Nellie Bly's Famous Story

 

Perhaps the most famous female journalist of the late 1800s was Nellie Bly, not because of her successful Trip About the World, described in last week's blog, but rather because of her courage in exposing the disgraceful treatment of women in a "Lunatic Asylum."  After some initial success as a journalist, Nellie wanted to work in the city where a journalist could become famous.  She headed to New York, but she struggled, trying to find a newspaper that would give her a chance. She had an idea, and she took it to perhaps the most powerful newspaper editor in America, Joseph Pulitzer of the "New York World."  Nellie proposed going undercover to be admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.  Recognizing what a story that would be, Pulitzer agreed.

First Nellie had to feign insanity in order to be admitted to the Asylum as a patient.  Using a mirror, she practiced deranged expressions.  Once she felt able to play the role, she checked into a working class boarding house, waiting until bedtime to start her act.  Having convinced the other boarders that she was crazy, Nellie faced her next test when they called the police, and her act was again successful.  Her next challenge was convincing a judge, who then ordered her to be examined by several doctors.  Once the doctors had pronounced Nellie insane, she was committed to the Asylum.

Charles Dickens had visited in the 1840s, and he described the conditions.  "...everyone had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful.  The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails:  there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror."

Yet, when Nellie Bly was admitted, she said, "From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity.  I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life.  Yet, strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be by all..."  She described rotted food, cruel attendants, and cramped and diseased conditions, and she believed there were patients with whom she talked that were as sane as she was.  Sadly, it was a time when an inconvenient wife or a dependent elderly person that had become a nuisance to the caregiver might be delivered to the Asylum.

Nellie Bly wrote:  "What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?"  She described, "...take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading material 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."

With the help of Pulitzer, Nellie was released after 10 days, and her newspaper expose, later published as the book, "Ten Days in a Mad-House," led to a grand jury investigation and increased financial budgeting.  While her expose did gain fame for Nellie Bly, it also brought attention and changes to the abuses at the Asylum on Blackwell's Island.