\u201cWhen I was a news chick at the New York Herald Tribune<\/em>,\u201d she wrote, \u201csequestered in the flamingo pink Women\u2019s Department (as were all the paper\u2019s female journalists in the \u201860s), the male reporters I might encounter in the elevator looked straight through me, probably assuming I was somebody\u2019s stenographer.\u201d<\/p>\n One specific elevator ride, however, led to an opportunity to write, after she asked the tall sandy-haired reporter: \u201cMr. Wolfe, what\u2019s it like, writing for Clay Felker?\u201d Felker was the editor of New York<\/em> and later became the editor of Esquire<\/em> and later yet of the Village Voice<\/em>. Wolfe, to his credit, encouraged her to find out from the source\u2014Felker himself.<\/p>\nWomen managed, through force of will and ingenuity, to do good in the world or for the world by hiding who they were.<\/span>\n \u201cI crossed the DMZ into the City Room, all bobbing heads of white men with crew cuts (except for Bad Boy [Jimmy] Breslin and his tangle of black curls) and tapped on the door of the editor-in-chief. Clay Felker\u2019s booming voice came back: \u2018Where did you come from? The estrogen zone?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Even ten years later, in the New Journalism<\/em> anthology of the twenty writers selected as the best new journalists of the era, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, only two women were included: Joan Didion and Barbara Goldsmith, who wrote may books in her long career, including the classic best seller Little Gloria\u2026Happy at Last<\/em>, about Gloria Vanderbilt\u2019s difficult coming of age, which became both a movie and a TV series.<\/p>\n But long before Sheehy was confined to the \u201cestrogen zone,\u201d women journalists were persona non grata in newsrooms, not included on mastheads and not legitimately acknowledged in bylines. But women managed, through force of will and ingenuity, to do good in the world or for the world by hiding who they were, often assuming a male identity\u2014or disguising themselves as someone else. And not only were they writing narrative, employing the techniques of fiction writers, as Wolfe had described, but daringly and courageously involving themselves in their stories, diving into unknown territory in situations that men could not or would not confront. And they worked really hard at it because they were, in many cases, not wanted and certainly not appreciated as women. But they not only made history; they changed history. And in order to do that, they often changed their names.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n There are three statues at the Pittsburgh International Airport, through which I mostly travel from home to wherever and back. Two are heroic examples of the city\u2019s history. First, George Washington, the father of our country, who initiated the French and Indian War near Pittsburgh and helped built Fort Necessity and Fort Duquesne; second, the famed Pittsburgh Steelers running back Franco Harris, making his incredible immaculate reception in a divisional playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. If you are a Pittsburgher or an NFL fan, you will know the exact details of this improbable catch he made and the thirty seconds that followed, leading the Steelers to their first of four Super Bowl victories. If you\u2019ve never heard of the immaculate reception, you ought to look it up, unless you want to be perceived as a fool while visiting the town.<\/p>\n The third statue is quite a contrast to George and Franco and somewhat of a surprise and maybe a bit misleading: A young woman, twenty-four years old, with short brown hair, wearing a neat, tailored plaid coat and black leather gloves, with a small woolen hat on the back of her head. She is carrying at her side a small leather satchel. She was a journalist who early in her career worked as a reporter for two local newspapers, but achieved greatness after she left Pittsburgh in 1887 to work for the New York World<\/em>.<\/p>\n Her name, when she began her journalistic career in Pittsburgh, was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. But by the time she left the area where she had grown up, she was known as Nellie Bly. It was a name chosen by her editor, taken from a Stephen Foster song. So, a man was able to name her and forge her identity. Women were not allowed to write under their own names at that time, because\u2014according to their publishers and editors\u2014being weak and helpless, they would be much too vulnerable to the wrath of the men who were subjects of the undercover stories they wrote.