April 14, 2025 • 41 mins
Nellie Bly was a true trailblazer. In late 19th century America, women were expected to get married and become housewives, or go into a suitable career like teaching.
But Nellie didn’t do any of that. Instead, she changed journalism forever, becoming one of the world’s first female investigative journalists, and paving the way for a generation of incredible ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’.
And Nellie’s first investigation was probably her most dangerous: In 1887, she deliberately got herself committed to the most notorious insane asylum in New York, to expose the abuse of women inside its walls. She was drugged, half starved and manipulated by doctors as the screams of other patients echoed around the corridors…
Researcher and author Kim Todd tells us Nellie’s story.
Kim’s book about Nellie and the journalists she inspired is called Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’.
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Record yours as a voice memo (under 90 seconds) and email to thegirlfriends@novel.audio. Please don’t include your own name or anyone else’s real names.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey listener. In this episode, we'll be mentioning themes like
physical and sexual abuse, but we'll also be talking about
probably the most kick ass female journalists you've ever heard of,
And in the spirit of the show, there's also going
to be some inevitable bad language. Oh well, I was
(00:23):
having dinner with some of my oldest friends the other night,
the kind of old friends who you don't ask about
work because we're not entirely sure what the other one does.
But at some point in the evening, after saying I
was still jet lagged from one of my recent reporting
trips to New York, one of them actually asked what
I was doing there, and so I told them I
was interviewing some convicted murderers, and for safety reasons, I
(00:46):
was assigned a chaperone. My friend, who is a therapist,
audibly sighed the last time I think she sighed at
me like that. I just described the moment I was
on an industrialist state at night, the sound of gravel
being poured into a pit behind me, while a prolific
gangster threatened to kill me and my family, Or actually,
(01:09):
was it the time that an interviewee insisted I fired
their ak forty seven at a gun range, or when
someone suddenly changed root and drove me without warning out
into the Alaskan abyss where there's no electricity or plumbing.
I forget. She sighs at me a lot, and so
(01:29):
does my mum, and occasionally so do I, because in
all of those moments, I've been truly fucking terrified, and
yet I keep on doing it, chasing my story like
some crazed dog following a rabbit into a burrow and
getting stuck. The scary thing is, I think I actually
(01:50):
even like that feeling, knowing I'm on that knive sedge
of things going really horribly wrong. This is the point
where my therapist friend would sit me as a journalist.
I thought I'd seen some shit, but then I heard
about someone who blows all of that out of the water.
(02:12):
Nellie Bly, the original female investigative reporter. The more I
read about her, the more I realized I'm part of
a long lineage of stubborn women obsessed with chasing their
story no matter what, and dan all started with Nellie.
(02:36):
In this episode, we're going back to the eighteen hundreds
on the trail of Nellie's dazzling and groundbreaking career. I
want to find out how Nelly, as a woman in
the notoriously unemancipated nineteenth century, did something so brave so
you could argue stupid that she changed journalism forever. You see, really,
(02:59):
Nellie Bly was pretty punk. For her first ever story,
Nellie literally risked her life by going undercover in an
insane asylum. She was drugged, half starved, manipulated by doctors
as the screams of other patients echoed around the corridors.
Nellie didn't know if she would ever get out. I'm
(03:28):
Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts,
this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of
women women today. Nellie goes undercover. As soon as I
(04:02):
heard about her, I knew Nellie Bly would be the
perfect guest for the Girlfriends. But unfortunately, not even extreme
levels of girl power could keep someone alive for one
hundred and fifty years. So instead I turned to Kim Todd.
Kim is a researcher and author who wrote the definitive
book about Nellie and the revolution that she started. So, Kim,
(04:25):
I'm fascinated to learn or there is about Nellie. She
sounds so cool. She was like the first original female
investigative journalist, wasn't she?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, she really was.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
So what do we need to know about Nellie? What's
her story? Who is she so?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Nellie Bly was born in the mid nineteenth century and
grew up in small town western Pennsylvania. Her father died
when she was pretty young, and her stepfather was really
horrible and very abusive. So she grew up in this
household where she was, you know, watching him choke. Her
(05:00):
mother call her mother like whore, call her mother bitch.
So the idea of marriage wasn't particularly attractive to her,
and also the idea that she was going to need
to pay her own way and find a job and
support herself and not have to depend on a man
was really instilled in her. From very young.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Nellie was determined to lead an independent life. That meant
she needed to find a career for herself, and one
of the most common routes available to women at the
time in the late eighteen hundreds was teaching. She tried
to get her teaching certificate, but she ran out of
money before she could even finish the training. When Nellie
surveyed what other options were available, to her as a
(05:44):
young woman, tumbleweeds rolled past her, and then a newspaper.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
She was reading the local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and
there was a debate at the time about you know,
where do women belong. They be at home taking care
of kids, you know, making it a little paradise on earth,
or should they be out in the world. And she
wrote in to the Pittsburgh Dispatch and said, you know,
(06:14):
we need better jobs for women. And she signed this
letter Lonely orphan Girl. And there was something about the
letter that really intrigued the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch,
and he put a notice in the paper and said,
you know, lonely orphan girl, come by the office and
you know, we might have something for you. And her
(06:34):
first article is called the Girl Puzzle, and it's elaborating
on the case that she made in her letter, where
she says, you know, we really need better jobs for women.
Not all women marry, they're still going to need money.
So she says, you know, well, why can't we let
girls do better things? But we'll get them a better
(06:55):
start in the world. And then this is one of
my favorite quotes from this very early piece of her
when she's still figuring out how to write. Instead of
gathering up the real smart young men, gather up the
real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, and
give them a shove up the ladder of life.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I love that one. That's so good.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And so she has to do that for herself though
she's given herself this shove, and then she goes to
work as a reporter for the Pittsbury Dispatch for the
next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It wasn't totally unusual for a woman to be a
journalist when Nellie was starting out, but the opportunities for
female journalists kind of mirrored what was available to women
in the general society, you know, like they weren't expected
to worry their pretty little heads about complicated manly stuff
like politics or societal injustice.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
She kind of gets shunted into the writing that most
women who worked for newspapers did at the time, the
society writing, the fashion rating, and she wasn't really interested
in that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
After a while, Nellie got frustrated with the work she
was allowed to do at the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She set
her sights on much bigger goals.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She's very ambitious and has like a great sense of
what she might do in the world. So after two
years she goes to New York and she anticipates fame
and fortune and tells her friends of the Pittsburgh Dispatch
to watch for her as she, you know, mix a
splash in the big city, which she completely does not.
(08:26):
She spends months there like trying even to get in
the door at various editors. There's lots of people who
want to work as reporters and not manlyon people want
to hire women. But finally she talks her way into
the office of the editor of the New York World,
which is the biggest, splashiest paper at the time.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
The New York World. This was the big leagues at
the time. When Nelly stomped her way into the editor's office,
the paper was owned by Joseph Pulitzer, yes, the one
the prize is named after. The New York World circulation
was nearly one million copies a day. Standing in front
(09:09):
of the editor was the biggest opportunity Nelly would probably
have in her entire career. She was determined to land
a job and to prove to those hacks in Pittsburgh
what she was really worth. She tells the editor, I
will literally do anything to write for the.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
World, And he says, well, do you think that you
can get yourself committed to the Insanees Island for women
on Blackwell's Island, which is this notoriously bad insane asylum,
which there's just been rumors of mistreatment there for years
and years. And she answers, I don't know what I
(09:49):
can do until I try, And the editor says, well,
you can try, but if you can do it, it's
more than anyone would believe.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Just a few weeks later, Nennie Bly's first ever arcle
for the New York World is published, its splashed all
over the front pages, being flogged by newsboys across the city.
