Chicago and work with the Chicago Conservator, the oldest paper for people of color in the city.

After her retirement, Wells wrote her autobiography Crusade for Justice (1928). The book was never finished. It ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a word. She died of uremia in Chicago at the age of 68. On February 1, 1990, the US Postal Service issued a 25 cent stamp in her honor. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Ida B. Wells on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.