Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

paper sales. The editor displayed a ruthlessness Pulitzer both despised and admired.

Cockerill looked up from his desk at the young interviewer and suggested she “get a bachelor and form a syndicate” of her own. Once again, here was the advice to leave journalism, marry (“form a syndicate” was a hokey metaphor, not a business plan), and busy herself with children. If she was frustrated, she didn’t show it, quipping later that she declined to “relate a tale of blighted affections,” and instead continued her mission, asking, “What do you think of women as journalists?”

Women didn’t like the kind of things they were suitable for, Cockerill said. “There are society events which no man can report as well as a woman; yet they always claim to hate that style of work.” Like Bly, other women reporters didn’t hide their scorn for these assignments. J. C. Croly, who reported for the World under the pseudonym “Jennie June” had written to Pulitzer, asking for a better beat, complaining, “I cannot write the utter rubbish that seems to be expected from women—or columns about nothing.” But with dozens of male applicants showing up each day, restless women weren’t Cockerill’s concern. The editor of the Mail and Express echoed these sentiments. Women were great for gossip, travel, dramatic criticism, but, he noted, “Their dress, constitution and habits of life keep them from the routine of a reporter’s work.”

Like Charles Dana, former Unitarian pastor George Hepworth of the Herald said he couldn’t send a woman to police courts to cover crime and criminals, and even if he did, no one would talk to her. They were unsuitable for the sensations and scandals the public craved. Women needed to be respectable, and respectability was boring. Until “the public demands a different kind of news . . . women will be unable to serve as all-around reporters,” he said. He added that with women in the office, men didn’t feel free. They couldn’t work in shirtsleeves, put their feet on their desks, or curse.

With Hepworth, Bly tried a different strategy, even more blunt and straightforward than she’d been with Dana.

“Dr. Hepworth, I want a position on the Herald.”

“Yes?” he said. “What can you do?”

And, in what would become her career-defining trait—a splash of bravado, a hint of desperation—she answered, “Anything.”

The Herald didn’t hire her. And the article resulting from her interview tour, which Bly wrote up for the Dispatch to inform young women who long for “the empty glory and poor pay” of a reporter’s life, wasn’t encouraging to anyone with the same dreams. None of the male editors saw a place for women outside petticoat styles and party reports. Aspiring writers, mostly the qualified men whom editors preferred, were descending on the papers in thick flocks. No one offered her a job.

Nonetheless, these encounters provided food for thought. Though her interview subjects talked about education, experience, and writing ability, the front pages they published displayed a journalism that valued sheer nerve. The editors’ view of what a woman could do was narrow, framed by convention. What if she could enlarge it? The editor of the Telegram had said, “Woman understands women, as men never can; so why should she not be able to write of their ways and habits?” He meant that they grasped intricacies of weddings and waltzes, but wasn’t this true in other ways as well? Plenty of women crowded courts and jails; they just weren’t reporters. Cockerill claimed, “No editor would like to send a woman out in bad weather or to questionable places for news.” But what if the story was irresistible? Right in the middle of police stations and holding cells and other unseemly places? And what if it was something only a woman could do?

By September, Bly’s purse had been stolen. Her rent was overdue. Pride wouldn’t let her return to Pittsburgh and admit failure. She put on her lucky ring, a gold band around her thumb, and returned to Newspaper Row and the dirty, dilapidated building that housed the World. Somehow, she talked her way past the elevator operator up to the editorial department, saying she had an important story, and if the editor didn’t want to hear it, she’d take it elsewhere.

Face-to-face with Colonel Cockerill again, she said he could send her out in bad weather. That she had no objection to “questionable places.” That she wasn’t going to quit and get married. She told him her ideas, including traveling in steerage class from Europe and writing about the immigrant experience. He gave her $25 to keep her from going to another paper while he thought it over.

Bly must have appeared sufficiently bold, or sufficiently reckless. When she returned, Cockerill asked whether she thought she could fake her way into New York’s notorious insane asylum for women on Blackwell’s Island, past the doctors, keeping up her role without discovery to report on conditions there. It was an opening, and Bly took it.

“I don’t know what I can do until I try.”

“Well, you can try,” Cockerill said, “but if you can do it, it’s more than anyone would believe.”

Chapter 2

1887

Opportunity in Disguise

Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.

—Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad-House

Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for Women, a gleaming white building on an island in the East River, had been cloaked in rumors of beatings and neglect from the facility’s opening in 1839. It was one of a constellation of institutions on the island—a penitentiary, a workhouse, an almshouse, a charity hospital—designed to shelter those the city wanted out of sight. The rapid current offshore thwarted escape. Sewers emptied into the river, drawing rats. When Charles Dickens visited the asylum, he noticed a suicidal patient locked alone in the dining room before he fled from the “naked ugliness and horror.” The New York Times reported a girl forced to give birth while in a straitjacket.

A chill wind blew through New York City on September 23, 1887, as Bly headed toward a boarding house, the Temporary