The headline reads inside the Madhouse.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
In the first paragraph, she rapes, could I pass a
week in the Insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said
I could, and I would and I did.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Okay, must blow up. Next we find out how Nelly
smuggles herself into the asylum and tries not to get
stuck there forever.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Got you, I got you, got you, I've got you.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Okay, So how on earth does Nellie manage to get
inside this notorious insane asylum, the women's lunatic asylum.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So she books herself into this boarding house for women
and starts to act very odd. She keeps asking for
her trunks, and she doesn't know where her trunks are
and is very concerned about them, and she doesn't go
to sleep at night like she is acting very what
we described today as paranoid and afraid. And she says
(11:32):
that people are looking at her very oddly, and eventually
the other women in the boarding house just start to
get very disturbed by her behaviors. And that's at the
point where the matron calls the police and has her
taken away.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Wow, that is such a courageous and scarian, maybe slightly
stupid thing to do. I mean, how old was she.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
At this point, So she was in her early twenties.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Okay, oh, that's amazing. And was this sort of big stunt,
you know, going and getting yourself committed to an insane asylum.
Was that something that was going on generally in journalism
at the time, perhaps obviously by male reporters, or was
this a whole new genre.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I mean, people did do undercover work at the time,
but the particular way that Nellie Blye did it was
really not something that had ever been.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Done before, and I guess, like I know, she was
asked to do it by her editor, but did she
also have a personal reason for wanting to cover this story.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I think that she really wanted to do meaningful work,
which is what she had been arguing for from the beginning.
So I do think that she saw a great value
in helping out these women and reforming the system, and
that was something that would be important to her throughout
(12:58):
her life.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So can you tell us a little bit about her
story with this insane asylum? Like how did it go?
What did she uncover?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So when she gets committed to the asylum, she gets
put on a boat across the East River, and on
the boat she meets another woman consigned to the asylum,
Tillie Mayard, And this is sort of a clue as
to what she would find in the asylum when she
gets there, because Mayard seemed actually sane. She just seemed
(13:28):
very sick, and she thought that she was being sent
to a place that would help her get better, and
she was really devastated when she found out that she
was on her way to the asylum. Bli describes being
driven in what was some sort of ambulance from the
place where the boat docked to the asylum. And then
(13:48):
they go up this rather grand entrance to this white
building called the Octagon, which is where the asylum was.
And when they arrive, BLI, here's Mayard please eating her case.
You know, she's mayored as saying, you know, test me
for insanity. I'm not insane, but she's ignored. Then they're
checked in and they're processed and given these freezing cold
(14:12):
baths and had their usual clothes taken away from them
and transformed into patients at the asylum.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And so what sort of things did Nellie Bly witness
inside the asylum?
Speaker 2 (14:25):
BLI sees women getting slapped, They're being fed rancid food,
They're being bathed and freezing water and not given warm
enough blankets and night clothes. And like Mayard, like most
of the women that I talked to, did not seem
to be mentally ill. They seemed to be sick, or
they were poor and didn't have relatives to take care
(14:45):
of them, or they had committed adultery and their husbands
wanted to get rid of them, or they didn't speak English.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, I mean, it's so depressing isn't it that this
is how they were using mental illness at the time
as a sort of handy tool to just remove and
imprison women who didn't fit into the mold of society.
What does Nellie say about what sounds like very common
abuse of the patients by the staff.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
She makes it clear that many of them, the nurses
in particular, enjoyed tormenting the patients. You know, they were
people without any rek warse or without any friends who
they had power over.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah. I mean, it's a perfect place for abuse to manifest,
isn't it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The idea is that no one's watching, right, and then
all of a sudden, there's someone watching.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
In the article, Nellie quoted one of the women, Missus Cottera,
describing how she'd been beaten because she'd been crying. The
nurses beat me with a broom handle and jumped on
me injuring me internally so that I shall never get
over it. Then they tied my hands and feet, and,
throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around
my throat so I could not scream, and thus put
(15:57):
me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held
me under until I gave up. Every hope and became senseless.
Nellie writes that missus Cotter then showed her and I
quote the dent in the back of her head and
the bare spots where the hair had been taken out
by the handful. But it seemed that the treatment Nellie
(16:18):
was uncovering wasn't even the worst of it. You see,
Nellie was placed with the general population, but she soon
learned that there were other wings too.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
The most severely mentally ill patients were kept in separate
areas called the Lodge and the Retreat. And Blia said
that she didn't even attempt to get herself committed there
because she thought it would be too dangerous. But she
talks about hearing the sounds from the patients there and
how much distress it seems like they were in.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
All of these women were locked away on Blackwell Island
without any real recourse, just out of reach of their
old lives, which used to unfold on the other side
of the East River.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
From the island, you can look over and see New
York City. You can see Manhattan. You can see the
lights of people who are still embraced by society playing out,
but feel so isolated and feel so shonned to be
put on this island.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Nellie, who remember was in her twenties and who had
never done anything like this before, had to stay focused
on the task at hand.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
One of her big struggles was how to report this
story while she was there being treated as a patient,
and she smuggled in a pencil and a notebook so
she can take notes and do her work, and they
are confiscated when she gets into the asylum and she
asks about it. It had been her purse and she's
(17:47):
told you can't have it, so shut up. And when
she asked about it again, the doctor tells her that
she hadn't brought a pencil and that she should stop hallucinating.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
At all times. Nellie was dancing the line of losing herself,
losing her sanity to the darkest recesses of the asylum.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
She was very much at risk. She was at risk
of being drugged, she was at risk of staying there.
She was at risk of sexual assault, which isn't something
that she plays up but kind of hints around a
little bit in the storytelling, and was certainly something that
happened to women who had been discarded by mainstream society.
And there's this one instance where they give her a
(18:28):
drug and she knows that gieeds to keep her wits
about her while she's there, and so as soon as
the nurses are gone, she throws it up.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Throughout her time in the asylum, Nellie remains close to
Tillie Mayard, the woman she mess on the boat. At
the very start.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One of the saddest things in her expose, she just
talks about how Mayard really declines rapidly under the strain
of the cold and terrible food. One day, they're sitting
together on a bench and Mayard just collapses into a fit,
and when the superintendent comes in, Bli describes later he
(19:05):
caught her roughly between the eyebrowser thereabouts and pinched her
until her face was crimson, and Blithe said that when
Mayer came to she was never really the same after that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And for the women who were committed to the asylum,
what was their fate? Would a lot of them just
kind of languish there for years on end or were
they actually being treated to be released?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I think that they just languished there for years on end.
