Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  So Elizabeth Cochrane came to be hired as a reporter for the Dispatch, at a salary of five dollars a week. Before her next article was published (this one on divorced women, another subject close to her heart), George Madden called her into his office and informed her that she needed a pen name. At the time, it was considered uncouth for a woman to sign her own name to a news story. The Dispatch’s own Elizabeth Wilkinson Wade wrote as “Bessie Bramble”; in New York, Sara Payson Willis was “Fanny Fern”; in Boston, Sally Joy (which itself sounded like a pen name) was known instead as “Penelope Penfeather.” He was looking for a name, George Madden said, that was “neat and catchy.” Together the two considered several possibilities, but none seemed quite right. It was late in the afternoon; the light from the gas lamps cast flickering shadows on the wallpaper. From upstairs an editor called for his copy. An office boy walked by whistling a popular tune of the day, written by the local songwriter Stephen Foster:

  Nelly Bly! Nelly Bly! Bring de broom along,

  We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear,

  And hab a little song.

  The name was short, it was catchy, and best of all, the public already liked it. Madden instructed the typesetter to give the story the byline “Nelly Bly”—but the typesetter misspelled the first name, and as a result of the erratum she was forever after Nellie Bly.

  OF THE 12,308 AMERICANS listed as journalists in the 1880 U.S. census, only 288—just over 2 percent—were women. The number whose writing appeared in the news sections of the newspaper, as Nellie Bly’s would in the Dispatch, was far smaller still. By the 1880s many American papers, recognizing that women were an as yet untapped market, had created a separate women’s page, featuring articles devoted to the topics in which women were thought to be most interested: fashion, shopping, recipes, homemaking, child rearing, and the doings of high society. Articles discussing the medicinal uses of arrowroot, or the proper sequence of brown and white sauces in a formal dinner, or the gowns worn at a recent cotillion, or why women were afraid of mice—the women’s page was where they would appear, written in a suitably cozy tone, and likely interspersed with earnest couplets about love or the weather, and perhaps a review of a new romantic novel or volume of poetry. The articles were not only directed at women but were overwhelmingly written by them; male editors justified their reliance on female contributors to fill this section by explaining that it was where their natural aptitude lay—as, for instance, the editor of the New York Telegram, who once pointed out that in reporting on society functions, “A man must examine minutely a woman’s costume in order to describe it, where a woman would take the whole thing in at a glance.”

  For some female journalists it was where they felt most comfortable, but for others the banishment to the women’s page brought only boredom, frustration, and despair at the waste of their talents. In an 1890 Harper’s Weekly article entitled “A Woman’s Experience of Newspaper Work,” a reporter who gave her name only as J.L.H. described her long and fruitless effort to escape society reporting. “I think there is no class of employment in the world which I would have liked less than professional intrusion upon the august movements of the élite,” she wrote; “but again it was no question of choice. I was obliged to accept the position of society reporter because managers stoutly maintained that there was nothing else about a newspaper office which a woman could do.” The year before, in an article for The Journalist, the newspaper writer Flora McDonald likewise bemoaned the sorry lot of the intelligent, ambitious female reporter forced to attend one dreary society event after another. “Life,” wrote McDonald, “becomes to her one long-drawn-out five o’clock tea of somebody else. She is in the swim, but not of it, and, recording the flops and flounders of the big fish, she in time descends to a state of mental and moral petrifaction that is simply awful. One woman says ‘society reporting is prostitution of brains.’ Oh, that it were no worse! It is prostitution of soul, too.”

