Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman was born in 1864 in what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She grew up in a large family with almost fifteen siblings. When she was a young woman, she read an article claiming that a woman’s purpose was to give birth and maintain the household in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and she wrote a response to the article. The editor was impressed by it and eventually offered her a full-time job writing for the newspaper. She chose Nellie Bly as her pen name while working for the newspaper. After a while, she was unsatisfied with writing only about ‘women’s’ interests like fashion and gardening, and at 21, she became a correspondent to Mexico.
Cochrane lived in Mexico for six months, where she wrote a report criticizing the Mexican government for the oppression of the Mexican people and manipulation of the press. She was threatened with arrest by the government, causing her to flee the country back to the United States. Several months later, she had the opportunity to write an article about the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York. Cochrane did more than interview people, she took on a fake name and got herself admitted into the asylum. She maintained her fake identity for ten days, recording the abuse the patients for the asylum experienced.
Cochrane was admitted to the asylum, claiming to have amnesia. Once she was inside, she stopped pretending to have symptoms, and all the staff continued to claim she was mentally insane. Cochrane found that the patients endured terrible conditions with spoiled food, unsafe drinking water, rats living inside the building, beatings from the staff, and they were washed with freezing water and towels that were never cleaned. The asylum refused to release Cochrane after she revealed herself until a representative from the newspaper she worked for came to asylum. After her release, she wrote “Ten Days in a Mad-House” about the deplorable conditions in the asylum. The article brought about an investigation into the asylum and led to reforms of all asylums. She became world-renowned for her articles. She continued her career as a journalist, writing about World War I and women’s suffrage until she died in 1922. Cochrane’s “Ten Days in a Mad-House” led to a wave of women entering the field of journalism and following in her footsteps in investigative journalism.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly