Happy Birthday to investigative journalist Nellie Bly (b. Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, May 5, 1864, in Burrell Township, PA), who reshaped American journalism through her undercover investigation of a psychiatric institution. This Blackwell’s Island asylum reporting did lead to an increase in funding for the institution, but it is unclear if and unlikely that these funds benefited the victims of nineteenth century approaches to mental illness. As scholar Karen Roggenkamp argues, “Bly’s presentation of herself as the central sympathetic figure in her stories, battling against New York’s frightening public institutions, served as a tool by which she could reinforce her professional status.” She continues, “The reporter acts as an example to instruct readers how to sympathize with social outcasts, but as a leading actress in her own literary drama—a heroine precisely because she is not insane, not a criminal.” Despite these valid criticisms, it is still important to recognize that Bly was trailblazing a path for women and innovating new practices of American journalism.
Citations: Karen Roggenkamp, Sympathy, Madness, and Crime: How Four Nineteenth-Century Journalists Made the Newspaper Women’s Business (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016), 77, https://archive.org/details/sympathymadnessc0000rogg; Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House (New York: Norman L. Munro, 1887), i, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html; “Nellie Bly / Myers, N.Y.,” photograph (location unknown, c. 1890), https://lccn.loc.gov/89711960.
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