Nellie Bly, known for her book Ten Days in a Madhouse, was born in 1864 just outside of Pittsburgh. She would become a true suffragette and leader in women’s voices. Nellie grew up living a typical life of domestic womanhood like many in those days, but she had a voice that needed to be heard. In 1885, she wrote to the Pittsburg Dispatch, going against an article that said the only purpose for women was to clean house and take care of children and that they had no business working outside the home. In her letter, she evoked a woman’s God-given abilities to work and do other jobs well, despite what society thought. Her passionate rebuke landed her a job with the Dispatch for $5 a week. But women weren’t respected in journalism. Women were allowed to write about food, gardening, household topics, and fashion. But Nellie wanted to be a real journalist.
Nellie Bly
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known as Nellie Bly, was born in 1862 in Cochran Pennsylvania. Her family owned the town’s mill, but after her father died when she was only six years old, her mother could no longer maintain the estate. Her mother did remarry, but that husband was abusive. So, the family was left to fend for themselves once again. Nellie attended Indiana Teacher’s College, but because of the family’s financial struggle, she wasn’t able to complete her studies there.
Elizabeth began working under the pseudonym, Nellie Bly, and gained notoriety in the 1890s. According to her biography, she began her career in 1864, at the tender age of 18, as a journalist for a newspaper. Her early worked focused on the lives of working women in factories. She later was assigned to write about fashion, gardening, and other household duties attributed to women at the time.
Feeling impatient and feeling confident in her abilities to provide the world with true journalism, from a woman’s perspective, she went to New York. She began working for The New York World in 1887. She planned to write about the immigrant experience in the United States, but she instead was offered a chance to go undercover in an insane asylum. You see, there had been reports on Blackwell Island, home to an insane asylum, that women were being horribly abused. People wanted to know more, but it was seemingly impossible to get straight answers about the actual happenings there. The truth was being swept under the rug, it seemed. Accepting this bold challenge made Bly one of the most famous female journalists of all time.
Blackwell Island
In the 1800s, Blackwell Island served as a place for incurables, prisoners, and a smallpox hospital. The insane asylum was built in 1839. The male patients were moved to kinder hospitals, while the women patients of the asylum suffered from overcrowding and horrendous conditions like being fed spoiled food.
In the early 1900s, the last of the patients were moved to other hospitals, and in 1973, the island was renamed Roosevelt Island. Many of the buildings are in disrepair but are still landmarks today.
Ten Days in a Madhouse
After receiving her assignment, Nellie then planned her journey to the asylum. She decided she was going to stay at a women’s shelter and began to dress and act strangely in order to get people’s attention. She made herself stay awake for days to make herself look and feel her worst. After scaring people there and refusing to sleep, she was sent to the courts where doctors asked her a series of questions. When she didn’t answer them in a typical way, the decision to send her for further examination was made.
At the time, it wasn’t difficult for women to be committed. Anything from depression to PMS could land a woman in an asylum. Women were particularly vulnerable to this horrific imprisonment.
But this wasn’t the case for Nellie Bly. The judge remarkably decided to send her to the Bellevue Hospital for observation only. While there, she wasn’t getting much food and was not treated well. She was already being abused before even getting to the asylum.
At only 23 years old, one thing was clear to Nellie. If she could get herself inside the insane asylum, she’d land the job of her dreams while attaining what she wanted more than anything–to become a real female voice in journalism. Once inside, she didn’t put on an act because many of the women didn’t act mad at all. She acted normal, hoping the doctors would notice so their attentiveness (or lack thereof could be noted). The doctors and nurses didn’t care that she seemed completely normal. She was treated like everyone else.
One woman, Anne Neville, that she met there claimed that she was a maid, but once she became sick from overwork, she was sent to the asylum. She felt hopeless, knowing that no one was ever going to help.
“Do you know that only insane people are sent to this pavilion?” I asked.
“Yes, I know; but I am unable to do anything. The doctors refuse to listen to me, and it is useless to say anything to the nurses.” —Ten Days in a Mad-House
The women were cold, poorly clothed, and fed. She was refused sleep and was submitted to repeated observations and interrogations. The food was often spoiled or unsuitable for eating. They were forced to take cold baths. It’s reported that they’d even use the same water and towel for every person. It became apparent–every one of the women she’d met would die there…in this torture.
Nellie said she’d seen nurses beat patients, drug them to put them to sleep, and yank their hair out of their heads. They’d taunt the women, smacking them if they ever got out of line. The women were even disciplined for crying. All of this caused Nellie to lose faith in doctors, understandably so.
“My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head – ice-cold water, too – into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.” {2}
She later wrote how women were forced to sit in uncomfortable straight-back benches for hours on end, all day. She described it as a “human rat trap. Easy to get in, but once there, it is impossible to get out.” After ten days, a lawyer from The New York World got her released, but the others were not so lucky. She felt the treatment she received there would have made any sane woman lose her mind.
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? . . . Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
She then began documenting every aspect of her experience in a sensational exposé on the inside happenings of the insane asylum. Her one goal–evoke the hearts of readers to do something about it. She further developed a style of journalism that would eventually be called “stunt journalism.” Her articles rose to the top of the journalistic society. She took all of this to court and demanded help for the patients. Jurors were taken there, but Blackwell Island had cleaned up things a bit since the release of her articles. The city gave them a large sum of money to turn things around, and several of the staff were fired, despite claiming that what Nellie wrote was a lie.
Her experience in the mental institution was just the beginning, though. Over the years, she became many characters to expose all sorts of social injustices. At one point, she covered a story every week; therefore, giving historians lots to draw from. She was, at heart, a storyteller. And some people didn’t appreciate the stretched truths that were inevitable in stunt journalism. Her thinking was that they were justified if they helped people in the end.
In 1889, she even went on a journey around the world in seventy-two days with only “one dress and no trunk.” Most rebelliously for the time, she didn’t have a male to accompany her. She wrote about her travels but found herself bored. People began to cast ballots on when she’d arrive where, trying to guess the exact date, time, and location of her travels. She’d become somewhat of a living legend–her stunts became the story, sometimes overshadowing whatever she was covering.
She believed herself, Nellie Bly, as a fictional character. She did impossible things, and people took notice. In the end, she had changed the nation’s view of women, madness, and journalism.
In 1895, Nellie married Robert Seaman, a millionaire, and retired from journalism. He died in 1903. Having been left with his manufacturing company, her grit and determination once again surfaced, and she flourished. She went on to patent many inventions in oil manufacturing.
It wasn’t until her later years that Nellie returned to journalism, covering a topic very dear to her heart–women’s suffrage. She also covered World War I. Nellie Bly died from pneumonia on January 27, 1922. She was only 57 years old.
If you’re interested in learning more about insane asylums, be sure to listen to the St. Albans episode. Much like the Blackwell Island’s asylum, St. Albans Sanatorium in Episode 20 has a haunted past.
It’s difficult to look back on history and see how people were treated with mental illness, it’s equally tough to imagine a time when people, most especially women, were locked away who weren’t suffering from illness at all. But it’s stories like Nellie’s that encourage us to continue to fight the injustices in the world.
Never underestimate a determined and compassionate woman.
Written by Vanessa K. Eccles.
Music by Kevin MacLeod and Epidemic Sound (paid license).