Pioneering journalist inspiration to women

When I was in elementary school during the early 1960s, there were only half a dozen biographies about women. Girls could pick from a small list of women who had been the first in their fields: Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman doctor; Clara Barton, first woman nurse; Marie Curie, first woman scientist; Jane Adams, first woman social reformer, and, of course, Helen Keller, first woman to overcome physical handicaps.

But the woman who captured my imagination was Nellie Bly, first woman reporter. Her journalistic exploits still are commanding attention and will be broadcast on Public Television’s “The American Experience” series at 1 p.m. today. Written, produced and directed by Christine Lesiak, “Around the World in 72 Days” tells Bly’s story.

The “stunt reporter,” known as Nellie Bly, was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864 in Pennsylvania. She was not really the world’s first female reporter. The essayist Margaret Fuller and Jenny June, who developed newspaper food and fashion pages, preceded her by almost 50 years. But Bly did pioneer investigative journalism, going places no reporter, male or female, had gone before.

She got her first job at The Dispatch in Pittsburgh when she replied to an editorial that chastised women for seeking to move outside their “natural sphere” — the home. Bly wrote an angry reply, taking the paper to task for overlooking the plight of the young working women who filled Pittsburgh’s growing factories, and for dismissing women’s intellect and ambition. She signed it “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

Her piece so intrigued the editor of The Dispatch that he put an ad in the paper asking her to come forward. When Bly appeared in his office, so the story goes, he offered her a job on the spot. She wrote about the effect of divorce on women and children, it was a subject she knew firsthand, having watched her mother divorce her stepfather. She became the first woman foreign correspondent when she spent six months traveling throughout Mexico.

But despite these successes, her editors kept giving her assignments for the women’s pages. After two years at the paper, she left for New York City, where she convinced the editor of The World to give her a job. Here she would become the most famous woman in the world, writing stories that would inspire generations of young women to become journalists.

Bly faked insanity to report on conditions in New York’s asylum for women. She pretended to be an unwed mother to expose the sale of babies on the black market. She bribed a lobbyist at the state capitol in Albany to get a bill through the Legislature and then reported on political corruption. But what she did best was to increase circulation for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspapers.

Her greatest stunt was traveling around the world in 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, beating Jules Verne’s fictitious record of 80 days. But to a 10-year-old girl gobbling up Bly’s adventures, her most amazing feat was that she did all this before she was 25 years old.

“Around the World in 72 Days,” bumped from its usual Monday night slot due to Maine Public Broadcasting’s annual auction, tells Bly’s story through interviews, old newspaper clippings and a few photographs. David Ogden Stiers, of “M*A*S*H” fame, narrates Bly’s story in dull, flat tones. The visuals are repetitive and nearly as boring as the narration.

But despite these flaws, Bly is brought vividly to life by the women who talk about her. Writer Maureen Corrigan, journalist Catherine Robe and biographer Brooke Kroeger speak animatedly and with deep admiration for Cochran, the woman, and Bly, the reporter. Through them, the viewer meets and gets to know this amazing journalist.

Ironically, the filmmaker leaves untouched the fact the kind of undercover, investigative journalism Bly pioneered is now under attack from the public and the courts. Even if reporters today are willing to take the kind of personal risks Bly took to get a story, the owners of newspapers and television stations are unlikely to risk lawsuits for similar kinds of investigative journalism.

In their less cynical moments, most reporters will confess they joined the profession “to make a difference,” citing how two young journalists toppled a President. But half a century before Woodward and Bernstein, there was Bly. Her reports on the social conditions in New York City created a demand for social change. Her trip around the world proved that even a girl could produce record-breaking profits for her publisher.

So program the VCR to tape this “American Experience” for the budding journalists who have never heard of Nellie Bly. Show it to those who believe undercover journalism began with the invention of the television camera. Share it with young women so they can see how long ago one woman made her own adventures. Listen to writers and journalists talk with awe about Bly’s accomplishments. And remember her own motto: “Energy rightly applied and directed can accomplish anything.”