I’m finally catching up on some of the amazing women’s journeys I’ve been wanting to write about. I’ll write one today and hopefully the next few soon. Thank you for your patience! I did write a post for my church blog recently, and you can read that here https://www.citysalt.org/blog/2019/9/13saltandlight-jj if you’re interested.
For this post, I bring to you an early American superstar reporter. She even pioneered her style of investigative journalism. I recently discovered Elizabeth Cochrane, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly. After I read about her, I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her before!
Remember the classic Jules Verne book, Around the World in 80 Days? Well, Nellie Bly decided to beat it. In the late 1800s. By herself. This was after multiple career-defining experiences (I don’t want to sound like the encyclopedia articles I’ve read, so I’ll just briefly mention them) such as living in México for several months to report on government corruption and the plight of the poor there, and going undercover at a mental institution (by faking her own insanity) to report on the conditions there. Dang, girl! For a single woman in the 1800s, that was pretty gutsy!
She decided to race around the world in nearly every kind of transportation imaginable, except airplanes, because they didn’t exist yet. The story would be covered in the newspaper she worked for, Joseph Pulitzer’s the New York World. She left in November 1889. A rival journal, Cosmopolitan, sent their own woman traveler, Elizabeth Bisland, in order to beat her, but Bly kept on her own plans, not interested in beating anyone except the fictional hero in Verne’s novel. Is this the same Cosmopolitan that I see in stores nowadays, that seems obsessed with fashion and makeup and other things that don’t interest me? I hope they go back to cool stunts like racing women around the world! Anyway, back to the story. Bly beat Bisland, making it around the world in 72 days. Her newspaper had made a board game and public contest out of her trip to keep readers engaged.
I’ll let you do the work of looking her up and finding out the fascinating details of her journey, but I just had to give a shout-out to such an awesome woman. Especially back then. Girl Power! As soon as I have the money to replace my dead Kindle, I’ll be buying her books (they’ll definitely be free since there from the century before last!) which seem to be mostly collections of articles about her travels.
Here are some websites I found information on, and others for further reading:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nellie-Bly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/nellie-bly
The Compass Rose Queen 
Interesting! I had heard of her investigative reporting on the insane asylum, but not of this race. Fascinating.