Very notably, Blind describes the asylum as a human rat
trap and wrote that it's easy to get in, but
once there, it's impossible to get out.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
By now Nellie had spent ten days in the human
rat trap, it was time to attempt that impossible feat
her escape. How did Nellie actually manage to get herself
out of the asylum?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So Nellie spent ten there, and then the world's lawyer
came and said that he was a relative and that
he would take care of her and got her released.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
It turns out that actually, if one of the most
powerful media entities in New York, or you know, a
long lost uncle came to your rescue, it wasn't actually
so difficult to leave the Women's Lunatic Asylum, which just
sort of underlines the level of abandonment most of the
women on the inside were facing. Once out, Nellie got
(20:30):
to writing.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
He worked incredibly quickly, because it was just a few
weeks later that she publishes the first of two very
long pieces in the World detailing her experience at this
I l.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Am coming up. How Nellie's article shook the city of
New York and made Nellie into a superstar. And what
(21:15):
happens to Nellie and hier Oscical once it gets out?
Does it have a big impact.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
It has a huge impact. It's this explosive story, and
it's not just the story of what happened in the asylum.
It's also the story of this young woman being able
to sneak her way into the asylum. And she tells
it very vividly. She tells it through this engaging, funny,
descriptive narrator herself, the character of Nellie Bye, and she
(21:45):
just makes people really feel like they're there.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Here's Nellie's fantastic description of having dinner at the asylum.
We were marched into a long, narrow dining room, where
a rush was made for the table. The table reached
length of the room and was uncovered and uninviting. Placed
close together. All along the table were large dressing bowls
filled with a pinkish looking stuff, which the patients called tea.
(22:13):
By each bowl was laid a piece of bread, cut
thick and unbuttered. A small saucer containing five prunes accompanied
the bread. One fat woman made a rush and jerking
up several sources from those around her, emptied their contents
into her own saucer. Then, while holding to her own bowl,
she lifted up another and drained its contents. At one gulp.
(22:35):
This she did to a second bowl in a shorter
time than it takes to tell it. The article didn't
just make for breathless reading. The outrage it caused among
the people of New York led to a grand jury
being called probing the conditions of the asylum and debating solutions.
When testifying in front of the jury, Nellie said this
(22:56):
great line about what she hoped her work could do
for the women inside.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty,
I hoped at least to influence others to make life
more bearable for them. And she visits the facility with
people from the grand jury and it's determined that the
asylums should get an extra fifty thousand dollars to care
for patients, and the grand jury also recommends the hiring
(23:22):
of more female doctors to eliminate that possibility of abuse.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's amazing that after her first article like this, Nelly
managed to create so much real impact, And what kind
of impact did it have in terms of her being
like a female reporter.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
The secondary impact was that Bly's work was so popular
that editors all over the country thought, I would like
to hire somebody to do this kind of work and
run these kind of articles, and it was a genre
that became known as girls stunt reporting, and lots of
women all over the country who liked BLYI were looking
for meaningful work that I would like to be one
(24:03):
of these kind of reporters, and launched this entire decade
of female investigtive journalism.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I can totally imagine if I was around back then,
if I read this article, that would have been me done.
I would have been writing into newspapers and saying, can
I please be a girl stunt reporter? That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
No editors describe being besieged by women showing up at
their offices.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
The revolution started. I guess that means that also Nellie's
career must have taken off at that point, oh hugely.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
It's very interesting to watch. Originally her articles are signed
on the bottom, but soon she is in the headline
like she is the news. It's Nellie Bly investigates orphanages
or Nellie Bly goes around the world.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Tell me about that, because that sounds like the best
job ever. And there's the budgets just aren't there anymore?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
They definitely are, And so she's been working at the
world for a number of years at this point, and
she's wondering what her next big thing is going to be,
and she decided that she's going to try to beat
the fictional record established by Jules vern in his novel
(25:19):
Around the World in eighty Days. So she's like, I
bet I can go around the world faster than eighty days,
and the publisher supports her, and it is this huge sensation.
It's this huge stunt, like it really made her even
more famous than she had already been. There's massive coverage
of every stop and huge illustrations, and she makes around
(25:43):
the world in seventy two days and triumphantly lands in
New Jersey, and it's very much taken as a triumph
of the new American girl. You know what can't an
American girl do. It's really showing this kind of new
woman which we're going to enter the new century with.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, like an influencer from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think that it was similar to
the way that we look at history or great feats
of women today, Like it's just the fact of her
having done it was very inspirational to a lot of
people and really definitively answered The question which she wanted
to answer for the Pittsburgh Dispatch was like, where do
(26:29):
women belong? Her answer was like, not even in the house,
not even in the workplace. They belong all around the world.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
How did she feel about the fame and recognition that
she got.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
I mean, I think that she always wanted to be
a successful journalist, so I think that she was very
happy to have her name out there, be desired be
able to command large amounts of money. At the same time,
she kept her personal life pretty private. She had this
persona of now Allie Bly, who is very light hearted
(27:02):
and free spirited and brave and funny, but we don't
always know what was going on behind the scenes and
what was going on in her heart.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Nellie Bly was literally a persona. It was a pseudonym,
you know, like catwoman Madonna, that kind of thing. The
reporter's real name was actually Elizabeth Cochrane, and Elizabeth, unlike
Nellie Well, she largely kept herself to herself. I mean
that the gossip munker in me is curious. Do we
(27:30):
know kind of what her love life was like, what
her family set up was As she had this career
take off.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So she cared for her mother. Throughout her life, she
had a number of love affairs which didn't work out
as she was working through her reporting career. Eventually she
married a very wealthy man and they had a reasonably
successful relationship, it seems like, until he died and she
(27:57):
took over his business and was windoled and the business
went bankrupt. Oh no, And then she went back to reporting.
She had editor friends who were like, you know, Nellie,
by your forte is really reporting, and you should come
back and do it. And she did, and she reported
pretty much after her death, you know, through World War One.
(28:17):
It was really her strength, and she was really exceptional
at it.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Nellie was a reporter at heart, and so were those
hundreds of women who besieged editors offices inspired by her.
There was nell Nelson, who worked for the Chicago Times
and went undercover as a worker at female factories in Chicago,
exposing physical and sexual abuse and child labor. There was
(28:42):
Caroline Lockhart, who worked at the Boston Post, who went
undercover as a drug addict in a women's rehab center
to expose the conditions for the women on the inside.
But she also did these weird and cool tabloidy stunts
like going inside a lion's cage for an article or
diving to the bottom of Boston Harbor in a diving suit.
I never get those gigs. There was also the story
(29:05):
that fascinated me most about a Chicago Times reporter whose
identity had never been revealed. I would love you to
tell me the story of this anonymous girl reporter who
investigated the abortion story.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
So the story of the girl reporter is that one
November day in Chicago, a young woman went around and
she visited doctor after doctor, and she pretended to be pregnant,
and she requested an abortion and recorded their response. The
procedure was illegal, and she was investigating how many physicians
(29:43):
and midwives were willing to break the law. By the
end of her investigation, she had visited more than two
hundred doctors. And in December of that year, she published
her reporting about the availability of abortion in the city,
and the paper scolded the doctors, and the woman who
just went by the name Girl Reporter said that she
(30:04):
was against abortion and hoped that the doctors would you
be shamed?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
And what impact did her apposting have?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Then? The effect of the reporting was that it was
clear that anyone who wanted an abortion in Chicago could
get one. It was available, you know, to anyone for
a wide variety of prices. The Girl Reporter documented the addresses,
the kinds of operations that were available, which medicines you
could take, and at what dosage.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Wow. So it ends up being a kind of bible
for how to get an abortion, basically.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
It really was. And I don't know what her actual
purpose was again, you know, she said that she was
against it and that the paper was doing it to
highlight these abuses, but she provided more information about abortion
than one of the available in any other highly public
space like the pages of the Chicago Time.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah. I mean, I desperately hope because it's just such
a cool thing to do that she wrote that line
in to get it past her editors. But actually she
was doing this really amazing act, you know, and getting
all this information out there. Whatever Anonymous Girl reporters true
motives were, I think her story shows just what a
(31:20):
radical new era American journalism was in and the huge
impact of this kind of daring, female led reporting. There
wasn't only women's issues specifically, that this generation of women
journalists were now creating space.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
For Another woman who was doing very innovative investigtive journalism
at the time, but not in a girls stunt reporter mode,
was this reporter named Ada B. Wells who wrote about
lynching in a really unflinching way.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And a lot of the names these women use were fake,
weren't they They were pseudonyms, and like to be fair,
they're all way cooler than my real name. So I'm
starting to consider that. But why were they working under
these pseudonyms.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
It's a complicated question. I think a lot of women
did it because it wasn't quite respectable, you know, reporting itself,
putting yourself out into the public sphere was on the
edge of respectability. But also as time went on, the
role became somewhat of an expectation. So if women showed
(32:25):
up into newspaper office and wanted to do a different
kind of newspaper work and the editor was like, what
you really need to do is get yourself arrested and
talk about what's going on in the jail, that wouldn't
have been so attractive to women who wanted to cover
the presidential race or something like that. So I do
think that this opportunity became a bit of an imprisoning expectation.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah. Well, even the title girl stunt reporters, it feels it's,
you know, it's a little cheat.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Oh, it definitely is. Like girls stunt reporters is definitely
a slur often used by male reporters at the time
who were jealous of their high paychecks and high profiles.
But it's also to me a useful term to describe
exactly what was going on during this ten year period
(33:18):
because they didn't hide that they were female. So I
think there's nothing valuable about the term, even though I recognize, yes,
female investigtive reporters suuch much better.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Yeah, I think I'd go for that, So I'll start report.
I'm leaning I'm leaning in and generally, what was the
playing field like in terms of rights for women in
the late eighteen hundreds in America? What did Nelly have
available to her as well as the other women that
she was writing about.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
One of the things that's always so astonishing to me
about these women doing this work at this time is
that they couldn't vote, and they would not be able
to vote for decades and decades. Some of them interviewed
the president, but we're not able to vote for the president,
so many fewer rights than you'd imagine given the quite
(34:11):
prominent position some of them occupied.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, and often reporting on very political things.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah. So one of the things that's kind of at
the heart of the Girlfriends is this idea that it's
women looking out for each other. We celebrate female friendship
and how powerful that can be actually as a force
of change, not just as a force of connection. How
did Nellie's work help give a voice to women's issues.
(34:39):
How did she go about doing that?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Well, it was really one of the ways that she
is most revolutionary because only a woman can go undercover
in women's faces. So when all of a sudden you
had demand for this kind of reporting, you were able
to see what's going on inside women's facts. You were
able to see what's going on inside jails where women
(35:03):
are imprisoned. You were able to see, you know, how
women were treated in public hospitals. And that was a
perspective that only these female Investigator rewarders could provide. And
so all of a sudden you had very different kinds
of stories on the front pages. Before coverage of women
was really like you were murdered or you were wearing
(35:26):
the spring's best new hat. But now all these women
dominated spaces were really taking up cultural space.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What I love about Nellie's story is that it's kind
of twofold. Undoubtedly Nellie made a genuine difference for other
women in America. But what actually inspires me, I guess
selfishly as a fellow journalist, at the opportunities that she
afforded herself through her sheher will to live an independent life.
She created an entirely new genre of journalists. Not only that,
(36:01):
but she lived well and on her own terms. That's
so cool. I mean, what more could somebody want? She
was celebrated for her courage and her contemporary writing, not
her spring hat, in a world where spring hats were
a really big deal. So I guess my main takeaway
from all of this is that I should keep doing
what I'm doing. I just hope that people will see
(36:24):
past my seasonal Hat collection two as fabulous as it is.
Thank you so much to Kim Todd for taking us
through Nellie's epic story. Kim's book is called Sensational, The
(36:45):
Hidden History of America's Girls Stunt Reporters. You should read it.
There's so much fascinating stuff about Nellie and the other
women doing journalism at the time that we just couldn't
fit into this episode. Next time on the Girlfriend's Spotlight,
(37:11):
June rocks America.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
We're starting a band.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I might as well have said we're going to walk
on the moon. We just got better and better, and
they were gobsmack and they would rush up after the
sent and say, not bad for chicks.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Hey, you've reached the girlfriend's hotline. You can leave your
mini story after the tone, right, catchu lator bye.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
A time that my girlfriend's really really had my back
was when I got savagely broken up with in a
pub of all places, and I was so distraught I
could not stop crying. I thought I was going to
be sick from crying. The only thing I could think
to was call my best friend, who lives an hour away.
(38:03):
I called her, I told her what happened. She said,
give me an hour and meet me at your house.
And by the time I got home to my house,
she had assembled not only her, but three of my
other best friends and my sister were waiting there for
me to give me the softest landing possible and catch me.
(38:26):
And it makes me emotional even to think about it.
Because it was exactly what I needed. She just did
it without asking, and I felt so supported and held
by my friends. And that's just the kind of situation
that you would not be able to survive without your girlfriends.
So it made me appreciate my girls even more.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Hi, if you have your own story like the one
you just heard, and you'd like the whole girlfriend's getting
to hear it, then please send it to us. You
can record it as a voice memo under ninety seconds
please and email it straight to the girl friends at
novel dot Audio. Please don't include your name. We're keeping
(39:05):
things a little anon. We want stories like say that
one time you faked an emergency on an awful date
and your bestie bailed you out with a phone call.
We love her all that time when all of your
girls showed up on your doorstep with five pizzas, two
types of ice cream, and three bottles of saven your
blanc because the man of your dreams just dumped you.
(39:28):
I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big,
I want small. I'm desperate to hear them, so send
them over this season, we're supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.
(39:50):
They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and
movements to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find
out more or donate to help them secure equal rights
for women and girls across the globe, you can go
to womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is
produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel,
(40:13):
visit novel dot audio. The show is hosted by me
Anna Sinfield. This episode was written and produced by Jake o'tairevich.
Our researcher is Seana Yusuf. The editor is Hannah Marshall.
Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers. Production management
from Joe Savage, Sari Houston, and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design,
(40:38):
mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music
supervision by Jakotivich, Nicholas Alexander and Dana Sinfield. Original music
composed by Louisa Gerstein and Jemma Freeman. The series artwork
was designed by Christina Limpool. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development and Special Thanks to Katrina Norville, Carrie Lieberman
(41:01):
and will Pearson at iHeart podcasts, as well as Carl
Frankel and the whole team at w m E
Hey listener. In this episode, we'll be mentioning themes like
physical and sexual abuse, but we'll also be talking about
probably the most kick ass female journalists you've ever heard of,
And in the spirit of the show, there's also going
to be some inevitable bad language. Oh well, I was
(00:23):
having dinner with some of my oldest friends the other night,
the kind of old friends who you don't ask about
work because we're not entirely sure what the other one does.
But at some point in the evening, after saying I
was still jet lagged from one of my recent reporting
trips to New York, one of them actually asked what
I was doing there, and so I told them I
was interviewing some convicted murderers, and for safety reasons, I
(00:46):
was assigned a chaperone. My friend, who is a therapist,
audibly sighed the last time I think she sighed at
me like that. I just described the moment I was
on an industrialist state at night, the sound of gravel
being poured into a pit behind me, while a prolific
gangster threatened to kill me and my family, Or actually,
(01:09):
was it the time that an interviewee insisted I fired
their ak forty seven at a gun range, or when
someone suddenly changed root and drove me without warning out
into the Alaskan abyss where there's no electricity or plumbing.
I forget. She sighs at me a lot, and so
(01:29):
does my mum, and occasionally so do I, because in
all of those moments, I've been truly fucking terrified, and
yet I keep on doing it, chasing my story like
some crazed dog following a rabbit into a burrow and
getting stuck. The scary thing is, I think I actually
(01:50):
even like that feeling, knowing I'm on that knive sedge
of things going really horribly wrong. This is the point
where my therapist friend would sit me as a journalist.
I thought I'd seen some shit, but then I heard
about someone who blows all of that out of the water.
(02:12):
Nellie Bly, the original female investigative reporter. The more I
read about her, the more I realized I'm part of
a long lineage of stubborn women obsessed with chasing their
story no matter what, and dan all started with Nellie.
(02:36):
In this episode, we're going back to the eighteen hundreds
on the trail of Nellie's dazzling and groundbreaking career. I
want to find out how Nelly, as a woman in
the notoriously unemancipated nineteenth century, did something so brave so
you could argue stupid that she changed journalism forever. You see, really,
(02:59):
Nellie Bly was pretty punk. For her first ever story,
Nellie literally risked her life by going undercover in an
insane asylum. She was drugged, half starved, manipulated by doctors
as the screams of other patients echoed around the corridors.
Nellie didn't know if she would ever get out. I'm
(03:28):
Anna Sinfield and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts,
this is the Girlfriend's Spotlight, where we tell stories of
women women today. Nellie goes undercover. As soon as I
(04:02):
heard about her, I knew Nellie Bly would be the
perfect guest for the Girlfriends. But unfortunately, not even extreme
levels of girl power could keep someone alive for one
hundred and fifty years. So instead I turned to Kim Todd.
Kim is a researcher and author who wrote the definitive
book about Nellie and the revolution that she started. So, Kim,
(04:25):
I'm fascinated to learn or there is about Nellie. She
sounds so cool. She was like the first original female
investigative journalist, wasn't she?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, she really was.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
So what do we need to know about Nellie? What's
her story? Who is she so?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Nellie Bly was born in the mid nineteenth century and
grew up in small town western Pennsylvania. Her father died
when she was pretty young, and her stepfather was really
horrible and very abusive. So she grew up in this
household where she was, you know, watching him choke. Her
(05:00):
mother call her mother like whore, call her mother bitch.
So the idea of marriage wasn't particularly attractive to her,
and also the idea that she was going to need
to pay her own way and find a job and
support herself and not have to depend on a man
was really instilled in her. From very young.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Nellie was determined to lead an independent life. That meant
she needed to find a career for herself, and one
of the most common routes available to women at the
time in the late eighteen hundreds was teaching. She tried
to get her teaching certificate, but she ran out of
money before she could even finish the training. When Nellie
surveyed what other options were available, to her as a
(05:44):
young woman, tumbleweeds rolled past her, and then a newspaper.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
She was reading the local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and
there was a debate at the time about you know,
where do women belong. They be at home taking care
of kids, you know, making it a little paradise on earth,
or should they be out in the world. And she
wrote in to the Pittsburgh Dispatch and said, you know,
(06:14):
we need better jobs for women. And she signed this
letter Lonely orphan Girl. And there was something about the
letter that really intrigued the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch,
and he put a notice in the paper and said,
you know, lonely orphan girl, come by the office and
you know, we might have something for you. And her
(06:34):
first article is called the Girl Puzzle, and it's elaborating
on the case that she made in her letter, where
she says, you know, we really need better jobs for women.
Not all women marry, they're still going to need money.
So she says, you know, well, why can't we let
girls do better things? But we'll get them a better
(06:55):
start in the world. And then this is one of
my favorite quotes from this very early piece of her
when she's still figuring out how to write. Instead of
gathering up the real smart young men, gather up the
real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, and
give them a shove up the ladder of life.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
I love that one. That's so good.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
And so she has to do that for herself though
she's given herself this shove, and then she goes to
work as a reporter for the Pittsbury Dispatch for the
next couple of years.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It wasn't totally unusual for a woman to be a
journalist when Nellie was starting out, but the opportunities for
female journalists kind of mirrored what was available to women
in the general society, you know, like they weren't expected
to worry their pretty little heads about complicated manly stuff
like politics or societal injustice.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
She kind of gets shunted into the writing that most
women who worked for newspapers did at the time, the
society writing, the fashion rating, and she wasn't really interested
in that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
After a while, Nellie got frustrated with the work she
was allowed to do at the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She set
her sights on much bigger goals.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She's very ambitious and has like a great sense of
what she might do in the world. So after two
years she goes to New York and she anticipates fame
and fortune and tells her friends of the Pittsburgh Dispatch
to watch for her as she, you know, mix a
splash in the big city, which she completely does not.
(08:26):
She spends months there like trying even to get in
the door at various editors. There's lots of people who
want to work as reporters and not manlyon people want
to hire women. But finally she talks her way into
the office of the editor of the New York World,
which is the biggest, splashiest paper at the time.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
The New York World. This was the big leagues at
the time. When Nelly stomped her way into the editor's office,
the paper was owned by Joseph Pulitzer, yes, the one
the prize is named after. The New York World circulation
was nearly one million copies a day. Standing in front
(09:09):
of the editor was the biggest opportunity Nelly would probably
have in her entire career. She was determined to land
a job and to prove to those hacks in Pittsburgh
what she was really worth. She tells the editor, I
will literally do anything to write for the.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
World, And he says, well, do you think that you
can get yourself committed to the Insanees Island for women
on Blackwell's Island, which is this notoriously bad insane asylum,
which there's just been rumors of mistreatment there for years
and years. And she answers, I don't know what I
(09:49):
can do until I try, And the editor says, well,
you can try, but if you can do it, it's
more than anyone would believe.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Just a few weeks later, Nennie Bly's first ever arcle
for the New York World is published, its splashed all
over the front pages, being flogged by newsboys across the city.