  The female contributors to the women’s page rarely appeared in the newspaper office itself; far more often they wrote their pieces at home and sent them in by mail. Like the saloon or the voting booth, the newsroom was considered an improper place for a woman, as it naturally included a good deal of cigar smoking and tobacco chewing, the occasional slug from a bottle or flask, and copious use of what were then termed Anglo-Saxon words. In 1892 a shocked editor was heard to exclaim, when asked if he would ever hire a woman to work in his newsroom, “A woman—never! Why, you can’t say d—— to a woman!” The newsroom was a place where men could smoke and drink and swear without fear of a woman’s disapproval, and also without fear of corrupting her character, as exposure to the harsh realities of big-city newspaper life was generally believed to erode the qualities in women most prized by men. “I have never yet seen a girl enter the newspaper field but that I have noticed a steady decline in that innate sense of refinement, gentleness and womanliness with which she entered it,” observed one male newspaper editor. “Young womanhood,” rhapsodized another, “is too sweet and sacred a thing to couple with the life of careless manner, hasty talk, and unconventional action that seems inevitable in a newspaper office.”

  For all of the airy talk, though, exclusion from the newsroom had very real and damaging effects on the chances of a woman’s career success. As journalism schools did not yet exist, young reporters traditionally learned their trade in what was called the school of experience—one that female reporters found almost impossible to enter. Routinely a young man was brought into a newspaper office to serve as an office boy (the very term indicated who was expected to occupy the position), where he swept the floor, delivered copy, ran errands, learned what an editor expected of his reporters and subeditors, and watched how stories were written and rewritten, over time gaining increasingly greater responsibilities, which, if all went well, ultimately led to his being allowed to try his hand at reporting. When his work was found to be lacking, the offense was most often met not with an editor’s gentle admonishment but with long and fluent tirades of abuse, punctuated by curses and threats against his health, the type of rough instruction that had long been understood to be the most effective means of imparting newspaper wisdom, but that most editors would not dare impose on more delicate female sensibilities. And so the young newspaperwoman was left to ply her trade on teas and trousseaux while the rest of the world went on without her.

  “A great deal of the practical training of a newspaper office is beyond the sphere into which a woman can enter,” The Epoch pointed out in 1889, “and the scope of her work, no less than the fullness of her information, must be limited by this fact.” It simply would not do to ask a woman to perform the tasks routinely asked of male reporters—to travel by herself at night, and in all kinds of weather; to pursue stories wherever they led, into tenements and dance halls and barrooms and gambling dens; to consort with criminals and policemen alike; to be present at riots and strikes and fires and other municipal disturbances; to uncover the lies spoken and misdeeds committed by men who held positions of power. For a woman to engage in such behavior was not only risky, it was also improper, undignified, and unseemly: in a word, unladylike.

  Of course, there were notable exceptions to the rule, women who proved themselves to be outstanding journalists, such as the political reporter Jane Grey Swisshelm. A feminist and abolitionist, Swisshelm was also a contributor to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. In 1850, during a brief visit to Washington, she came to call on Vice President Millard Fillmore, asking him to assign her a press seat in the Senate gallery. “He was much surprised and tried to dissuade me,” Swisshelm recalled later; the vice president said that she would attract unwanted attention, that “the place would be very unpleasant for a lady.” But Swisshelm was persistent, and finally Fillmore relented. The next day she observed Senate proceedings from a seat in the gallery—the first woman ever to do so. In one of her columns Jane Grey Swisshelm ridiculed the scorn and consternation directed at women who had decided that they wante
d to go into journalism, or any other intellectual profession:

  They plough, harrow, reap, dig, make hay, rake, bind grain, thrash, chop wood, milk, churn, do anything that is hard work, physical labor, and who says anything against it? But let one presume to use her mental powers—let her aspire to turn editor, public speaker, doctor, lawyer—take up any profession or avocation which is deemed honorable and requires talent, and O! bring cologne, get a cambric kerchief and feather fan, unloose his corsets and take off his cravat! What a fainting fit Mr. Propriety has taken! Just to think that “one of the dear creatures”—the heavenly angels—should forsake the sphere—women’s sphere—to mix with the wicked strife of this wicked world!

