Pennsylvania, shortly before the turn of the century: The newspaper Pittsburgh Dispatch publishes the article “What Girls are Good for”. According to the article, not for much, mainly for the household and having children. Shortly afterwards, the editorial team received an indignant letter from a reader. The author: a young woman named Elizabeth Cochran. The editorial team was so impressed by her temperament that they offered her a job. It was the beginning of a journalistic career that would shape the media world – especially for women.
In the following years, Elizabeth Cochran adopted two new names: she changed Cochran to Cochrane simply because she liked it better. She wrote her articles under the pseudonym Nellie Bly.
Nellie Bly
Source: H. J. Myers, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
As Nellie Bly, she took on topics that were unusual for female journalists of the time, even in her early twenties. Many newspapers had so-called “women's pages”. These were filled with topics that were considered interesting for women. Most of the time, these pages were about household, gardening and children. Socially critical reporting was a male domain. Nevertheless, Bly's first reports were about working women, for example in the steel industry, and criticized their working conditions.
She was criticized for this, but instead of changing her focus, she quit her job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch to become a freelancer. As a young reporter, she traveled through Mexico and sent reports to her newspaper about the living conditions of the poor and the consequences of corruption in politics and government agencies. It wasn't long before the Mexican government became annoyed with her and she had to leave the country.
Undercover research in women's psychiatric wards
Nevertheless, Bly is only at the beginning of her career: in 1887 she goes to New York and is hired by Joseph Pulitzer at the New York World. At the time, the World is one of the largest daily newspapers in the United States – and helps Nellie Bly to get into the public eye.
With undercover reporting from the Blackwell Island women's psychiatric ward, she creates a story that reads like a mixture of report and diary entry. She recounts how she fakes mental illness and gets herself admitted to the facility. She talks about the treatment and abuse of the patients, some of whom have drastically worsened after being admitted. From her observations, Bly gained the impression that anyone who was not ill before became ill after their stay. The report caused a stir and led to a court investigation. Finally, funds were made available to improve conditions in psychiatric institutions. With Ten Days in a Madhouse, Bly not only changed society, she also created one of the first examples of investigative journalism.
From then on, Nellie Bly often went undercover, sometimes as a prostitute, sometimes as a patient on the operating table. Time and again, she put herself in risky situations, and as a woman she sometimes gained insights that a male reporter would have been denied. Afterwards, she reported on them accurately and entertainingly. She became a pioneer for an entire movement of women: the so-called “girl stunt reporters”.
A new way of telling stories
The “Girl Stunt Reporters” were women who, like Bly, often conducted undercover research to expose social injustices and bring about change. In doing so, they established an area that is now often referred to as the “supreme discipline” of journalism: investigative journalism. Not only was the undercover research a novelty, but the tone of the reports also differed from the usual. The articles were often humorous, written from the first-person perspective and dealt with taboo topics. What may seem sensationalist from today's perspective at the time opened up new possibilities in storytelling that captured readers' attention. The stylistic innovations were an early basis for New Journalism, a term popularized by journalist Tom Wolfe in the 1970s.
In addition, the journalists' reports were popular with readers and gave the reporters an opportunity to make themselves heard in a male-dominated media world. At the same time, the often dangerous situations they found themselves in show how far they had to go to do so. Furthermore, although their stories were popular, the journalists themselves were not necessarily so. Due to their extreme research methods and daring maneuvers, during a time when research in rainy weather was still considered “unladylike,” they lost respect in some parts of society despite their success. The term “girl stunt reporter” makes this clear and was often used pejoratively. They were not girls, but adult women, albeit very young ones. The term “stunt” also belittled what their work ultimately was: undercover journalism that often uncovered social injustices.
Helen Cusack wrote the series City Slave Girls for the Chicago Times in 1888 under the pseudonym Nell Nelson, in which she documented and criticized the working conditions and vanishingly low wages of female factory workers. To do so, she infiltrated the industry herself as a worker. In 1890, Winifred Sweet reported as Annie Laurie on the treatment of women in a public hospital in San Francisco. A doctor who physically abused women when he diagnosed them as “hysterical” was dismissed. Sweet had faked a circulatory collapse on the street for her story and had herself admitted to the hospital as a patient. Other women remained anonymous in their reporting and remain unknown to this day. However, their journalistic works irrevocably influenced the media world.
With Ten Days in a Madhouse, Nellie Bly set a movement in motion that changed journalism. Her career was far from over. The full story of Bly can be heard in the podcast “Frauensachen”. The podcast is produced by students at the TU Dortmund University and is broadcast on campus radio eldoradio*, among others. The author of this text is one of the producers of “Frauensachen”.
Copyright: European Journalism Observatory (EJO)
The Institute of Communication Studies (ICS) is a member of the European Journalism Observatory (EJO). The views expressed on this site are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, and positions of the EJO and ICS.
