What are girls good for? Well, in the 1800s, the answer to that question was plain as day: birthing children and keeping house. In fact, in 1885, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published a column declaring that a woman who worked outside the home was "a monstrosity”!
This outrageously sexist column sparked a fiery response from one hell of a young woman. Born Elizabeth Cochran and known later and more famously as Nellie Bly, at age 21 wrote back a response under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl”. Something in Nellie’s passionate letter appealed to the newspaper editor, George Madden, who eventually offered her a full-time job writing on issues affecting working women.
Unfortunately, the factory owners got their knickers in a knot about her writing (likely calling out sexist behaviour) so she was reassigned to where women belong - fashion, society, gardening and the like. Screw that! In a time when women were treated atrociously, Nellie fought back. Unhappy with her assignment to the lifestyle section, she embarked on a mission that would change the course of journalism forever.
After a 6-month stint in Mexico reporting as a foreign correspondent during Porfirio Diaz’s tyrannical dictatorship (at age 21, mind you), Nellie decided it was time for the big smoke. Off to New York City she went, facing rejection after rejection from every newspaper (well, she was a woman) until finally she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. It was here that she began her remarkable foray into the as-yet-unknown career of investigative journalism.
Her first mission: expose the appalling treatment of patients in the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum. A casual stroll around the exterior and interview with a staffer would simply not do for Nellie’s standards. She opted for undercover, which meant feigning insanity to get herself committed… and hopefully returning home. With careful consideration, and a promise from her editor to get her out, Nellie accepted the mission and took to practising her crazy eyes in the mirror, spooking herself out with ghost stories and brushing up on her acting skills.
But could she really convince doctors, police officers and judges that she was insane? Surely they would do thorough tests and discover inconsistencies that would expose her? Well, unsurprisingly, the doctors and courts were all too willing to send a woman to the loony bin back then. All she had to do was act a bit confused and not blink for a while and they were convinced. She was declared “positively demented”! Off she went with a one-way ticket to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.
Now we can all imagine what Nellie was subjected to while under good and proper care in a mental asylum in the 1800s. Cold rotten food, a harsh scrubbing at bath time from a fellow legitimately insane inmate deputised by staff, dunked in freezing water in what sounded like waterboarding; good and proper care. The thing is, once Nellie was admitted to the asylum, she no longer kept up the insane act. In fact, according to her records (yes, her editor came good on the promise to get her out - phew!) plenty of the women in there seemed sane. Yet such non-insane behaviour was met with a suspicion of trickery from staff, only further confirming their judgements of these poor women, condemned to a life of inhumane treatment. What a catch-22!
After her exposé on Blackwell Island, New York City spent $50k 19th-century dollars on the management of institutions housing people with mental illness. Other trailblazing journalists (pejoratively called “stunt girl journalists”) followed in her footsteps, using undercover reporting to effect change and shed light on critical human rights issues.
Nellie Bly was an incredible woman! Oh, and she turned Around The World In Eighty Days into fact and set the world record for travelling around the world (72 days) and would later become a patented industrialist, novelist, national women’s hall of fame inductee, and posthumously inspired songs, musicals and movies.
SOURCES:
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[00:00:00] Will: Two ways to get into the insane room. One, I could feign insanity at the house of my friends and get myself committed on the decision of two competent physicians. Or I could go to my own goal by way of the police.
[00:00:15] Rod: She went with B, didn't she?
[00:00:17] Will: She went with B.
[00:00:18] Rod: Because you would. It's guaranteed to be horrifying. There's more to write about.
[00:00:23] Will: You know it. And well, she said straight away, I didn't want to inflict this on my friends. Could imagine your friends would say. No Nelly.
[00:00:30] Rod: No I don't want my friends to feel uncomfortable. I'm gonna get the police to brutalize me into a loony bin.
[00:00:42] Will: September 26th, 1887. A mysterious wife, an unknown girl, was sent to Bellevue Hospital Saturday for examination with regard to her sanity. Yesterday afternoon, she lay shivering on a cot in the pavilion and drew the bed clothing tightly about her neck as she turned to look at the visitor. She does not appear to be over 19 years old, and gives both in speech and manner of good breeding.
[00:01:05] Her features are regular and comely, the eyes being large and dark, the forehead broad and low, the nose straight, the mouth and chin well shaped, and the hair dark brown.
