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When she was twenty-one years old, a young woman named Elizabeth Cochran wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. The letter berated the newspaper for supporting neither women's suffrage nor the right for women to work outside the home if they so choose. The editor of the Dispatch, George Madden, was impressed by her moxie and hired her on as a journalist. The pen name she selected was Nellie Bly. The year was 1885.
From the start Nellie Bly took on controversy, eschewing the fluffy women's pieces in favor of meaty stories about social problems and wars. A year after hiring on, the paper sent her to Mexico where she observed and wrote about the tragic living conditions of the poor, the political corruption and the disparity between living conditions of the upper and lower classes. The Mexican government kicked her out.
Nonplussed, Nellie Bly went to New York where she promptly convinced Joseph Pulitzer to put her on staff at New York's most widely read newspaper, the New York World. Once employed, she went under cover in a mental institution to report on the reprehensible conditions inmates lived in. Her work sparked reforms that had been sorely needed for a very long time. In another instance she got herself arrested for theft to reveal the deplorable treatment of female prisoners.
When challenged to try to beat the Jules Verne character Phineas Fogg's fictional record of circumnavigating the globe in 80 days, she was up to it. She beat the record by almost eight days, coming in at seventy two days, six hours and eleven minutes, sending back stories of her exploits from points all around the world. Accolades came from every angle as she was honored with a line of clothing in her name, songs written about her, dances named for her, and even parades held in her honor.
Somehow in the course of all this she managed to marry, and remained married for fifteen years. Her husband died in 1910.
Then in 1911, Nellie Bly became the first woman to cover the Eastern Front in WWI. Female journalists at that time normally wrote about hearth and home. Nellie Bly wrote about war from the lines.
She returned home and retired a year later.
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