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When I volunteered to write this week’s Inspiring Women, I’d just returned from San Francisco, and was eager to write about a famous female writer. “Who should I talk about?” I asked myself. “Madeleine L’Engle? Louisa May Alcott? One of the Bronte sisters?” Because those are the names I grew up with, those are the authors whose words formed much of my reading taste.

But then, while moving some books from my old office to my new writing studio, I tripped over a worn copy of another childhood favorite, Harriet the Spy, and that triggered my memory of one of America’s first female journalists: Nellie Bly. It wasn’t until after I began my research on her that I learned about her childhood nickname, Pink, which only makes her more appropriate a subject, at least for me.

Nellie Bly, whose real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was born in the year 1922 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, which is about 40 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Her father was an associate justice, but he died when she was six. When Nellie was nine, her mother remarried, only to sue for divorce five years later. Nellie – or Pink, as she was known because of a fondness for the color – testified against her stepfather, who was drunken and violent. It was shortly after this that she added the ‘e’ to her last name, making it “Cochrane,” which she thought seemed more sophisticated. (I’m suddenly wondering if Lucy Maude Montgomery drew any inspiration for naming one Miss Shirley “Anne with an ‘e’” because of Bly’s story, but it’s probably just coincidence.)

In 1880, Nellie and her family moved to Pittsburgh, where a sexist column in the local paper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to pen a rather fiery letter to the editor, who invited her to join the staff. As it was customary for female journalists to use pen names, Pink turned to a Stephen Foster song, and chose the name Nellie Bly.

Her early work for the Dispatch focused on the plight of working women, and included a series of articles about female factory workers, but she was pressured to cover more traditionally “female” topics, such as fashion society, and gardening. Unhappy with those assignments, Bly relocated to Mexico and became a foreign correspondent. She was just 21 years old at the time.

Nellie spent half a year in Mexico, and her dispatches were eventually published as a book titled Six Months in Mexico. She left the country in order to avoid arrest: the Mexican authorities were displeased by her protest of the imprisonment of a local journalist who had criticized the local government.

During her career, Nellie became famous first for faking a mental disorder in order to do an expose on an asylum, and later, for an historic trip around the world inspired by the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Her trip lasted seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds, and not only became a world record (at least for a few months), but also put her in position as a role model for female travelers, and a symbol of independence for all women, as she made the journey unescorted.

In 1894, Nelly Bly married Robert Seaman, millionaire, manufacturer, and septuagenarian (and 44 years her senior). She retired from journalism and became president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co, which produced steel containers (like milk cans), and even invented and patented the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon drum still in wide use today. While Bly was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States for several years, mismanagement eventually forced her to go bankrupt, and she turned to journalism once more, covering the woman’s suffrage convention in 1913, as well as stories from the battle front during World War I.

Nellie Bly died in 1922, in New York.

Posted by Melissa in Inspiring Women |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 2:05 am and is filed under Inspiring Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.