[00:01:16] Rod: The forehead broad and low. I'm hearing neanderthal.
[00:01:20] Will: No. They were saying she's pretty hot. Like I think they're saying she's pretty hot.
[00:01:24] Rod: Also. I love the word comely. WE don't use that enough. What does she look like? Comely.
[00:01:31] Will: They used it too much. Comely. Comely. This is weird. Cause this is page eight of the newspaper anyway, below medium height and decidedly slight.
[00:01:39] Rod: Below medium height and decidedly slight.
[00:01:42] Will: Yeah. Her face was almost haggard in its paleness and there was a wild, haunted look in her eyes. When spoken to, she stared hard and made no reply. At the second question, she shivered and said, it's cold here. So cold. When asked if she did not wish to find her friends, she nodded, yes, I do, but said wearily, I can't remember, I can't remember. To nearly all the questions asked, she simply responded by nodding her head.
[00:02:11] When she did speak, it was a plaintive whisper, so low that it was necessary to bend down close to her in order to hear.
[00:02:18] Rod: But I have to do that for people speaking in normal volume. So that's not a big deal.
[00:02:22] Will: She was seen in Brooklyn last Thursday by Madam Irene Stewart of the temporary home for females on second Avenue. ON Friday, she put in an appearance at the home. And on Saturday, she was taken to the Essex market police court and they're committed by justice Duffy. Committed? Yeah. She was sent directly to the women's lunatic asylum on Blackwell Island.
[00:02:51] Welcome to the wholesome show.
[00:02:54] Rod: The podcast that goes undercover into the hole of science. Yes, we do. What covers do we wear though?
[00:02:59] Will: Oh, any of the covers. I'm Will Grant.
[00:03:02] Rod: I'm Rod Lamberts.
[00:03:03] Will: We'll come back to her. Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born on the 5th of May 1864 in Cochran's Mills. She was the 13th daughter of the local mill owner, postmaster, associate justice, guy who the town was named after. Thirteenth daughter. She got a nickname when she was young. Pinky or pink because you wore a lot of pink. I don't know much more about that. But as a teenager, she decided I want to portray myself as a little bit more sophisticated. So she added an E to her surname.
[00:03:32] Rod: But kept wearing pink all the time.
[00:03:34] Will: I think so. Her story really kicks off in 1885 when her local newspaper pissed her off. 1885, the Pittsburgh dispatch published a column with the title, what girls are good for. 1885. What things do you think?
[00:03:49] Rod: What are they good for? Obviously having sons.
[00:03:52] Will: Yes.
[00:03:53] Rod: Sewing.
[00:03:54] Will: Well, yeah, that would be in their categories too.
[00:03:56] Rod: Falacio.
[00:03:57] Will: I don't think they said that. I don't have the original article sadly. I've only got quotes from it.
[00:04:02] Rod: Cooking.
[00:04:03] Will: Probably. Yeah, that, that would be part of it.
[00:04:05] Rod: Feeding the chickens.
[00:04:06] Will: Not business though. Well, obviously the column was pretty pissed at women in the workforce or something, or women going into business. I'm not sure how much it was happening in 1885 in Pittsburgh, but the columnist was like women, girls are good for birthing children and keeping a house. And they went on to say that a woman who worked outside the home was a monstrosity. There is no greater abnormality than a woman in breeches, unless it is a man in petticoats. So thanks. Okay. You can imagine this is published in the Pittsburgh dispatch and young pinky Elizabeth Cochran is like, Oh, fuck that.
[00:04:42] Or in, in polite words of 1885 indeed, I believe she said in her head, fornicate you. She wrote back a response under a pseudonym, a lonely orphan girl saying, columnist, dude you have no idea. The letter landed on the desk of the managing editor of the dispatch. It was like, I'm struck by its spirit.
[00:05:01] And he said let's get this girl to write a column. She isn't much for style, but what she has to say she says right out, regardless of paragraphs or punctuation. I think he was like, she doesn't know how to write, she says shit.
[00:05:13] Rod: Dumb, but feisty. I'm impressed though. The fact that he actually said that.