<\/p>\n Bly\u2014or Cochrane\u2014became famous worldwide by circling the globe in a record-breaking seventy-two days, leaving the fictional character Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne\u2019s novel Around the World in Eighty Days<\/em>, published in 1873, in the dust. The statue in Pittsburgh depicts her outfit on the day of her departure, on November 14, 1889. The satchel she carried, the size of a small toaster oven, held everything she needed for those seventy-two days of journeying by ship, train, and horseback, including her writing materials and a small flask with a drinking cup. Bly had confronted a great deal of resistance when she proposed her around-the-world plan to her editor, who told her, \u201cNo one but a man can do this,\u201d to which she replied: \u201cVery well, start the man, and I\u2019ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.\u201d<\/p>\n She won the assignment and the race against Fogg. Her editor was well aware that Bly could do anything she set her mind to, not despite the fact that she was a woman, but because of it.<\/p>\n For her first big story for the New York World<\/em> the previous year she exposed the horrific living conditions of the patients of what was then known as an \u201cinsane asylum\u201d on Blackwell\u2019s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York. Her plan was to get herself committed to Blackwell\u2019s by convincing officials that she was insane, a performance that might have earned an Academy Award if she had been making a movie.<\/p>\n In preparation, Bly rented a room in a tenement boarding house, the Temporary Home for Females, on Second Avenue in the East Village in New York. In her room, she practiced how to look and act insane, as she would later describe in the first ten articles for the World<\/em>: \u201cI flew to the mirror and examined my face. I remembered all I had read of the doings of crazy people, how first of all they have staring eyes, and so I opened mine as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection\u2026I read snatches of improbable and impossible ghost stories, so that when the dawn came to chase away the night, I felt that I was in a fit mood for my mission.\u201d<\/p>\n When she was satisfied that she was well-prepared to prove herself insane, she had momentary second thoughts. \u201cWho could tell but that the strain of playing crazy and being shut up with a crowd of mad people, might turn my own brain, and I would never get back. But not once did I think of shirking my mission. Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.\u201d<\/p>\n Her story, the first in a ten-part series, begins that way\u2014from acting out in the boarding house to being taken by police to the Essex Market Police Courtroom and acting out again so that a sympathetic Judge Duffy allowed her to move one more step forward\u2014to be admitted to Bellevue Hospital\u2019s \u201cpavilion for the insane.\u201d And then finally, after another day of examination and acting out, sent where she wanted to be all along, Blackwell\u2019s\u2014the focus of her stories about the city\u2019s treatment of the mentally ill\u2014where she was immediately undressed and prepared for confinement. She wrote:<\/p>\n The water was ice-cold, and a crazy woman began to scrub me. I can find no other word that will express it but scrubbing. From a small tin pan, she took some soft soap and rubbed it all over me, even all over my face and my pretty hair. I was at last past seeing or speaking, although I had begged that my hair be left untouched. Rub, rub, rub, went the old woman, chattering to herself. My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head\u2014ice-cold water, too\u2014into my eyes, my years, my nose and my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane\u2026They put me, dripping wet, into a short canton flannel slip, labeled across the extreme end in large black letters, \u201cLunatic Asylum, B.I., H. 6.\u201d The letters meant Blackwell\u2019s Island, Hall 6.<\/p>\n Nellie Bly\u2019s \u201cTen Days in a Mad-House,\u201d capturing her experiences at Blackwell\u2019s Island, immediately made a difference, as she wrote in the introduction to her series: \u201cI am happy to be able to state as a result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.\u201d Like Rachel Carson, a fellow Pittsburgher, her mission forced change. Although not enough change to allow women to write as women under their own given names.<\/p>\n Picture a scene two years after Bly\u2019s sensational expos\u00e9: A helpless young girl in old tattered clothes staggers and stumbles across a busy street in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District and suddenly faints in front of a moving carriage, which nearly runs her down. The police are called to move her out of the street, but when she resists, they club her with wooden batons, throw her on the hard floor of a horse-drawn buggy, and transport her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. The staff at the hospital, men and women both, are dismissive and annoying, and pepper her with lewd and insulting remarks. She is treated coldly and quickly, no real examination provided, medicated with a concoction of mustard and hot water to precipitate vomiting\u2014and soon thereafter released.