I haven't written much on my favourite topic - the horrendousness of our terribly patriarchal society - recently, and I think it's definitely time I started being more aggressively feminist, and what better way to do so than by talking about Nellie Bly, who, on 14 November 1889, began a round the world trip which she intended to complete in 80 days (like the book goes...) but actually manage in 72. She did many other pretty amazing things, too, and is my new Person I Want To Be When I Grow Up Which Technically I Have Now Because I'm 18 But I Still Don't Feel Very Accomplished Or Adult.
Anyway. Yes. Nellie Bly...
Nellie was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on 5 May, 1864, to a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. Her father, an entrepreneur, died when she was six, leaving her mother with fifteen children to raise. Poor old Mary Cochran didn't have it easy - she remarried, but had to sue for divorce when Nellie was 14. She herself testified in court against her stepfather, whom she insisted was drunken and violent, which may have been the basis for her strong feminist principles.
She wasn't an exceptional school pupil - she even dropped out of boarding school after just one term - but was hired by the Pittsburgh Dispatch when she was 21, after writing a furious letter to the editor in response to a piece about women only being good for housework and taking care of children. Changing her name to Nellie Bly, she soon took up a position at the paper, writing exposés on the appaling conditions in local factories, which employed very young children and had terrible mortality rates.
The problem with this was, most advertising space in the paper was brought by the owners of said factories, who weren't best pleased with seeing their businesses slandered (even if what Bly was writing was true). She was therefore relegated to writing about "women's events" covering such fascinating topics as housework, gardening and child rearing. Clearly dissatisfied with this turn of events, Bly moved to Mexico and became the paper's foreign correspondent.
Again, this worked well for six months until the Mexican government (at the time, a dictatorship) got wind of what she was writing about (for example, an article protesting against the imprisonment of a Mexican journalist who had been criticizing the government) and ran her out of the country, where she continued to write about them in a derogatory fashion, but this time without fear of arrest. After a while though, she was shunted to the theatre and arts section, which she found somewhat unsatisfying, so moved to New York City to see what work she could gain there.
Four months later, with not a penny to her name, she walked into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer, and talked her way into a job at the New York World. Her first assignment was to be an undercover report into the conditions of the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. There had been reports of brutality and horrendous conditions there, so Bly agreed to fake insanity and spend ten days there to see what really went on.
There were many things which could you get classed as insane in the nineteenth century (and even the first half of the twentieth century) if you were a female. Having an eating disorder, protesting as a suffragist, cheating on your husband, having a baby out of wedlock or even having showing too much interest and enjoyment in sex made you crazy, in the view of society but Nellie chose instead to spend a night practicing crazy faces in the mirror (well, who doesn't?!) and walk into a local workhouse, pretending to have amnesia. Doctors quickly declared her insane, and she was taken away to the Asylum.
The conditions she reported were atrocious. The water the patients were given to drink was dirty; the food consisted of gruel broth and spoiled beef; the women were expected to sit for many hours a day on uncomfortable wooden benches with nothing to do; the wards were unclean; 'dangerous' patients were tied together with rope; women were woken by having freezing cold water thrown over their heads and the nurses were physically abusive to their patients.
Of course, this all proved to be very embarrassing for the Asylum when Bly was released at The World's behest - a grand jury was opened to examine the claims she put forward in her report which resulted in an annual extra $850,000 for care of the insane.
At this point, Bly had achieved nation fame and could have retired from public view, but she continued ever onwards in her quest to break boundaries for women. After spending a couple of years pioneering investigative journalism by writing about the terrible housing and labour conditions in New York (at a time when there were still very, very few female journalists, most of whom were writing the gardening or crocheting columns), she suggested turning the fictional Around the World in 80 Days into fact, an idea that was very well received by her editor. At 9:40am on 14 November 1889, she began her journey, which The World covered and introduced a competition which called for members of the public to guess when she would arrive back in the United States (the winners were awarded an all expenses paid holiday to Europe). Bly completed her journey in a record breaking 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds - a very respectable time in which to cover 24,899 miles without flight.
She then retired from journalism, marrying businessman Robert Seaman (40 years her senior) in 1895. When he died in 1904, she took over the running of his companies and not only patented a design for the 55 gallon oil drum (which is still in use in America today and earned her a fortune) but also introduced a series of reforms for the workers which included supplying them with essentials such as health care and luxuries such as access to gyms and libraries.
As if she hadn't already done enough with her life, Bly traveled to the Eastern Front of the First World War (she had been on holiday in Europe when the war broke out) and reported the war for the New York Evening Journal. She survived the war unscathed, but died four years after it ended, of pneumonia, aged 57. Frankly, I think it's likely that she packed more into one day than I have done in my whole life, and I'm pretty exhausted having just written all that. I also think that school History curricula should be modified to include more feminists like Nellie Bly, who made a real difference to many people's lives, rather than 'powerful' female members of the aristocracy, such as Queen Victoria or Marie Antoinette, who were little more than puppets, doing what men commanded them to, but sadly I think that's unlikely to happen...
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