The headline reads inside the Madhouse.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
In the first paragraph, she rapes, could I pass a
week in the Insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said
I could, and I would and I did.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Okay, must blow up. Next we find out how Nelly
smuggles herself into the asylum and tries not to get
stuck there forever.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Got you, I got you, got you, I've got you.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Okay, So how on earth does Nellie manage to get
inside this notorious insane asylum, the women's lunatic asylum.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
So she books herself into this boarding house for women
and starts to act very odd. She keeps asking for
her trunks, and she doesn't know where her trunks are
and is very concerned about them, and she doesn't go
to sleep at night like she is acting very what
we described today as paranoid and afraid. And she says
(11:32):
that people are looking at her very oddly, and eventually
the other women in the boarding house just start to
get very disturbed by her behaviors. And that's at the
point where the matron calls the police and has her
taken away.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Wow, that is such a courageous and scarian, maybe slightly
stupid thing to do. I mean, how old was she.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
At this point, So she was in her early twenties.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Okay, oh, that's amazing. And was this sort of big stunt,
you know, going and getting yourself committed to an insane asylum.
Was that something that was going on generally in journalism
at the time, perhaps obviously by male reporters, or was
this a whole new genre.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I mean, people did do undercover work at the time,
but the particular way that Nellie Blye did it was
really not something that had ever been.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Done before, and I guess, like I know, she was
asked to do it by her editor, but did she
also have a personal reason for wanting to cover this story.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
I think that she really wanted to do meaningful work,
which is what she had been arguing for from the beginning.
So I do think that she saw a great value
in helping out these women and reforming the system, and
that was something that would be important to her throughout
(12:58):
her life.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
So can you tell us a little bit about her
story with this insane asylum? Like how did it go?
What did she uncover?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
So when she gets committed to the asylum, she gets
put on a boat across the East River, and on
the boat she meets another woman consigned to the asylum,
Tillie Mayard, And this is sort of a clue as
to what she would find in the asylum when she
gets there, because Mayard seemed actually sane. She just seemed
(13:28):
very sick, and she thought that she was being sent
to a place that would help her get better, and
she was really devastated when she found out that she
was on her way to the asylum. Bli describes being
driven in what was some sort of ambulance from the
place where the boat docked to the asylum. And then
(13:48):
they go up this rather grand entrance to this white
building called the Octagon, which is where the asylum was.
And when they arrive, BLI, here's Mayard please eating her case.
You know, she's mayored as saying, you know, test me
for insanity. I'm not insane, but she's ignored. Then they're
checked in and they're processed and given these freezing cold
(14:12):
baths and had their usual clothes taken away from them
and transformed into patients at the asylum.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And so what sort of things did Nellie Bly witness
inside the asylum?
Speaker 2 (14:25):
BLI sees women getting slapped, They're being fed rancid food,
They're being bathed and freezing water and not given warm
enough blankets and night clothes. And like Mayard, like most
of the women that I talked to, did not seem
to be mentally ill. They seemed to be sick, or
they were poor and didn't have relatives to take care
(14:45):
of them, or they had committed adultery and their husbands
wanted to get rid of them, or they didn't speak English.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, I mean, it's so depressing isn't it that this
is how they were using mental illness at the time
as a sort of handy tool to just remove and
imprison women who didn't fit into the mold of society.
What does Nellie say about what sounds like very common
abuse of the patients by the staff.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
She makes it clear that many of them, the nurses
in particular, enjoyed tormenting the patients. You know, they were
people without any rek warse or without any friends who
they had power over.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah. I mean, it's a perfect place for abuse to manifest,
isn't it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The idea is that no one's watching, right, and then
all of a sudden, there's someone watching.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
In the article, Nellie quoted one of the women, Missus Cottera,
describing how she'd been beaten because she'd been crying. The
nurses beat me with a broom handle and jumped on
me injuring me internally so that I shall never get
over it. Then they tied my hands and feet, and,
throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around
my throat so I could not scream, and thus put
(15:57):
me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held
me under until I gave up. Every hope and became senseless.
Nellie writes that missus Cotter then showed her and I
quote the dent in the back of her head and
the bare spots where the hair had been taken out
by the handful. But it seemed that the treatment Nellie
(16:18):
was uncovering wasn't even the worst of it. You see,
Nellie was placed with the general population, but she soon
learned that there were other wings too.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
The most severely mentally ill patients were kept in separate
areas called the Lodge and the Retreat. And Blia said
that she didn't even attempt to get herself committed there
because she thought it would be too dangerous. But she
talks about hearing the sounds from the patients there and
how much distress it seems like they were in.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
All of these women were locked away on Blackwell Island
without any real recourse, just out of reach of their
old lives, which used to unfold on the other side
of the East River.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
From the island, you can look over and see New
York City. You can see Manhattan. You can see the
lights of people who are still embraced by society playing out,
but feel so isolated and feel so shonned to be
put on this island.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Nellie, who remember was in her twenties and who had
never done anything like this before, had to stay focused
on the task at hand.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
One of her big struggles was how to report this
story while she was there being treated as a patient,
and she smuggled in a pencil and a notebook so
she can take notes and do her work, and they
are confiscated when she gets into the asylum and she
asks about it. It had been her purse and she's
(17:47):
told you can't have it, so shut up. And when
she asked about it again, the doctor tells her that
she hadn't brought a pencil and that she should stop hallucinating.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
At all times. Nellie was dancing the line of losing herself,
losing her sanity to the darkest recesses of the asylum.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
She was very much at risk. She was at risk
of being drugged, she was at risk of staying there.
She was at risk of sexual assault, which isn't something
that she plays up but kind of hints around a
little bit in the storytelling, and was certainly something that
happened to women who had been discarded by mainstream society.
And there's this one instance where they give her a
(18:28):
drug and she knows that gieeds to keep her wits
about her while she's there, and so as soon as
the nurses are gone, she throws it up.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Throughout her time in the asylum, Nellie remains close to
Tillie Mayard, the woman she mess on the boat. At
the very start.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
One of the saddest things in her expose, she just
talks about how Mayard really declines rapidly under the strain
of the cold and terrible food. One day, they're sitting
together on a bench and Mayard just collapses into a fit,
and when the superintendent comes in, Bli describes later he
(19:05):
caught her roughly between the eyebrowser thereabouts and pinched her
until her face was crimson, and Blithe said that when
Mayer came to she was never really the same after that.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
And for the women who were committed to the asylum,
what was their fate? Would a lot of them just
kind of languish there for years on end or were
they actually being treated to be released?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I think that they just languished there for years on end.
Very notably, Blind describes the asylum as a human rat
trap and wrote that it's easy to get in, but
once there, it's impossible to get out.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
By now Nellie had spent ten days in the human
rat trap, it was time to attempt that impossible feat
her escape. How did Nellie actually manage to get herself
out of the asylum?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So Nellie spent ten there, and then the world's lawyer
came and said that he was a relative and that
he would take care of her and got her released.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
It turns out that actually, if one of the most
powerful media entities in New York, or you know, a
long lost uncle came to your rescue, it wasn't actually
so difficult to leave the Women's Lunatic Asylum, which just
sort of underlines the level of abandonment most of the
women on the inside were facing. Once out, Nellie got
(20:30):
to writing.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
He worked incredibly quickly, because it was just a few
weeks later that she publishes the first of two very
long pieces in the World detailing her experience at this
I l.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Am coming up. How Nellie's article shook the city of
New York and made Nellie into a superstar. And what
(21:15):
happens to Nellie and hier Oscical once it gets out?