  In the United States, of course, the press had always been one of the centers of social power, the so-called fourth estate, and throughout the nineteenth century the near-total segregation of women within it was justified as being for their own good (by not exposing them to coarse male behavior) or, conversely, by their own fault. Though women writers were widely acknowledged to possess wit, imagination, liveliness, and sympathy in abundance, they supposedly lacked other qualities—good judgment, lucid thinking, and clarity of prose—that were essential for proper journalism. “Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod style,” the British writer Arnold Bennett observed in his 1898 book Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide. “They have earned it.” Among the weaknesses that Bennett diagnosed in women’s writing were wordiness, overuse of metaphor and simile, and, more generally, “gush and a tendency to hysteria.” It was an opinion not infrequently shared by women who had succeeded in other fields of writing, such as, for instance, the renowned poet Julia Ward Howe, who in the pages of The Epoch advised newspaper editors not to employ “women of fluent pen and chaotic mind, who can furnish a farrago of sentiment or of satire upon a variety of topics without any availing perception of judgment regarding any one of them.” In the monthly The Galaxy, another poet and essayist of the day, Nelly Mackay Hutchinson, took women writers to task for slovenliness, spitefulness, and a “jelly-like inaccuracy of thought and expression.” Before a woman could be entrusted with a responsible position on a newspaper, pronounced Hutchinson, “both the nature and social position of woman must be transformed.… She must have constant practiced political experience. And she must never let her sympathies, prejudices, and antipathies run too violently away with her. While woman is woman I’m afraid that this latter requirement will not be met.”

  Unprotected by either a union or a press club—the Women’s Press Club was not founded until 1889—women reporters had to pursue their trade in a work environment that all too often included unwanted sexual advances (one anonymous female journalist of the time attested, “Women in absolutely every other line of work are not assailed to such an extent by individuals of the opposite sex as is the newspaper woman”) and salaries much lower than those earned by their male colleagues. In Harper’s, J.L.H. noted that she was often not paid at all for her published work, while another writer said that she was paid in “compliments” rather than cash. Another estimated that she wrote for more than two years before she ever received her first five-dollar payment.

  The female journalist who resisted these inequities, who defied social convention, who endured despite the many obstacles placed in her way, was a kind of pioneer, marking out new territory in a forbidding landscape with few protections and few companions to share the load. As late as 1889, the year that Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland set off around the world (by which time enough women had entered the field that The Journalist published a “special women’s issue” celebrating the work of female journalists, Bly and Bisland among them), Flora McDonald could still point out that for “any well-balanced woman who works among newspaper men, one thousand and one causes make hers the miserable experience of a freak—the ‘only and original one of its kind on earth.’ ” The successful female journalist, McDonald suggested, should be composed of “one part nerve and two parts India rubber.”

  IN HER FIRST MONTHS at the Dispatch, Nellie Bly produced an eight-part series on the working conditions faced by women in Pittsburgh’s factories. It was the sort of piece she did best: about people much like her, working people, especially women, who tried to maintain their dignity, perhaps even have a bit of fun, in the face of hardship. At the Dispatch she wrote about clerks and chorus girls, servants and religious sectarians. She advocated the establishment of a women’s version of the Young Men’s Christian Association, where “poor girls” would find “a place that will offer and give assistance.” Bly did all she could to resist being confined to the women’s page; she was, as she would later write, “too impatient to work along at the usual duties assigned women on newspapers.” Still, George Madden insisted, and eventually she found herself writing articles on topics including ladies’ hair care, rubber raincoats, and a local minister with a collection of fifty thousand butterflies.

  One evening, about nine months after she had started work at the Dispatch, Bly was listening to two of her family’s boarders, young railroad workers, discuss their plans someday to travel to Mexico; it was possible, they said, to take a train the whole way there. That night she was too excited to sleep; early the next morning she hurried into the Dispatch office and begged George Madden to allow her to become the paper’s correspondent in Mexico. Madden replied that the idea was out of the question. It was far too dangerous, he said; too many Americans had traveled below the border and simply disappeared. Still Bly persisted, and eventually, possibly by enticing the editor with the prospect of the circulation gains that might be gotten, she managed to win Madden over.

