JOURNALIST UNITED STATESCould I pass a week in the insane asylum at Blackwell’s Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.
—NELLIE BLY, THE EVENING-JOURNAL 1922
Nellie was furious. She reread the column in the Pittsburg Dispatch written by “Mr. Quiet Observations” that he had titled “What Girls Are Good For.” According to QO, not much. He argued that the working woman was a “monstrosity” and that her only proper place was in the home, caring for children and doing housekeeping.1
“Rubbish!” thought Nellie. What about widows with no men to provide for them? How could those women survive if they didn’t earn money? Nellie and her mother had been working outside the home for years, ever since Nellie’s father had died. What choice did they have? And exactly how were men more qualified to work than women? How dare this writer judge them!
Nellie grabbed a pen and paper. QO was an idiot and she wanted him to know it. She began writing a letter in response.
“Dear QO,” she began. “What shall we do with the girls? Those without talent, without beauty, without money.”2 She went on to explain what it was like to be a poor single woman in American society, struggling to put food on the table for hungry children in a world with few options for women who needed work.
Nellie’s arguments poured out onto the page. And solutions too:
Here would be a good field for believers in women’s rights. Let them forego their lecturing and writing and go to work; more work and less talk. Take some girls that have the ability, procure for them situations, start them on their way, and by so doing accomplish more than by years of talking.3
She finished her letter, sealed it, and mailed it off to the newspaper.
Eighteen-year-old Nellie Bly had no idea that this was just the beginning of her long and renowned career in journalism.
Nellie was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864, in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. Her family was wealthy since her father owned the town mill and most of the land around their farmhouse. Indeed, the town was named for him! But it didn’t last long. When Nellie was just six years old, her father died and the family was plunged into poverty. Nellie’s mother was not allowed to run the mill and had to sell their house to survive. Later, her mother remarried, but her new husband was abusive and couldn’t support their family. After six horrible years, Nellie’s mother filed for divorce and fourteen-year-old Nellie had to testify in court.
Those awful years made Nellie realize that she never wanted to depend on a man to take care of her. She wanted to earn her own money, to be independent. The only career open to women back then was teaching, so Nellie enrolled in a teacher’s college. But after one semester, her money ran out and she had to quit.
At sixteen, Nellie and her family moved to Pittsburg. Her younger brothers quickly found good, white-collar jobs, but Nellie looked for five years and found nothing suitable. The only nonteaching work for women was hard labor in factories or sweatshops. When she was eighteen, Nellie wrote an anonymous rebuttal to a sexist column in the Pittsburg Dispatch in which she vented her frustration with the inequalities she’d faced.
Nellie’s childhood nickname was “Pink.” While other girls wore drab brown or gray dresses, Nellie’s mother always dressed her in bright pink. Although she later dropped the nickname, Nellie learned early the value of standing out from the crowd.
The editor of the paper was impressed with Nellie’s passion and printed an ad asking the author to identify herself. When she came to the office, he was even more impressed and offered her a full-time job writing articles for the paper. This was an incredible feat at a time when female reporters were unheard of. Her boss gave her the pen name Nellie Bly, after a popular song.
Nellie began her journalism career with a bang. She wrote a series of articles about the challenges of working girls and women—something she knew a lot about—and about the horrible conditions for female factory workers. Determined to set herself apart from other reporters, she caught a train to Mexico and sent home articles about the lives and traditions of the people there. When she criticized the corrupt Mexican government, she had to flee the country to avoid being arrested.
Though Nellie’s articles were popular, her editor decided to move her to the so-called “women’s pages,” where she had to write about fashion, gardening, society, and the arts. Nellie was not pleased. She wanted to report “real” news. So one day, she just didn’t show up for work and left a note saying, “I am off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.”4
Finding a job in New York City, however, proved challenging, even for Nellie Bly. After six months of looking, Nellie finally talked her way into New York’s biggest paper, the New York World. Lucky for her, they happened to be looking for a reporter to go on a dangerous assignment: sneak undercover into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum at Blackwell’s Island! (Blackwell’s Island is now known as Roosevelt Island.) There were rumors of horrible conditions and abuse—conditions which Nellie would have to live in for ten days and then report on. She was scared, but she knew a great opportunity when she saw one. She accepted.
It turned out Nellie was also a good actress. She convinced judges and doctors she was insane. “Positively demented,” wrote one doctor. “I consider it a hopeless case.”5 And they locked her up.
Inside the asylum, Nellie experienced its horrors in person. She was fed gruel, rotten meat, and dirty water. Some patients were tied up with ropes, while others were forced to sit all day on hard benches. The asylum was filthy and overrun with rats. Nurses poured freezing water over patients to bathe them, and also yelled at and beat them. “What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?” Nellie later wrote.6
To make traveling faster and easier, Nellie took almost nothing with her. She took one dress, which she wore, a long, sturdy coat, and several pairs of underwear. She carried just one small handbag with her bathroom necessities and a smaller bag around her neck for her money. That was it for over two months of hard travel!7
After her release, Nellie’s scoop made the front page of the paper: “Inside the Madhouse.” The story caused an uproar that made Nellie Bly a household name. She was the World’s star reporter, and she was just twenty-three years old! But more important, Nellie’s reporting led to better living conditions in New York’s asylums.
Nellie’s editors let her come up with her own story ideas after that. She soon had a doozy. There was a popular novel called Around the World in Eighty Days, and Nellie wanted to beat that fictional record. This was not an easy task in the late 1800s; you couldn’t just hop in an airplane and fly around the world. Nellie would have to take steamships and trains, which were slow and rarely on schedule.
The race was on starting at 9:40 AM on November 14, 1889, when Nellie sailed out of Hoboken, New Jersey. Nellie traveled across the Atlantic, through Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal, and into the Middle East. She crossed the Arabian Sea to India and then went on to Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. She sailed across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco, where she rode trains across the country. On her trip, she battled seasickness, monsoons, snowstorms, and endless, maddening delays. But all the while, Nellie sent stories about her journey and adventures back to the World.8
While delayed for a day in Singapore, Nellie had time to buy herself a monkey, which she named McGinty.
On January 25, 1890, Nellie Bly arrived back in New Jersey, where a cheering crowd greeted her at the train station. The journey had taken her seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes.9 She had done it—and she had beaten the record! If Nellie had been famous before, she was a superstar now. Tens of thousands of people had followed her adventures for months, increasing the World’s circulation by twenty-four thousand readers. The paper described Nellie as “the best known and most widely talked of young woman on earth today.” Her face was everywhere—on toys, games, cigars, and soaps—and her name was recognized around the world!10
While Nellie was running her dead husband’s business, she invented and patented an improved milk can and a stacking garbage can.11
In her thirties, Nellie did finally marry—to a millionaire who was forty years older than her! When he died, she took over his business, becoming president of Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made metal containers. She spent some years as an inventor and became one of the top female industrialists in America. But when employee embezzlement led to bankruptcy, Nellie was ready to go back to her true calling. She wrote and reported for the rest of her life. At age fifty, she was the first female journalist to report from the Eastern Front of World War I. She continued to write about the rights of women and the working class, and the plight of orphans.
Nellie Bly died in 1922 at the age of fifty-seven. Her editor at the New York World wrote of her, “She was the best reporter in America.”12 Nellie Bly’s own motto was an excellent summary of her life: “Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.”13
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
The best way to rock the world is to bring unity to it. Unity can stop war and bring peace. I want to help stop the hate and bring love. I will rock the world by spreading the motto of the United States: e pluribus unum—out of many, we are one!
RACHEL TIPPENS 
AGE 16