<\/p>\n Two weeks later, the San Francisco Examiner<\/em>, owned by William Randolph Hearst, published a five-part series of stories capturing and documenting the brutal and insensitive treatment of women in hospital emergency rooms. Like Bly\u2019s work, this dramatic account of treatment led to the establishment of a well-trained ambulance service in the city\u2014for men and women. Later, this writer\u2014identified as Annie Laurie\u2014was to become the first woman journalist to cover a prize fight. Later still, disguised as a boy, she was the first reporter on the scene to cover the horrific Galveston hurricane of 1900 in Texas.<\/p>\n And then in July 1888, Nell Nelson, a young schoolteacher in Chicago, wearing a brown veil and a tattered coat, began taking a number of jobs in factories, stitching coats, shoe linings, and shirts at the Excelsior Underwear Company for eighty cents a dozen. It was hard work, to say the least\u2014a lack of ventilation, poor lighting\u2014and it was bloody hot. And as it turned out, the first dozen shirts she sewed were free\u2014at least to her employer. For, she learned: Rent for the sewing machine she was using was fifty cents. And the thread for the shirts she sewed? An additional charge of thirty-five cents. But if that wasn\u2019t bad enough, Nelson and her fellow employees were insulted and berated. And not just at Excelsior; it was no different wherever she went. Her series of stories ran for nineteen straight weeks, doubling circulation for the Chicago Times<\/em>. And then there was Eva Gay, who, in disguise, infiltrated an industrial laundry to document the unhealthy conditions for the women who labored there.<\/p>\n These writers made an impact; they changed lives because of their personal narratives, but despite their bylines, few readers knew who they really were. But as Kim Todd wrote, the names these women used, their bylines, \u201cwere often fake. Stunt reporters relied on pseudonyms, which offered protection as they waded deep into unladylike territory to poke sticks at powerful men. Annie Laurie was really Winifred Sweet; Gay was Eva Valesh; Marks was Eleanor Stackhouse\u2026. \u2018Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen,\u2019 wrote a male editor for the trade publication The Journalist in 1889. \u2018This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n All of these boundary-breaking reporters were forced into a similar identity deception. And the treatment of some of these stories, as serious as they were, was often trivialized with inappropriate illustrations of billowing skirts and wild wind-whipped hair, depicting the helplessness of the \u201copposite\u201d sex. Even the ways in which women writers were referred to and labeled were often demeaning. Laurie, Bly, and their ilk were treated as novelty writers, performing tricks to get access to their stories. In fact, they were called as a group, as Todd reports, the \u201cstunt girls.\u201d<\/p>\nThe personalization, the confessional aspects of these stories, would, nearly a century later, become a flashpoint of the creative nonfiction debate and movement.<\/span>\n There was another label, which as most ironic, especially since it wasn\u2019t actually the \u201cstunt\u201d that captivated readers and motivated political and social action, but the voices, observations, and feelings\u2014the deep-seated personal observations of the writers and the descriptions of the characters they captured. When the stories were especially poignant, critics and colleagues referred to the women who wrote these stories as the \u201csob sisters.\u201d<\/p>\n The personalization, the confessional aspects of these stories, would, nearly a century later, become a flashpoint of the creative nonfiction debate and movement, when writers like James Wolcott demeaned them in Vanity Fair<\/em>, characterizing their emotional honesty and intensity as \u201cnavel gazing.\u201d But at the time, the confessional aspects of their work weren\u2019t seen as worth debating\u2014or criticizing. This whining and wailing about the ills of the world, the man\u2019s world, was to be expected coming from women. Journalists generally did not take the \u201cgirls\u201d seriously. They were simply a means to the end. They used a woman to get a story that would not be possible for a man to get, a story that would sell papers and advertising and attract attention and praise\u2014perhaps until Ida Tarbell.