[175 years ago Tuesday, Elizabeth Blackwell became Dr. Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a US medical school. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Blackwell and four other groundbreaking women from American history, leading up to a special weekend post on folks from our own moment!]
On a
rightly famous work of groundbreaking investigative journalism, and another
that should also be.
As I traced
in this post, the great journalist and author Fanny Fern arrived at the
women’s prison on New York’s Blackwell’s Island (literally and as a subject for
her journalism) long after she was well-established as a successful columnist—as
I argued in that post, that timing only adds to the series’ impressiveness, but
it does also mean that Fern was by no means an investigative journalist in her
career overall (and never would have defined herself as such). Whereas when Nellie Bly (the pseudonym for Elizabeth Jane
Cochran; 1864-1922) published her own sensational (in every sense) 1887
series about the Island, she had already been producing substantive
investigative journalism for many years, since she was just a hugely precocious
young writer submitting columns to the Pittsburgh Dispatch on controversial topics like the need
for divorce reform. Bly published her groundbreaking first column for the Dispatch, “The Girl
Puzzle” (1885), when she was just 20 years old, launching a career in
provocative and investigative journalism that would change the industry and
America alike.
When the Dispatch tried to limit Bly’s columns to
more conventionally “women’s” subjects like theater and the arts, she left the
newspaper and the city, moving to New York and talking her way into a
job with Joseph
Pulitzer’s New York World. She did
so by making the case for the truly groundbreaking investigative assignment
that would become her justifiably famous series on
the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (which had been renamed
Roosevelt Island). Fern visited Blackwell’s and wrote thoughtfully about what
she saw there, but Bly found a way to truly live the experience: going
undercover, first in a boarding house where she convinced the authorities
she was insane, then for a ten-day
imprisonment at the asylum (before the World reached out to identify her and request her release). She
published her reporting first in the World
in October 1887 and shortly thereafter as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887),
and in both forms her investigations and journalism alike truly altered the way
America thought about mental illness, public health, and women’s rights—as well
as about the possibilities for women journalists and all journalists.
If Bly’s
asylum work was her only investigative journalism, it would be more than enough
to establish her as a titan in that field—but it wasn’t, and indeed despite her
youth it wasn’t her first extended such assignment. Shortly after she began
writing for the Dispatch her
published a series of investigative reports on women
factory workers in the city; they were significant enough that factory owners
complained to the paper and Bly was reassigned. She then embarked on an
extended investigation that, to my mind, was at least as impressive as the
asylum one: the 21 year-old Bly traveled to Mexico and spent
six months embedded with locals, producing in-depth reporting on their
communities as well as the dictatorial government of Porfirio Díaz. The latter
reports angered the government sufficiently that Bly was forced to leave, but
not before she had accumulated enough investigative journalism to publish in the
subsequent book Six Months in Mexico (1888). I’m
not in any way trying to downplay the asylum work by suggesting that this
Mexican project was just as impressive—quite the opposite, I would argue that
both represented the best of investigative journalism, of a courageous writer
pushing into settings and stories that many of her colleagues and audiences
alike never would, and changing our collective conversations in the process.
Next
groundbreaking woman tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other groundbreaking women, past or present, you’d highlight?
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