Pittsburgh Dispatch In 1885, a column in the
Pittsburgh Dispatch titled "What Girls Are Good For" stated that girls were principally for birthing children and keeping house. This prompted Elizabeth to write a response under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochran introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". Her second article, "Mad Marriages", was about how
divorce affected women. In it, she argued for reform of divorce laws. "Mad Marriages" was published under the byline of Nellie Bly, rather than "Lonely Orphan Girl" because, at the time, it was customary for female journalists to use pen names to conceal their gender so that readers would not discredit them. Cochrane chose "Nelly Bly", after the African-American title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by
Stephen Foster. However, her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck. Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. However, the newspaper soon received complaints from factory owners about her writing, and she was reassigned to
women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists, and she became dissatisfied. Still only 21, she was determined "to do something no girl has done before." She then traveled to Mexico to serve as a
foreign correspondent, spending nearly half a year reporting on the lives and customs of the
Mexican people. Her dispatches later were published in book form as
Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under
Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to flee the country. Safely home, she accused Díaz of being a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and
controlling the press. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of
Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the
New York World, and took an
undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign
insanity to investigate reports of
brutality and
neglect at the
Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island, now named
Roosevelt Island. It was not easy for her to be admitted to the asylum; she first decided to check herself into a boarding house called "Temporary Homes for Females". She stayed up all night to give herself the wide-eyed look of a disturbed woman and began making accusations that the other boarders were insane. Bly told the assistant matron: "There are so many crazy people about, and one can never tell what they will do." She refused to go to bed and eventually scared so many of the other boarders that the police were called to take her to the nearby courthouse. Once examined by a police officer, a judge, and a doctor, Bly was taken to
Bellevue Hospital for a few days, then after evaluation was sent by boat to Blackwell's Island.. She got to know other patients, noting the particular mistreatment of poor or immigrant patients with limited English language skills. After several days of lucidity and multiple denied requests to be discharged, an attorney from
The World intervened. After ten days, the asylum released Bly at
The Worlds behest. Her report, published October 9, 1887 and later in book form as
Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation, prompted the asylum to implement reforms, and brought her lasting fame. Just twenty-three years old, Nellie Bly had a significant impact on American culture and shed light on the experiences of marginalized women beyond the bounds of the asylum as she ushered in the era of
stunt girl journalism. (formerly Blackwell's Island) that mentions Bly's connection to the island Biographer
Brooke Kroeger argues:
Around the world and general impact '' newspaper to promote Bly's
around-the-world voyage In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the
New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the
Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the
Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,898 mile (40,070 kilometer) journey. To sustain interest in the story, the
World organized a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match" in which readers were asked to estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip. During her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met
Jules Verne in
Amiens),
Brindisi, the
Suez Canal,
Colombo (in
Ceylon), the
Straits Settlements of
Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. printed in ''
Frank Leslie's Illustrated News'' on February 8, 1890 Just over seventy-two days after her initial departure, Bly arrived in New York on January 25, 1890, completing her circumnavigation of the globe. She had traveled alone for almost the entire journey. Bly was not the only woman attempting to circumnavigate for newspaper sensation:
Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore was attempting the journey in the opposite direction, for the
Cosmopolitan. Bly's journey was a
world record, though it only stood for a few months, until
George Francis Train lowered it to 67 days.
Novelist After the fanfare of her trip around the world, Bly quit reporting and took a lucrative job writing serial novels for publisher
Norman Munro's weekly
New York Family Story Paper. The first chapters of
Eva The Adventuress, based on the real-life trial of Eva Hamilton, appeared in print before Bly returned to New York. Between 1889 and 1895 she wrote eleven novels. As few copies of the paper survived, these novels were thought lost until 2021, when author
David Blixt announced the discovery of 11 lost novels in Munro's British weekly
The London Story Paper. In 1893, though still writing novels, she returned to reporting for the
World.
Later work c. 1914 In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer
Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73. Due to her husband's failing health, she left journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. Seaman died in 1904. That same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon
oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. There have been claims that Bly was responsible for the design, Bly was also an inventor in her own right, receiving for a novel milk can and for a stacking garbage can, both under her married name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. For a time, she was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States. But her negligence, and embezzlement by a factory manager, resulted in the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. going bankrupt. According to biographer Brooke Kroeger: Back in reporting, she covered the
Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913 for the
New York Evening Journal. Her article's headline was "Suffragists Are Men's Superiors", and in its text she accurately predicted that women in the United States would be given the right to vote in 1920. Bly wrote stories on Europe's
Eastern Front during
World War I. Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy. ==Death==