This week marked the 150th birthday of Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who wrote trailblazing journalism under the pen name Nellie Bly. Wondering if Bly was “the great American journalist,” Elisabeth Donnelly reviews the first complete collection of her writing, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings, and finds that the “weirdly striking thing about her work is that — and I hate to write this — she sounds a bit like a blogger”:
Here’s why: In Joseph Pulitzer’s day, people read the newspaper for information, sure, but they also wanted perspective and a point of view. Objective journalism wasn’t an idea that came into vogue in American newspapers until about the 1890s, and Bly made her name writing personal, very subjective pieces about her life and her experience. That perspective made her advocacy work, and her “Ten Days in a Mad-House” reads like a good thriller — surprising and moving. She makes the point that the asylum is not just a place for the insane: women are also put there when they have no options. … [I]t is marvelous to read and to see the span and scope of Bly’s writing, as it still feels very contemporary and current, like a friend telling you stories that you need — no, you must— hear.
Popova, also commemorating the occasion, elaborates on Ten Days in a Mad-House:
It isn’t until she witnesses the actual “care” for the insane that she grasps the full scope of the institutionalized brutalities. In the yard, she is faced with a sight she’d never forget, the “rope gang” — a long rope onto which fifty-two women are strung together via wide leather belts locked around their waists; all are sobbing, crying, or screaming, each inhabiting her private delusion in public. The remaining patients — those less visibly delusional or violent, Bly included — are forced to sit on benches from morning till night, scolded and beaten for moving or speaking, and generally treated as mindless automata unworthy of dignity or compassion. An air of helplessness and hopelessness envelops the women, aware that telling the doctors of the brutalities would only elicit more beatings from the inhumane nurses.
Here, Bly makes her most important point:
What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured? I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A.M. until 8 P.M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane.
The Dish 