Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly was one of the most groundbreaking female journalists in American history!

She began her journalistic career before she was 20 years old. Working in a time when very few women had ever achieved a great deal of success in journalism, Nelly Bly broke every mold and every expectation as to what a woman could do in the ‘man’s world’ of newspaper reporting. Smart, fearless, and determined, Nellie Bly fearlessly exposed the harsh, unfair working conditions for mill workers in Pittsburgh, drawing the ire of the richest people in the city. She then served as her newspaper’s foreign correspondent in Mexico before being run out of the country for exposing governmental corruption. This dangerous assignment made the petite Ms. Bly the first woman ever to be an accredited foreign correspondent for an American newspaper!

Wanting greater challenges and rejecting the stereotypical notion that female reporters should cover “women’s stories,” Nelly Bly moved to New York City. In her first assignment, for Joseph Pulitzer, she risked her life going undercover in a “mental asylum” in New York. For ten harrowing days, she was locked in an asylum where Ms. Bly was starved, tortured, and unable to secure her own release. Her bombshell reporting caused the New York City asylum to be shut down, and New York agreed to major reforms in the way they treated people with mental health issues.

Today, Nellie Bly is probably best remembered for being the first person ever to travel around the world in less than 80 days. If you are impressed with her accomplishments, let me add that she did all this before she was 25 years old!