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Early life Elizabeth Jane Cochran, nicknamed "Pink" for wearing that color as a child, was born in Cochran's Mills, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, forty miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Her father, a wealthy former associate justice, died when she was six. Her mother remarried three years later, but sued for divorce when Pink was fourteen; Pink testified in court against her drunken, violent stepfather. As a teenager she changed her surname to Cochrane, apparently adding the "e" for sophistication. She attended boarding school for one term, but dropped out due to a lack of funds. In 1880, Pink and her family moved to Pittsburgh. A sexist column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor; impressed with her earnestness and spirit, he asked her to join the paper. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Pink the editor chose "Nellie Bly", the title character in a popular song by Stephen Foster. Bly focused in her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Impatient with these duties, she took the initiative and travelled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Then twenty-one, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the incarceration of a local journalist imprisoned for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Diaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press. Asylum exposé Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's sensationalist newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a working-class boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she begged amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged. She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one—"I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where some one will take care of her." After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The Worlds behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. Around the world
Later years Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman in 1894, who at 72 was fourty-four years her senior. She retired from journalism, and after her husband's death in 1904, she ran his companies. For a time she was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States, but mismanagement forced her into bankruptcy. Forced back into reporting, she covered such events a women's suffrage convention in 1913, and stories on Europe's eastern front during World War I. In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Nellie look after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and difficult to place since he was half Japanese. He spent the next six years in an orphanage run by the Church of All Nations in Manhattan. As Nellie became ill towards the end of her life she requested her niece, Beatrice Brown, look after the boy and several other babies that she had become interested in. Her interest in orphanages may have been part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the day. At the age of 57, Elizabeth "Pink" Cochrane died of pneumonia. The Nellie Bly Amusement Park in Brooklyn, New York City, is named after her, taking as its theme Around the World in Eighty Days. Notes | ||||||||||||
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