In honor of InternationalWomensDay2020, we're resharing some of our favorite stories about women in history.
“Do you think life is worth living?” the young man asked, somewhat menacingly. The year was 1889, and the man had been hounding 23-year-old journalist Nellie Bly for the past few days as they traveled on a ship from Singapore to Hong Kong. Now, on a stormy evening, he had her alone on deck, and his tone had become threatening. “Yes, life is very sweet,” Bly answered, but the man continued talking wildly, sitting at the foot of her deck chair.
The divorce was granted in 1879. Pink was 15. To help support her adored mother, she enrolled in the State Normal School in nearby Indiana, Pennsylvania , intending to make money in one of the few ways a woman could at the time—even though she’d never been a good student . Away from home for the first time, she added a sophisticated silent-e to her last name.
“What shall we do with our girls?” asked Orphan Girl. Not the exceptional ones, but those “without talent, without beauty, without money.” The answer was, she thought, to treat “our girls” like boys: Train them for jobs that weren’t those traditionally held by women, as office messengers, for example, or traveling merchants, and pay them the same wages. “We have in mind an incident that happened in your city.
"He shot down her proposal to report on the immigrant experience by traveling from Europe to the United States in steerage, and instead assigned her to report on the conditions at the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum—from the perspective of an inmate." The situation was untenable for an ambitious young reporter. Bly left The Dispatch and moved to New York in May 1887. There, she ran into a wall of resistance.
Oddly, Bly ran the risk of being outed, not by inmates or doctors who spotted a fake, but by reporters trying to identify the “mystery girl” they had seen at the police court, who, while apparently insane, appeared otherwise healthy and well cared for. A reporter who recognized her in the yard at the Island agreed to keep her secret. After 10 days, The World sent an attorney to release her “to the care of friends.
Nellie Bly’s biggest stunt is the one for which she is probably best remembered. The idea came to her, she said, on a Sunday night. She needed a vacation; why not take a trip around the world? Better yet, why not have The World pay for it? Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days had been a bestseller upon its American publication in 1873. In the novel, a rich British man, Phileas Fogg, along with his valet, Passepartout, races to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days in order to win a wager.
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