Media: "Petition to Teach Kids about the Mad Adventures of Nellie Bly in History Class"

We haven't visited Vanessa at Messy Nessy Chic in a while and that is an egregious failing on our part.

She truly has put together an internet version of the old-timey cabinet of curiosities that is unrivaled. Here's the homepage.

And here's the headliner, May 24:

When Nellie Bly got bored of writing about fashion and gardening, she went undercover as a patient in a mental asylum and faked insanity to expose the institutional abuse. When she read Jules Verne’s book Around the world in 80 Days, she attempted the fictional journey herself, and did it in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, setting a world record as the first person to do so. When she married and was expected to become a housewife, she patented two designs for steel cans and became the boss of a million-dollar iron manufacturing business instead. This was all before the age of 40, and before women had the right to vote.

Nelly Bly was a daredevil writer and pioneering investigative ‘stunt’ journalist on a mission. Ahead of her time as she was hell-bent on promoting social change, she felt compelled to champion the cause of neglected and exploited women in the rising industrial world of the late 19^th century.

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 at Burrell Township, Pennsylvania USA, and one of 15 children from an impoverished and extended family. Her father died when she was six, and although having been a successful local businessman owning the local mill, this seems to have had little benefit to Nellie. In 1880, Cochran enrolled at Indiana Normal School (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania) but after a year, had had to drop out due to lack of funds.

Her first skirmish within the world of journalism occurred in her early teens when she wrote a strong and feminist letter to an editor objecting to an article that had appeared in the “What Girls are Good For” column of her local Pittsburg paper, The Dispatch. The article claimed that women were ‘only good for giving birth and doing housework’.

*****

The paper’s editor, George Madden, was so bowled over by Nellie’s response that he asked her to write an official reaction article under the pen name ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’. In her first Dispatch article, ‘The Girl Puzzle’, she passionately penned how divorce adversely affected women and appealed for change to the divorce laws of the day. Madden offered her a full-time position using the pen-name Nellie Bly, based on a popular Afro-American song character from 1850. The name stuck....

....MUCH MORE, including illustrations that were new to yours truly.

We've looked at Nellie Bly a couple times. In Media: "On the 'Girl Stunt Reporters' Who Pioneered a New Genre of Investigative Journalism" the headline at Literary Hub was a disservice to both the writer and her subject. The article itself was very good.

And although Nellie Bly has not been accorded the place in journo history that Ida Tarbell and the McClure's crowd received, Nellie Bly was every bit the muck-raker that they were.

If interested see "Media: Where Are The Muckrakers? The Rise and Fall of McClure's Magazine" or some of our other muckraker posts:

In 2011 we visited Ida Tarbell in "Ida M. Tarbell: 'John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study'" in part because I wanted a searchable link to the Tarbell collection at Allegheny college and partly because she described John D.'s grandfather, Godfrey as "a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit".

In February 2016's "Oil Tankers and Interest Rates and Scallywags and Time" one of the Rockefeller minions, Thomas Lawson, got a mention, not for his exposé of his copper dealings with Standard Oil honcho Henry Huttleston Rogers, Frenzied Finance, but because of the ship for which Lawson was namesake.

Staying in 2016, it was Ida's buddy Lincoln Steffens in "Goldman Sachs: Death Of Capitalism Averted, Time For Working Schlubs to Partaay!", again not for the work he was most famous for, in Steffens' case his Shame of the Cities (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh et al) but because of his famously wrong statement about Soviet Russia in a letter dated April 3, 1919: “I have seen the future and it works.”.
It didn't.

In 2015 there was Jacob Riis because I was reminded of one of the photographs from "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York":
Jacob Riis Lives! "San Francisco Housing Bubble Goes Subterranean: $500/Month To Live In A Crawlspace"
 
And along the way Theodore Dreiser got a major link (possibly one of the best business novels ever) in "Switzerland Begins Two-Year Trial of Driverless Buses (plus money, art, glory and sex)"

So yes, more than wary reader might have anticipated and I've probably forgotten a couple.
Circling back to Ida, here's an online version of History of the Standard Oil Company.

Although there are quite a few critiques you can raise about her book it was pretty important and was one of the factors that led to the breakup of Standard Oil in the Supreme Court decision "Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States" seven years later. So Mr Rockefeller probably considered the book important.

It ranks #5 on NYU's Journalism school's list of the 100 best works of 20th-century American journalism. (via the NYT)