  Bly was thrilled by the prospect of the new journalistic enterprise that awaited her, but shortly before her departure she experienced an uncharacteristic loss of nerve at the prospect of traveling alone and asked her mother if she would like to come along as a chaperone. By this time Nellie’s four siblings were either working or married, and her mother agreed to join her. Bly secured railroad tickets for them, and together they set off for Mexico.

  The trip south was dreamlike, full of unexpected vistas. One evening as they went to bed the surrounding hills were covered with snow; the next morning, when they arose from their bunks, the world was warm and in bloom. From the train’s observation car the two women gazed awestruck at the vast expanses of land. They passed cotton fields that, waving in the breeze, looked like foaming breakers rushing toward the shore; they inhaled the perfume of immense, gaudily colored flowers. After three days they reached the town of El Paso, where, with some regrets at the prospect of the trip’s end, they boarded an overnight train for Mexico City.

  Nellie Bly spent five months in Mexico. Seemingly unhampered by what she admitted was her “very limited Spanish,” she brought the Dispatch’s readers along with her to bullfights, theaters, historic tombs; in Mexico City she found a street, apparently unknown to Americans, on which there was nothing but coffin manufacturers. Time and again, in her wandering, she encountered something that surprised or delighted her: the wreaths woven of honeysuckle and roses worn by native women on the Feast of the Flowers; ice cream made by pouring sweetened milk over snow brought down from a nearby volcano; teenage boys calling up to the balconies of their beloved, like a scene out of Romeo and Juliet. She observed how in Mexico it was considered polite, even complimentary, for a man to stare at a woman on the streets—“I might add,” she wrote, “that the men, by this rule, are remarkably polite.” She visited remote villages patrolled by their own armies, where the soldiers smoked cigarettes made from an herb called marijuana, each taking a draw and blowing the smoke into the mouth of the man sitting next to him; the intoxication was said to last five days, “and for that period they are in Paradise.”

  The longer she spent in Mexico, the more clearly she could see that almost everything Americans thought they knew about the country was wrong. The Mexicans she had met, Bly told her readers, were in the main not malicious, quarrelsome, dissolute, or dishonest; in fact,
the worst purveyors of untruths about Mexico—the colony of expatriate Americans living there—were the very ones who treated the natives the most shabbily, who took kindnesses as insults and addressed faithful servants as beasts and fools. Nor during her time in Mexico had she ever experienced the dangers about which she had been so fulsomely warned, all the lazy-minded American clichés about how thieves and murderers lurked around every corner. She wrote, “The women—I am sorry to say it—are safer here than on our streets, where it is supposed everybody has the advantage of education and civilization.”

  Bly was sending her reports regularly back to Pittsburgh, where they were published in the Dispatch; eventually word of one of her articles, about the arrest of a local newspaper editor who had dared to criticize the government, came to the attention of some Mexican government officials. Before long they were threatening to arrest her for violating Article 33 of the country’s constitution, which barred foreigners from participating “in any way” in Mexico’s politics. Facing the prospect of an extended stay in a Mexican jail, Bly returned to Pittsburgh with her mother, one month earlier than they had intended. Back home, she lashed out at the corruption of the Mexican political system, which she derided as “a republic only in name, being in reality the worst monarchy in existence.” One of her articles described how the recently retired president Manuel González had enriched himself by some $25 million during his four years in office; another criticized Mexico’s newspapers as little more than “tools of the organized ring.” The Mexican people themselves understood how newspapers were complicit in their exploitation, and as a consequence it was possible to travel all day in Mexico and never see a man reading one. “They possess such a disgust for newspapers,” Bly observed, “that they will not even use one of them as a subterfuge to hide behind in a street car when some woman with a dozen bundles, three children and two baskets is looking for a seat.”