The woman stood naked, alone, and frightened. Days earlier, she had been committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. "My teeth chattered and my limbs were . . . blue with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of water over my head . . . into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth . . . I experienced the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me gasping, shivering, and quaking from the tub. For once, I did look insane." By pretending to be mentally unstable, Nellie Bly was able to write about the horrors of life in a nineteenth-century asylum from the inside, in her undercover news story "Ten Days in a Madhouse." And with this amazing story, the reporter Nellie Bly became a household name.
Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864, in the small town of Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. She was nicknamed "Pink" by her mother, Mary Jane, who routinely dressed her in that color. Pink always had an active imagination and entertained herself by making up stories. Later, as an adult, she wrote about her childhood, saying, "When I was a very little girl, I wrote love and fairy stories by the score . . . weaving tales and creating heroes and heroines simply for my own delight."
Her father, Judge Michael Cochran, had enough money and the reputation to have the town where the family lived named for him. Unfortunately for the family, the judge never prepared a will, and when he died in 1870, the family estate was auctioned off. Pink’s mother received very little of the estate. In one year, the family, which included her older brothers Albert and Charles, her younger sister, Catherine, and youngest brother, Harry, went from prominence to near poverty.
In an ill-fated attempt to help stabilize her family, Pink’s mother remarried. Unfortunately, her new husband was an alcoholic with a violent temper. Mary Jane Cochran was granted a divorce, which was unusual at that time, after Pink gave damaging testimony in court about her stepfather’s behavior. Only 14 years old, Pink recounted how her drunken stepfather repeatedly cursed her mother and once "attempted to choke her."
When she was 15, Pink enrolled in Indiana State Normal School to become a teacher. She loved school, but sadly, had to drop out after one semester for lack of money. That was all the formal education Pink would ever have, and she returned home devastated.
The family moved to Pittsburgh, and Pink was delighted to discover seven daily newspapers in the city. She loved to read and was especially fond of the Pittsburgh Dispatch and the paper’s top writer, Erasmus Wilson, whose column was filled with bits of wisdom and his personal opinions on a variety of topics. In one column, titled "What Girls Are Good For," Wilson ridiculed women who were in the business world, writing that a woman should stay home and concentrate on making "home a little paradise." Angry responses from women poured into the paper, and one letter was written by Pink. She signed it "Lonely Orphan Girl."
Wilson and his editor, George Madden, were impressed with her letter, and they placed an ad in the paper for its writer to come forward. Pink Cochran went into the offices of the Pittsburgh Dispatch and introduced herself. George Madden asked her to submit an article on the proper role of women, and he published it under the headline "The Girl Puzzle." In the article, Pink wrote, "Can they that have . . . plenty of this world’s goods realize what it is to be a poor working woman?" She wrote that girls should not be kept out of the business world, but be given a "shove up the ladder of life."
Her next article cemented her position with the newspaper, and in 1885, she became a full-time staff writer, earning five dollars a week. Madden decided that "Lonely Orphan Girl" would need a pen name. Someone in the newsroom suggested "Nelly Bly" from a popular song of the same name. In his rush to deliver the story to the printer, Madden misspelled Pink’s new name. So Elizabeth Jane "Pink" Cochran became Nellie Bly.
Although initially focusing on women’s issues, Nellie began to receive attention for her articles chronicling the lives of the poor and working-class people who suffered at the hands of big business. She invented "immersion journalism," sometimes called "stunt" reporting. For instance, in one story, Bly posed undercover as a sweatshop worker. Companies advertising in the newspaper felt Bly’s exposés were hurting business and threatened to stop paying for advertisements, so in 1886, her editors sent Nellie Bly to Mexico to report on the political corruption there. Her articles angered Mexican officials and they expelled her from the country, but eventually, her news stories were published in a book, Six Months in Mexico.
In 1887, just back from Mexico, Nellie Bly decided to go to New York City, the publishing capital of the world. She called herself "Miss Push and Get There," bluffing her way in to see a lot of editors by saying she was doing a story for the Dispatch on women journalists trying to get a job in New York. She finally fast-talked her way into the office of John Cockerill, editor of the New York World, and he hired her to write a story about the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Bly pretended to be insane and had herself committed to the asylum. She spent ten horrifying days there, and the result was a two-part series that forced the State of New York to spend one million dollars to upgrade the institution.
For her next "stunt," Nellie Bly proposed a trip around the world in less than eighty days. Her idea came from the popular book Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. People everywhere followed her progress in the newspaper, and by the time she landed back in New York in just 72 days, she was a celebrity. Bly received heaps of fan mail and many marriage proposals, and the adventure became the topic of her second book, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.
In 1895, Nellie married a millionaire industrialist many years older, and she retired from journalism for a time. When her husband died in 1904, Bly ran his business for a while, but the company went bankrupt. With the outbreak of World War I, she returned to writing as a war correspondent in Eastern Europe. In 1919, Nellie Bly came back to America, reporting for the New York Evening Journal, a job she kept until her death. She died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922, at the age of 56.
Nellie Bly was a colorful pioneer who changed the perception of women in the workplace, especially in the field of journalism. She introduced a whole new way for reporters to cover a story—from the inside—and she bravely dared to write about subjects that others found too difficult. Nellie Bly circled the world faster than any other person and never stopped writing about con artists, corrupt politicians, dishonest businessmen, and the desperate people that the rest of the world seemed to forget too easily.