In the Spotlight:
Stunt Reporters and Muckrakers

Portrait of Nellie Bly from 1890. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-97448

In 1889, Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg traveled around the world in 80 days. The following year, a daring female reporter insisted that she could do better. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, or “Nellie Bly ,” used ships, camels, rickshaws, and other modes of transportation to circle the globe in 72 days. The publicity she received was an immense inspiration to adventurous women.

Elizabeth Cochrane was born in Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania in 1867. The death of her father left the family poor, and she moved to Pittsburgh to find employment at age 16. She had barely arrived when she read a Pittsburgh Dispatch editorial arguing that women should be confined to the domestic sphere. She responded with a letter to the editor, and her eloquence convinced editor George Madden to hire her. Adopting the pen name of Nellie Bly, she remained at the Dispatch until 1887, when publishing mogul Joseph Pulitzer recruited her to join the staff of the New York World.

“Round the World in Nellie Bly” board game. Each square is one of the 73 days of her journey around the world in a circular pattern, with images of Bly, Jules Verne, a steamship, and a train. Library pf Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-02918

 

Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum. The name has no connection to the famed feminist family of physicians Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, nor to their sisters-in-law, Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Lucy Stone, who married Henry Blackwell. New York Public Library.

But she was not merely a stunt maker: Bly's undercover reporting pioneered the field of investigative journalism and had a profound effect on social reform. She frequently posed as a factory worker or as a potential victim of scam artists and then wrote about her mistreatment. Perhaps her most stunning act was when she feigned insanity and committed herself to the Blackwell Insane Asylum to expose abuse of the mentally ill. She also went to Mexico , wrote about government corruption, and was expelled from that country.