[00:05:16] Will: And they placed an ad in the newspaper and said, who are you lonely orphan girl? Write in and we'd like to talk. So Elizabeth Cochran was like, no, I'm not writing in, I'm marching into the newspaper. So she marched into the editor's desk and said, look, this is me and I've got some feelings. When Elizabeth Cochran introduced herself to the editor, he said straight away, all right, well, why don't you write another piece, you know, you wrote this letter and let's write some more under the pseudonym again, lonely orphan girl. Her first article for the dispatch titled the girl puzzle basically continued the argument that she had before.
[00:05:54] Not all women would marry and that what was needed were better jobs for women. She wrote a second article about mad marriages, how divorce affected women. She argued for reform of divorce laws. And so at this point, the newspaper's like, it's weird. It's weird. They ran with it. They were like, okay, this is striking some sort of a nerve. And they're keen.
[00:06:15] Rod: We're getting, they're getting clicks.
[00:06:17] Will: The newspaper at the time said, all right, look, let's give you a job. We'll give you a byline, not under your birth name cause you can't publish under your birth name.
[00:06:25] Rod: No, it's gotta be John Smith.
[00:06:27] Will: That would be wrong as a woman, you have to sort of cover yourself up a little bit. Nelly Bly.
[00:06:33] Rod: Oh, that's a name I have heard. It was that song.
[00:06:37] Will: She was named after a song. I dunno, the hits of the 1880s. And she worked on a series of of articles investigating the lives of working women for the Pittsburgh dispatch.
[00:06:45] Rod: This is, I've got to say, sticking around aside, phenomenal. Like that's phenomenal.
[00:06:49] Will: I was going to say Nellie Bly, phenomenal. So yeah, she focused on the lives of working women and she did a series of investigative articles on women factory workers at the time in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was a very working town at the time, like lots of Yeah. Yeah. Industrial city and stuff like that.
[00:07:05] But you know, you can guess the newspaper got some complaints from the factory owners saying you can't cover these stories. These are stories that shouldn't be covered. So she was reassigned to the women's pages as they were called
[00:07:18] Rod: gossip columns, recipes, fashion. Society is gossip columns. And how tight should my corset be?
[00:07:24] Will: I'll come back to corsets. Oh, I'll come back to corsets. No. Fashion, society, gardening. And you know, she's like, ah. So she's still only 21 at this time and she's like, I want to do something no girl has done before.
[00:07:37] Rod: Weapons. Rifle column.
[00:07:39] Will: Not far. She traveled to Mexico at the time to serve as a foreign correspondent. And I don't know how much the Pittsburgh dispatch had a foreign correspondent.
[00:07:46] Rod: So what you mean is she fucked off to Mexico and said, by the way, I'm writing from here.
[00:07:50] Will: I think so. I think so. Yeah. He spent a half a year reporting on the lives and customs of the Mexican people. But also reporting on the dictatorship down there of the president Diaz, who, you know, it was doing normal dictator stuff, whatever it is, you know, locking up journalists and tyrannical czar.
[00:08:06] Anyway. So she covered this terrible regime in Mexico, six months, they threatened her with arrest in Mexico. And she's like, all right, I'm bugging out. I'm going back to Pittsburgh. And when she got back there, they were like, yeah, that was nice. She published a book on her story in Mexico, but you're back to the gardening pages.
[00:08:24] Rod: Can you imagine? So she's at what? Six months, did you say?
[00:08:27] Will: Yeah. So she's a 21 year old, 21 year old foreign correspondent covering a dictator, this is 1885.
[00:08:33] Rod: I'm trying to imagine 21 year old woman, anyone, but 21 year old woman doing that now.
[00:08:37] Will: Yeah. Nellie Bly is a person that you just think, no, well, she didn't waste her time. She came back and they said, okay, now you can have the theater and the arts beat. Love the theater and the arts beat. It was not in her soul. She wanted something more. So she left the Pittsburgh dispatch to try and make her way in the big city, in New York city. They didn't want to employ her.
[00:08:59] Rod: Of course not.
[00:09:00] Will: They're like women journalists. What are you talking about? Yes, in the fashion pages. But
[00:09:06] Rod: also why would we don't want to hire you because you've done stuff.
[00:09:10] Will: Now the next bit. I don't quite know how it happened, but she had four months worth of rejections. She knocked on the door of every newspaper she could find. There were a lot more newspapers back then. There were quite a lot, but she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper. The New york world
[00:09:26] Rod: Pulitzer that name rings a bell.