Does it have a big impact.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
It has a huge impact. It's this explosive story, and
it's not just the story of what happened in the asylum.
It's also the story of this young woman being able
to sneak her way into the asylum. And she tells
it very vividly. She tells it through this engaging, funny,
descriptive narrator herself, the character of Nellie Bye, and she
(21:45):
just makes people really feel like they're there.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Here's Nellie's fantastic description of having dinner at the asylum.
We were marched into a long, narrow dining room, where
a rush was made for the table. The table reached
length of the room and was uncovered and uninviting. Placed
close together. All along the table were large dressing bowls
filled with a pinkish looking stuff, which the patients called tea.
(22:13):
By each bowl was laid a piece of bread, cut
thick and unbuttered. A small saucer containing five prunes accompanied
the bread. One fat woman made a rush and jerking
up several sources from those around her, emptied their contents
into her own saucer. Then, while holding to her own bowl,
she lifted up another and drained its contents. At one gulp.
(22:35):
This she did to a second bowl in a shorter
time than it takes to tell it. The article didn't
just make for breathless reading. The outrage it caused among
the people of New York led to a grand jury
being called probing the conditions of the asylum and debating solutions.
When testifying in front of the jury, Nellie said this
(22:56):
great line about what she hoped her work could do
for the women inside.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty,
I hoped at least to influence others to make life
more bearable for them. And she visits the facility with
people from the grand jury and it's determined that the
asylums should get an extra fifty thousand dollars to care
for patients, and the grand jury also recommends the hiring
(23:22):
of more female doctors to eliminate that possibility of abuse.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
That's amazing that after her first article like this, Nelly
managed to create so much real impact, And what kind
of impact did it have in terms of her being
like a female reporter.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
The secondary impact was that Bly's work was so popular
that editors all over the country thought, I would like
to hire somebody to do this kind of work and
run these kind of articles, and it was a genre
that became known as girls stunt reporting, and lots of
women all over the country who liked BLYI were looking
for meaningful work that I would like to be one
(24:03):
of these kind of reporters, and launched this entire decade
of female investigtive journalism.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I can totally imagine if I was around back then,
if I read this article, that would have been me done.
I would have been writing into newspapers and saying, can
I please be a girl stunt reporter? That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
No editors describe being besieged by women showing up at
their offices.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
The revolution started. I guess that means that also Nellie's
career must have taken off at that point, oh hugely.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
It's very interesting to watch. Originally her articles are signed
on the bottom, but soon she is in the headline
like she is the news. It's Nellie Bly investigates orphanages
or Nellie Bly goes around the world.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Tell me about that, because that sounds like the best
job ever. And there's the budgets just aren't there anymore?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
They definitely are, And so she's been working at the
world for a number of years at this point, and
she's wondering what her next big thing is going to be,
and she decided that she's going to try to beat
the fictional record established by Jules vern in his novel
(25:19):
Around the World in eighty Days. So she's like, I
bet I can go around the world faster than eighty days,
and the publisher supports her, and it is this huge sensation.
It's this huge stunt, like it really made her even
more famous than she had already been. There's massive coverage
of every stop and huge illustrations, and she makes around
(25:43):
the world in seventy two days and triumphantly lands in
New Jersey, and it's very much taken as a triumph
of the new American girl. You know what can't an
American girl do. It's really showing this kind of new
woman which we're going to enter the new century with.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Yeah, like an influencer from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, I mean, I think that it was similar to
the way that we look at history or great feats
of women today, Like it's just the fact of her
having done it was very inspirational to a lot of
people and really definitively answered The question which she wanted
to answer for the Pittsburgh Dispatch was like, where do
(26:29):
women belong? Her answer was like, not even in the house,
not even in the workplace. They belong all around the world.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
How did she feel about the fame and recognition that
she got.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
I mean, I think that she always wanted to be
a successful journalist, so I think that she was very
happy to have her name out there, be desired be
able to command large amounts of money. At the same time,
she kept her personal life pretty private. She had this
persona of now Allie Bly, who is very light hearted
(27:02):
and free spirited and brave and funny, but we don't
always know what was going on behind the scenes and
what was going on in her heart.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Nellie Bly was literally a persona. It was a pseudonym,
you know, like catwoman Madonna, that kind of thing. The
reporter's real name was actually Elizabeth Cochrane, and Elizabeth, unlike
Nellie Well, she largely kept herself to herself. I mean
that the gossip munker in me is curious. Do we
(27:30):
know kind of what her love life was like, what
her family set up was As she had this career
take off.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So she cared for her mother. Throughout her life, she
had a number of love affairs which didn't work out
as she was working through her reporting career. Eventually she
married a very wealthy man and they had a reasonably
successful relationship, it seems like, until he died and she
(27:57):
took over his business and was windoled and the business
went bankrupt. Oh no, And then she went back to reporting.
She had editor friends who were like, you know, Nellie,
by your forte is really reporting, and you should come
back and do it. And she did, and she reported
pretty much after her death, you know, through World War One.
(28:17):
It was really her strength, and she was really exceptional
at it.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Nellie was a reporter at heart, and so were those
hundreds of women who besieged editors offices inspired by her.
There was nell Nelson, who worked for the Chicago Times
and went undercover as a worker at female factories in Chicago,
exposing physical and sexual abuse and child labor. There was
(28:42):
Caroline Lockhart, who worked at the Boston Post, who went
undercover as a drug addict in a women's rehab center
to expose the conditions for the women on the inside.
But she also did these weird and cool tabloidy stunts
like going inside a lion's cage for an article or
diving to the bottom of Boston Harbor in a diving suit.
I never get those gigs. There was also the story
(29:05):
that fascinated me most about a Chicago Times reporter whose
identity had never been revealed. I would love you to
tell me the story of this anonymous girl reporter who
investigated the abortion story.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
So the story of the girl reporter is that one
November day in Chicago, a young woman went around and
she visited doctor after doctor, and she pretended to be pregnant,
and she requested an abortion and recorded their response. The
procedure was illegal, and she was investigating how many physicians
(29:43):
and midwives were willing to break the law. By the
end of her investigation, she had visited more than two
hundred doctors. And in December of that year, she published
her reporting about the availability of abortion in the city,
and the paper scolded the doctors, and the woman who
just went by the name Girl Reporter said that she
(30:04):
was against abortion and hoped that the doctors would you
be shamed?
