Nellie Bly - more than just an Amusement Park

 

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth
Cochran  on May 4th, 1864.    

    It's funny to think I always used to beg my parents, "can we please go to Nellie Bly?", "I really want to go to Nellie Bly." Young Gabrielle thought nothing of the name of Nellie Bly, other than the fact it was my favorite amusement park to go to as a kid. It wasn't until recently that I learned that she was in fact a real person - and a remarkable one at that!

    Nellie Bly got her foot in the door when she wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Dispatch to emphasize her feelings about an article they printed that represented women in a negative way. The Pittsburgh Dispatch printed her rebuttal and she was soon offered a job as a columnist. This is where her pen name was born - Nellie Bly!

  Because she felt so strongly about the mistreatment of women, she was often asked to write pieces that addressed women. One of of her most recognized work is Ten Day's in a Mad House. After moving to NYC, she was out of work and she went undercover into the Women's Lunatic Asylum. To get admitted, she had to fake madness and was deemed mentally unfit/ unstable. She then went on to expose the operations of the asylum to show that women were being abused and tortured.

    The patients there were going through both physical and psychological abuse. For example, patients were forced to take ice cold baths to then remain in the soaking wet clothes for hours at a time. This caused the women to get ill many times throughout the year. Another mistreatment Bly reveals is that patients were forced to sit still for up to twelve hours a time without speaking or moving.

  She was able to gain attention and used this power to help the women who were suffering. This helped her career gain new heights and her hands-on approach became what we now know as investigative journalism.  At the time, it wasn't common for journalists to get their hands dirty and report from a personal experience. Bly put herself in the asylum and was able to get an amazing report rather than someone who was looking from the outside in.

 I thought it was so cool to learn that this type of journalism was routed in the life of Nellie Bly. Bly was on her way to becoming a renowned American Journalist.

 After reading the book Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, Bly took it upon herself to do it too - but broke the record within 72 days in 1889. Bly wrote her own book on her travels entitled Around the World in Seventy-Two Days 1890.

Bly's courage and determination to circumnavigate over 25,000 miles led her to beating the world record, even her own guess which was 75 days.

All in all, Bly was the most famous American Journalist of her time - the 19th century. Her investigation and unique storytelling led to legal action, improvements for treating the mentally ill and sparked curiosity within her readers.

 "Bly" became a synonym for a female star reporter. It's amazing to think such an amazing Journalist gained her career on my stomping grounds, and I just learned about her recently!

    

Nellie Bly Park, Brooklyn, New York, opened in 1966