[00:09:28] Will: Yeah. From this point on, I can quote from Nellie Bly's story here, which was published later under the headline 10 days in a madhouse or Nellie Bly's experience on Blackwell Island, feigning insanity in order to reveal asylum horrors, the trying ordeal of the New York world girls correspondent. The book I turned to the front and it's brought to you by Madam Mora's corsets. Why are they a marvel of comfort and elegance? And it's got like the front page and then it's got a picture there right in the front page of this is you in your corset.
[00:10:04] Rod: To be fair, that is a marvel. And by comfortable, I mean, why haven't you passed out yet?
[00:10:08] Will: I don't know how they came up with the idea. I don't know if Nelly came up with the idea or the editor came up with the idea, but they said, how about you go undercover in a loony bin? So that's what Nelly did.
[00:10:19] Rod: Can you imagine going can you guarantee I'll get out? Yep. Yeah, absolutely. We'll get you out. Yeah, we'll get you out. It'll be fine. It'll be fine.
[00:10:26] Will: There are a bunch of times where she knew that the women that alongside her on the boat or the carriage or walking through into the asylum, It was a life sentence. Like you are not leaving. And just the callousness of the doctors around who are like, no you're insane. You're insane. You're insane. You're insane. Oh, you're right. You're insane. You're insane. You're insane. And bye bye forever. Chapter one.
[00:10:51] Rod: Fuck. That's scary.
[00:10:52] Will: A delicate mission. 22nd of September. I was asked by the world, new York world, if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New york with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients they're in and the methods of management, et cetera. Did I think I had the courage to go through such an ordeal as the mission would demand?
[00:11:14] Could I assume the characteristics of insanity to such a degree that I could pass the doctors live for a week among the insane without the authorities they're finding out that I was only among them taking notes?
[00:11:24] Rod: A tourist.
[00:11:25] Will: Yeah, that's it. That's it. I believed I could. I had some faith in my own ability as an actress and thought I could assume insanity long enough to accomplish any mission entrusted to me.
[00:11:34] Rod: Well, anyone reading this at the time is going, well, you're a lady. Of course you could pretend to be insane because all ladies are insane. I'm very worried for her right now.
[00:11:42] Will: This is the editor. We do not ask you go there for the purpose of making sensational revelations. Write up things as you find them, good or bad. Give praise or blame as you think best and the truth all the time, but I'm afraid that chronic smile of yours, I will smile no more, said Nelly.
[00:11:57] Rod: It's the reverse of advice women get today. You should smile more. I'm the Attorney General of one of the biggest countries in the world. Why don't you smile more?
[00:12:04] Will: There is a bit where she feels she's nearly caught out by her smile. Well, by laughter.
[00:12:08] Rod: Well, if it's an insane cackle, she'd be fine.
[00:12:11] Will: Bly had one question of her editor. How will you get me out? And his confident reply straight away. I do not know. No. He did say, I do not know but we will,
[00:12:23] Rod: don't worry, sweetheart. We will, it'll be fine.
[00:12:27] Will: All the preliminary preparations for my ordeal were left to be planned by myself. Only one thing was decided upon, namely that I should pass under the pseudonym of Nellie Brown rather than nellie Bly. The reasons were that all of my linen, like my underpants would have the initials NB.
[00:12:44] Two ways to get into the insane ward. One, I could feign insanity at the house of my friends and get myself committed on the decision of some two competent physicians, or I could go to my own goal by way of the police.
[00:13:02] Rod: She went with b, didn't she?
[00:13:03] Will: She went with B.
[00:13:04] Rod: Cause you would. It's guaranteed to be horrifying. There's more to write about.
[00:13:10] Will: You know it. And well, she said straight away, I didn't want to inflict this on my friends. Yeah. Cause you could imagine your friends would say. No, Nellie, I'm not.
[00:13:18] Rod: She suddenly did a crap and ate it in front of us and we didn't know what to do.
[00:13:22] Will: So we had her committed for forever to be brutalized. Like
[00:13:26] Rod: no, I don't want my friends to feel uncomfortable. I'm going to get the police to brutalize me into a loony bin.
[00:13:33] Will: So the first thing that Nellie does is that she needed to practice being insane and her book came with illustrations and it's just beautiful. Nellie practices insanity at home.
[00:13:42] Rod: She's grabbing her fringe.