<\/p>\n Ida Tarbell, an investigative journalist and lecturer, became as famous and as influential as Upton Sinclair and others of what Theodore Roosevelt had labeled as the \u201cmuckraking\u201d crowd. The History of the Standard Oil Company<\/em> by Tarbell was first published as a nineteen-part series in McClure\u2019s Magazine<\/em> and then in 1904 as a two-volume book. As one critic described her reporting, Tarbell \u201cfed the antitrust frenzy by verifying what many had suspected for years: the pattern of deceit, secrecy and unregulated concentration of power that characterized Gilded Age business practice with its \u2018commercial Machiavellianism.\u2019\u201d Tarbell was prolific, to say the least, and most enjoyed digging deep into her subjects for long periods of time, as in her series of articles for McClure\u2019s<\/em> about the life of Napoleon and an eye-opening twenty-part series on Abraham Lincoln to which she dedicated four years of her life.<\/p>\n Tarbell\u2019s success and celebrity were due, not so much to the impact and drama of her prose, but more so to her dogged dedication to truth and accuracy and to uncovering heretofore undiscovered information and sources that led to deeper and richer stories. Liza Mundy, writing in the Atlantic<\/em>, observed that \u201ca half century before the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Joseph Mitchell went to the waterfront to write about clammers and fishermen, before John McPhee started hanging out with greengrocers, Tarbell was visiting out-of-the-way sectors and practicing immersive journalism\u2026. Today,\u201d Mundy concluded, \u201cRobert Caro is lionized for his exhaustive gumshoe method, but Tarbell was there before him, reading pamphlets and the opinion columns of local papers. \u2018There is nothing about which everything has been done and said\u2019 became her core insight.\u201d<\/p>\n Even after Tarbell and the work of the stunt girls had produced such serious and game-changing work, it remained a struggle for women to be considered equals in the journalistic world. Even when they succeeded, broke through the barriers, their work was often discounted or ignored. As it was for Martha Gellhorn, who was on the scene in Madrid in the heat of the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n Here’s the opening of a dispatch from Madrid filed by Gellhorn in July 1937, which appeared in Collier\u2019s<\/em> magazine:<\/p>\n At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists\u2019 guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit.<\/p>\n But now, for I don\u2019t know how long\u2014because time didn\u2019t mean much\u2014they had been hitting on the street in front of the hotel, and on the corner, and to the left in the side street. When the shells hit that close, it was a different sound. The shells whistled toward you\u2014it was as if they whirled at you\u2014faster than you could imagine speed, and, spinning that way, they whined: the whine rose higher and quicker and was a close scream\u2014and then they hit and it was like granite thunder. There wasn\u2019t anything to do, or anywhere to go: you could only wait. But waiting alone in a room that got dustier as the powdered cobblestones of the street floated into it was pretty bad.<\/p>\n I went downstairs into the lobby, practicing on the way how to breathe. You couldn\u2019t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it.<\/p>\n Later, despite her accomplishments, Gellhorn had to fight or trick her way into reporting on World War II. Women journalists could not be trusted to report the news accurately, or so it was believed, and they were much too vulnerable to be let loose in a war zone like their male colleagues. But Gellhorn ignored the warnings and the arbitrary rules excluding women. She was one of the very few correspondents to make it ashore during the D-Day invasion, male or female. She did this by hiding in a bathroom of a hospital ship to be part of the landing, and once ashore disguised herself as an orderly, carrying a stretcher. She was discovered on the beach a few days later while conducting interviews with the soldiers who had safely landed, and she was stripped of her press credentials. She was not, however, deterred. A year later she was part of the first wave of reporters at the Dachau concentration camp when it was liberated.<\/p>\n I think it is really terrific every time I pass through the Pittsburgh airport that Nellie Bly has been so deservedly honored, side by side with Franco and George, but I do wonder if travelers really understand the significance of her statue and what it should mean to them and the world\u2014not only the amazing trip around the world in seventy-two days, but the beginning of the liberation of women from a bastion of white men who had demeaned and disregarded them simply because of their gender. This liberation, would, however, not be quick or easy.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Gutkind-jacket-199x300.jpg\")
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