What Everyone Should Know is a bi-weekly column on women’s history.

Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a.k.a Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

My interest in women’s history was sparked at a young age by the story of one woman: Nellie Bly. I was eleven years old when I found her story in the children’s literature section of my local library. I had been browsing through the collection of choose-your-own-ending books (to which I was addicted) when I stumbled across a slim volume that had been mis-shelved. A smart-looking woman graced the cover wearing a Victorian shirtwaist and a tidy bun. I flipped it over and scanned the back. The woman on the front had apparently been a reporter, and according to the blurb had single-handedly changed the institution of reporting through her radical methodology. She would do anything to find the real story. My curiosity was piqued and the book went into the stack I checked out that day; the rest, as they say, is history.

Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born in 1864, and was christened that year in a pink gown, which gained her notoriety at an early age, and the eternal nickname, “Pink.” She was born into a comfortable existence provided by her father, a judge, and her mother. Her father died when she was six years old, leaving her family without a will and thus destitute; her mother remarried quickly, per the custom of the time. Cochran’s step-father turned out to be abusive. These developments in her childhood led her to be outspoken and strident in her beliefs, skills that served her well in her career choice, but which would cause her heartache in life because of her gender and the expectations of women at the time.

At the tender age of 18, young Elizabeth Cochran wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch in response to an article she had read that she considered offensive and denigrating toward women. She was already a women’s rights activist, and signed the letter “Lonely Orphan Girl.” The editor, George Madden, was so impressed with the quality of the letter that he published it and asked the girl to step forward. The next day she did, and in so doing secured her first job as a reporter. The year was 1882, and women were not a common feature of newsrooms at all. In fact, it was so uncommon that Mr. Madden and Ms. Cochran decided upon a pen name for her—Nellie Bly, from a 35 year old Stephen Collins Foster song.

What earned Nellie Bly her place in history, however, was her invention of investigative reporting. In her first such venture into investigation, Bly pretended to be a shop worker and went to work in what we now call sweat shops. The shop owners employed people, mostly women, to make clothing, hats, and accessories, and did not pay them a living wage. Worse, the mostly female workforce was subjected to incredibly poor working conditions, including facilities without heat in the winter, being locked in, working 12-16 hour days, being denied food, and of course, sexual harassment and abuse. The articles Bly wrote detailing these conditions were hugely popular, but the shop owners retaliated by threatening to pull their advertising from the paper unless she was stopped. She was reassigned to the “fashion beat,” and promptly decided to leave for Mexico, where she coyly reported on Mexican fashion and politics to the Pittsburgh Dispatch for the next six months.

Upon her return, she bypassed Pittsburgh and went straight to New York City. After a lot of fancy foot work (that you can read more about here), she landed a job with Joseph Pulitzer’s The New York World, at the time one of the biggest media outlets in New York. There she would realize her biggest scoop, and risked her life in the pursuit of truth.

In 1887, 23 year old Nellie Bly had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Her assignment was to report on the conditions, and she convinced her editors that she could not do that without getting an inside-view. She spent several months in the facility and was eventually denied release when the wardens didn’t believe her story. Men from the newspaper had to come and explain her story in order to get her released. She finally was released, several pounds slimmer and in poor health. Nevertheless, her stories of what women endured in the asylum increased the paper’s circulation and led to significant changes in the treatment of women at the Blackwell facility. This experience also kicked off what has been referred to as the “Stunt Age” for women, whereby women were willing to risk their lives in order to break into male-dominated fields.

There is much, much more to Bly’s story, including a trip around the world in a balloon, for which she submitted reports to the New York World. Bly was able to accomplish all of this as a teenager and woman in her 20s at a time when women were discouraged from doing anything except marrying men and having their children. In taking these risks, Nellie Bly brought about change in the newspaper business, in the sweatshop industry, and in the treatment of mental illness for women. One woman changed all of that in a world that was against her from the beginning because of her gender. Imagine what we can do today, with all of our freedom and privilege. Perhaps the importance of Bly’s story is that we are not as powerless as we think we are.