[00:13:43] Will: Yeah. She's kind of grabbing her fringe and she's looking in the mirror and sort of grabbing her fringe.
[00:13:49] Rod: I'm crazy.
[00:13:50] Will: My apologies in all of this. There is a lot of uses of terms that are not up to common parlance. And her description of mental ill health is not what we would say in 2023.
[00:14:02] Rod: History rocks.
[00:14:04] Will: History is great. But she says, okay, I've got to practice. What a difficult task I thought to appear before a crowd of people and convince them that I was insane. I had never been near insane persons before in my life and had not the faintest idea of what their actions were like. And then to be examined by a number of learned physicians who make insanity a speciality. So how do I convince them that I am crazy?
[00:14:26] Rod: My problem with that is the examinations I'm going to guess weren't just psychological. Anyway, carry on.
[00:14:35] Will: I began to think my task a hopeless one, but it had to be done. So I 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, I assure you the sight was not reassuring even to myself, even especially in the dead of light. Between times practicing before the mirror and pitching my future as a lunatic, I read snatches of improbable and possible ghost stories so that when dawn came to chase away the night, I felt that I was in a mood for my mission. So she read herself a bunch of ghost stories. She spooked herself. So she looked herself in the mirror, tried to look crazy. And read some ghost stories.
[00:15:14] Rod: And then watched was it Paranormal Activities 1 to 3? Have you watched those movies?
[00:15:18] Will: No, I don't want to watch them.
[00:15:19] Rod: Scare the living piss out of me. Very simple. Scariest scene in a horror movie and the exorcist is good, but this one, literally there's a woman in one of the movies, she's sitting in her kitchen in the middle of the day and suddenly there's a bang and every drawer and cupboard opens instantly. That's it.
[00:15:33] Will: Poltergeists are low down in my level of ghosts that I want. Casper, the friendly ghost. All other ghosts, poltergeists. So that's what she did. She was like, imagine some ghost stories and shit. And you look wild eyed.
[00:15:44] Rod: Horrifying, yeah.
[00:15:45] Will: And she stayed up late and so she looked a bit drawn and and then she said goodbye to, you know the normal world.
[00:15:51] Rod: The normal world. Oh, fuck.
[00:15:53] Will: Tenderly, I put my toothbrush aside. And when taking a final rub of the soap, I murmured, It may be for days. It may be for longer. So she thought, okay, I need to sort of go undercover into my journey. And the way to do it is to go sort of anonymously out into the world and places where people might say, Hey, you're a little bit crazy. So she said, I'll don my old clothes and I'll go find you know, a temporary home for females. It's a boarding house.
[00:16:20] So basically it's a place where a lot of women would live, you know, poorer women and she could turn up on their door and they might say something depending on her behavior. So she went to that temporary home for females and on second Avenue that was mentioned in the New York times article.
[00:16:36] I'm still baffled by the fact that there was a New York times article about this. While it was happening. So the New York times article I quoted at the beginning, long before the book, like, well, okay days before the book. So there's things going on. Yeah. I was left to begin my career as Nellie Brown, the insane girl.
[00:16:52] As I walked down the Avenue, I tried to assume the look which maidens wear in pictures entitled dreaming and far away. So she sort of just looked a bit wistful. I passed through the little paved entrance to the home. I pulled the bell, which sounded loud enough for the church chime and nervously waited upon the the opening of the door to the home.
[00:17:08] The door was thrown open and a short yellow haired girl of some 13 summers stood before me. Is the matron in? I asked faintly. She talks to the matron. I want to stay here for a few days if you can accommodate me. And she's putting on this affected sort of various version of, can you see me as insane? The matron says look, we're full up. But you can go in a room with another girl if you want. I should be glad of that. So she asked how much for lodgings. And the matron says, we charge 30 cents a night. At this point, Nelly is thinking that's good. I've got 70 cents and I want to use through my money so that then they've got to, they've got to move me on.
[00:17:44] She starts going, okay, how do I pretend to be insane? So she keeps the sort of wistful look and she's haggard and looking a bit.
[00:17:50] Rod: Toothbrush in the bum.