Speaker 1 (30:09):
And what impact did her apposting have?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Then? The effect of the reporting was that it was
clear that anyone who wanted an abortion in Chicago could
get one. It was available, you know, to anyone for
a wide variety of prices. The Girl Reporter documented the addresses,
the kinds of operations that were available, which medicines you
could take, and at what dosage.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Wow. So it ends up being a kind of bible
for how to get an abortion, basically.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
It really was. And I don't know what her actual
purpose was again, you know, she said that she was
against it and that the paper was doing it to
highlight these abuses, but she provided more information about abortion
than one of the available in any other highly public
space like the pages of the Chicago Time.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah. I mean, I desperately hope because it's just such
a cool thing to do that she wrote that line
in to get it past her editors. But actually she
was doing this really amazing act, you know, and getting
all this information out there. Whatever Anonymous Girl reporters true
motives were, I think her story shows just what a
(31:20):
radical new era American journalism was in and the huge
impact of this kind of daring, female led reporting. There
wasn't only women's issues specifically, that this generation of women
journalists were now creating space.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
For Another woman who was doing very innovative investigtive journalism
at the time, but not in a girls stunt reporter mode,
was this reporter named Ada B. Wells who wrote about
lynching in a really unflinching way.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And a lot of the names these women use were fake,
weren't they They were pseudonyms, and like to be fair,
they're all way cooler than my real name. So I'm
starting to consider that. But why were they working under
these pseudonyms.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
It's a complicated question. I think a lot of women
did it because it wasn't quite respectable, you know, reporting itself,
putting yourself out into the public sphere was on the
edge of respectability. But also as time went on, the
role became somewhat of an expectation. So if women showed
(32:25):
up into newspaper office and wanted to do a different
kind of newspaper work and the editor was like, what
you really need to do is get yourself arrested and
talk about what's going on in the jail, that wouldn't
have been so attractive to women who wanted to cover
the presidential race or something like that. So I do
think that this opportunity became a bit of an imprisoning expectation.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah. Well, even the title girl stunt reporters, it feels it's,
you know, it's a little cheat.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Oh, it definitely is. Like girls stunt reporters is definitely
a slur often used by male reporters at the time
who were jealous of their high paychecks and high profiles.
But it's also to me a useful term to describe
exactly what was going on during this ten year period
(33:18):
because they didn't hide that they were female. So I
think there's nothing valuable about the term, even though I recognize, yes,
female investigtive reporters suuch much better.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Yeah, I think I'd go for that, So I'll start report.
I'm leaning I'm leaning in and generally, what was the
playing field like in terms of rights for women in
the late eighteen hundreds in America? What did Nelly have
available to her as well as the other women that
she was writing about.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
One of the things that's always so astonishing to me
about these women doing this work at this time is
that they couldn't vote, and they would not be able
to vote for decades and decades. Some of them interviewed
the president, but we're not able to vote for the president,
so many fewer rights than you'd imagine given the quite
(34:11):
prominent position some of them occupied.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, and often reporting on very political things.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah. So one of the things that's kind of at
the heart of the Girlfriends is this idea that it's
women looking out for each other. We celebrate female friendship
and how powerful that can be actually as a force
of change, not just as a force of connection. How
did Nellie's work help give a voice to women's issues.
(34:39):
How did she go about doing that?
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Well, it was really one of the ways that she
is most revolutionary because only a woman can go undercover
in women's faces. So when all of a sudden you
had demand for this kind of reporting, you were able
to see what's going on inside women's facts. You were
able to see what's going on inside jails where women
(35:03):
are imprisoned. You were able to see, you know, how
women were treated in public hospitals. And that was a
perspective that only these female Investigator rewarders could provide. And
so all of a sudden you had very different kinds
of stories on the front pages. Before coverage of women
was really like you were murdered or you were wearing
(35:26):
the spring's best new hat. But now all these women
dominated spaces were really taking up cultural space.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
What I love about Nellie's story is that it's kind
of twofold. Undoubtedly Nellie made a genuine difference for other
women in America. But what actually inspires me, I guess
selfishly as a fellow journalist, at the opportunities that she
afforded herself through her sheher will to live an independent life.
She created an entirely new genre of journalists. Not only that,
(36:01):
but she lived well and on her own terms. That's
so cool. I mean, what more could somebody want? She
was celebrated for her courage and her contemporary writing, not
her spring hat, in a world where spring hats were
a really big deal. So I guess my main takeaway
from all of this is that I should keep doing
what I'm doing. I just hope that people will see
(36:24):
past my seasonal Hat collection two as fabulous as it is.
Thank you so much to Kim Todd for taking us
through Nellie's epic story. Kim's book is called Sensational, The
(36:45):
Hidden History of America's Girls Stunt Reporters. You should read it.
There's so much fascinating stuff about Nellie and the other
women doing journalism at the time that we just couldn't
fit into this episode. Next time on the Girlfriend's Spotlight,
(37:11):
June rocks America.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
We're starting a band.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
I might as well have said we're going to walk
on the moon. We just got better and better, and
they were gobsmack and they would rush up after the
sent and say, not bad for chicks.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Hey, you've reached the girlfriend's hotline. You can leave your
mini story after the tone, right, catchu lator bye.
Speaker 4 (37:42):
A time that my girlfriend's really really had my back
was when I got savagely broken up with in a
pub of all places, and I was so distraught I
could not stop crying. I thought I was going to
be sick from crying. The only thing I could think
to was call my best friend, who lives an hour away.
(38:03):
I called her, I told her what happened. She said,
give me an hour and meet me at your house.
And by the time I got home to my house,
she had assembled not only her, but three of my
other best friends and my sister were waiting there for
me to give me the softest landing possible and catch me.
(38:26):
And it makes me emotional even to think about it.
Because it was exactly what I needed. She just did
it without asking, and I felt so supported and held
by my friends. And that's just the kind of situation
that you would not be able to survive without your girlfriends.
So it made me appreciate my girls even more.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
Hi, if you have your own story like the one
you just heard, and you'd like the whole girlfriend's getting
to hear it, then please send it to us. You
can record it as a voice memo under ninety seconds
please and email it straight to the girl friends at
novel dot Audio. Please don't include your name. We're keeping
(39:05):
things a little anon. We want stories like say that
one time you faked an emergency on an awful date
and your bestie bailed you out with a phone call.
We love her all that time when all of your
girls showed up on your doorstep with five pizzas, two
types of ice cream, and three bottles of saven your
blanc because the man of your dreams just dumped you.
(39:28):
I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big,
I want small. I'm desperate to hear them, so send
them over this season, we're supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide.
(39:50):
They do amazing work to help women's rights organizations and
movements to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find
out more or donate to help them secure equal rights
for women and girls across the globe, you can go
to womankind dot org dot UK. The Girlfriend's Spotlight is
produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel,
(40:13):
visit novel dot audio. The show is hosted by me
Anna Sinfield. This episode was written and produced by Jake o'tairevich.
Our researcher is Seana Yusuf. The editor is Hannah Marshall.
Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers. Production management
from Joe Savage, Sari Houston, and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design,
(40:38):
mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music
supervision by Jakotivich, Nicholas Alexander and Dana Sinfield. Original music
composed by Louisa Gerstein and Jemma Freeman. The series artwork
was designed by Christina Limpool. Willard Foxton is creative director
of Development and Special Thanks to Katrina Norville, Carrie Lieberman
(41:01):
and will Pearson at iHeart podcasts, as well as Carl
Frankel and the whole team at w m E
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