15 Pioneering Female Journalists

Cover from “Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly”, by Deborah Noyes (Image via Puffin Books)

3. Nellie Bly

If the doctors, editors and, well, the general public of the 19th century won’t take a female journalist seriously, what is she to do? Pretend she’s insane, of course.

That’s the act that started Nellie Bly’s career, anyway. You see, Bly (who was born as Elizabeth Cochran) was already something of a journalist. However, she was often saddled with arts reporting, then considered to be up to the pace of a female reporter. That was all well and good, if it was your thing, but it was not Nellie Bly’s. Indeed, she resented the restriction so much that she quit her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch and made her way to New York.

Once in New York, she talked her way into at job at the New York World, run by Joseph Pulitzer. It was there that she took her fateful assignment. Bly would pretend to be insane in order to gain entry into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on nearby Blackwell’s Island. After Bly feigned derangement at a boarding house, the police were called. A judge said she was drugged and numerous doctors declared that she was incurably insane. One even called her “positively demented”.

The next ten days in the asylum proved to be frankly horrifying. Vermin abounded, waste was everywhere, and doctors generally seemed uninterested in treating the ill women. Bly gained her release after the New York World revealed her undercover scheme. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation. It led to an inquest and subsequent reforms for the asylum.

She later followed up that feat with yet another, in which she traveled the world in less than eighty days (an idea based on the Jules Verne novel, Around the World in Eighty Days). A fellow reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, attempted the same journey at the same time, though Bly beat her by four and a half days.

After marrying an industrialist, Bly retired from reporting to become, eventually, a leading industrialist and inventor. However, she returned to her old career after some years, reporting on World War I and the women’s suffrage movement. She died of pneumonia 1922, aged only 57.