[00:17:51] Will: No toothbrush in the bum. It would have been more effective. And and the matron said. What is wrong with you? Have you some sorrow or trouble? No! I said, almost stunned at the suggestion. Why? Oh, because, I can see it in your face. It tells the story of a great trouble. And then Nelly goes, Oh, go get into the bit, get into the bit. Yeah. Yes, everything is so sad. I said in a haphazard way to reflect my craziness. What she wanted to do is make everyone else a bit stressed there. And she says, yes, everyone else looks crazy here and I'm afraid of them.
[00:18:22] There are so many crazy people about, and one can never tell what they will do. Then there are so many murders committed and the police never catch the murderers. So, and I finished with a sob that would have broken up an audience of blase critics. So she's saying, I'm getting some good acting here. I'm accusing everyone of being crazy.
[00:18:37] Rod: And start sobbing and freaking out. Cut myself, head butted something. Boom.
[00:18:41] Will: People start in the boarding house, start going, okay, why is she accusing us of being crazy? Maybe she is crazy. That was her game. That was her game. They said, and so the matron says, love, come on, you finished your dinner. Let's go to bed. And she says, can I just sit on the stairs? And they literally say no, that will make everyone think you're crazy. So if you sit on the stairs, that is too much.
[00:19:01] Rod: thank you. Got it. All this other shit. I just got to sit on the stairs instead of going to bed.
[00:19:07] Will: Okay. And at this point, everyone starts to think she's crazy just because she's accusing them and she's doing slightly sort of, you know, weird sort of behavior.
[00:19:16] Rod: Your language is a little bit weird and then you say, you're nuts.
[00:19:18] Will: Yeah. That's it. Poor Loon, they said. Why? She's crazy enough. I'm afraid to stay with such a crazy being in the house. She'll murder us all before morning and it's hard to like, they've really dialed it up. Apparently in the night, one of the other women screamed out, had a nightmare and thought that Nellie was going to murder her with a knife.
[00:19:35] So I don't know what level of performance she was doing that was, I'm crazy, but
[00:19:40] Rod: Or she was surrounded by crazy people. She was the only sane one.
[00:19:43] Will: I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, in the morning the matron says, look, please, we don't really want you around here. She refuses to go and the matron says, all right, we're going to get the cops. And Nellie is like, This is it. Game on. This is what I want.
[00:19:57] Rod: It's good day at the office.
[00:19:58] Will: And so the cops come in they've been summoned by the matron, the cops come in and they're like, all right, time to go love. And they've been told there's a crazy person.
[00:20:04] Rod: So they brought the sensitive female officer that doesn't exist.
[00:20:07] Will: No. Yeah. They literally sent the big tough men who are expecting a fight. But Nelly pretended not to see them. And I want you to take her quietly said the matron. If she don't come quietly, responded one of the men, I'll drag her through the streets. Anyway, good cop.
[00:20:23] They dragged her down to the the Essex market police court. Apparently this was where judge Duffy is the judge of the court. It's like, what are we going to do with this woman? We don't know what's going to happen. And he was apparently really super kind. Also a little bit, I don't know if it's creepy or not, but he's like, surely this young woman who she must have a darling out there. She is comely.
[00:20:44] Rod: Look how hot she is. She can't be a problem.
[00:20:47] Will: Literally. And and at this point, this is where the smiling nearly got Nelly. She was like, I nearly burst out laughing and I can imagine the stress of you're pretending to be insane in front of you've gone from in front of boarding house, two in front of cops, two in front of a judge.
[00:21:02] Rod: A judge is going, I'd have that.
[00:21:06] Will: Okay. Well, that didn't help, but anyway, yeah. And she's gone.
[00:21:10] Rod: Yeah. Okay. She's in a problematic and complex social situation.
[00:21:14] Will: So, she has sort of insane character is that she has come from Cuba. Like she starts to embellish here. She's come from Cuba and she's lost her trunks, like her steamer trunks. And she's really confused.
[00:21:27] Rod: I am from Cuba. I've lost my trunks.
[00:21:29] Will: And she's confused and sort of scared and she doesn't really answer things. And when someone said, when did you come to New York? This is the judge. I did not come to New York. I replied and the judge says, but you're in New York now. And she's like, no. I did not come to New York. So she's like, I'm like her level of crazy person is just confused.
[00:21:51] Rod: Gentle disorientation
[00:21:53] Will: and they're like, ah, look, all right.
[00:21:55] Rod: Fucking nut job.
[00:21:56] Will: Like literally the judge says you had better attend to her. They take her then from the police court first door hospital where a doctor is like, all right, I'm going to check if she is really insane.
[00:22:10] Rod: It starts with full nudity cause that's how they were.
[00:22:14] Will: It starts with, let's have a look at your tongue. And he holds a magnifying looking in her eyes and she decides at this point, I'm not going to blink and that will trick him. And she holds that sort of, I don't know where my trunks are. And he's like, no, that's it. She's positively demented.
[00:22:30] Rod: Fucking nutcase. She might be a danger to this whole continent.
[00:22:35] Will: I consider it to be a hopeless case. She needs to be put to where someone will take care of her.
[00:22:39] Rod: Oh my God. I looked at her eyes. She didn't blink. Chick's crazy. He's going to kill people.
[00:22:45] Will: The willingness, I get part of the medical justice system is based on people not trying to trick them, you know,
[00:22:52] Rod: nonetheless, this is not a big effort.
[00:22:55] Will: No, like her level of. She's half wistful. I'm a bit confused.
[00:23:00] Rod: I'm a bit confused. I don't blink enough
[00:23:02] Will: and they've gone, well, we better condemn her for life. Cut one of her feet off too, just in case. The women's lunatic asylum. It's a nice place. It's a fucking ghost hospital. It had a pool. So another doctor comes and examines and
[00:23:18] Rod: fucking hopeless case. Look, I've looked at one of her eyes under magnification, I might add.
[00:23:23] Will: Then, you know, asked if he had any home or friends or lovers that had, might take care of me. He made me stretch out my arms and move my fingers. And then said, she's hopeless.
[00:23:34] Rod: Fuck. You're done, mate. Sorry, sweetheart. Irretrievably insane.
[00:23:45] Will: So that's it from the hospital gets sent on the boat out to Blackwell's Island, which is now known as Roosevelt Island. It's sort of a little bit down of down of Manhattan. That doesn't matter, but she's going on the boat there and ships there with a bunch of other women who were in the same sort of condition and she's keeping up the idea that she's insane at this point. She wants to keep up that idea until she gets there. So she needs to be properly incarcerated. But she's talking about like the other women that are there. And she's like, yes, there are definitely some who I'm you know, not sure where their head is at, what is going on there, but there's also other women's like,
[00:24:22] Rod: They might also be journalists,
[00:24:25] Will: half a dozen journalists in the, and so they, they catch a boat out to the, it's not far, like it's it's a short journey, but yeah, there was a bunch, she was like, ah, they seem all right. So she gets out to Blackwell's Island and her plan as specified by the editor is once she gets in, Basically see what it's all like, you know, so that we can get an undercover report of what's going on there. The interesting thing is she drops the idea of pretending to be insane as soon as she arrives in the house.
[00:24:54] She's just like, no I'm, she doesn't say she's a journalist. She just says, I'm just going to talk normally. I'm not going to have the whole, I'm off with the faries.
[00:25:01] Rod: Oh, this is already scary. Yeah. Yeah. She's scary.
[00:25:05] Will: But the whole bunch, the whole time people that are like, Oh no, you'll be, you don't get out of here. Like you don't leave here. You live here now. This is where you are. This is a one way ticket into the insane asylum. And she is feeling this the whole time. So she spends a bit of time on the women's lunatic asylum on Blackwell's Island. And what she says confined most probably for life behind asylum bars without even being told why or where you're going compared with a criminal who has given every chance to prove their innocence and know where they're up to.
[00:25:36] People are just shipped off. So she goes through it and she's like, I want to describe what the conditions are. What do you reckon the food was like? So there was a lot of potatoes and she said it felt like it could have been cooked a week ago. The temperature, it was freezing cold.
[00:25:51] Terrible tea that felt like it had been boiled in copper or something like that. Rancid butter, so they'd have bread and butter, but no one there could eat the butter. They'd like, I wish we could have bread with just the bread. Cause the butter is... Nine months old. And then everyone had heaps of little piles of prunes, which to me is like
[00:26:07] Rod: pooing's important. We've discussed this
[00:26:09] Will: but the thing is there was all served up in a way that was like the people running the asylum didn't really care. It's willful. And so they would put them on the table. And, you know, they give it to different people and other inmates would just be grabbing.
[00:26:24] And so someone's grabbing all of her prunes and she's like, it's my prunes and grabbing all of her bread and butter. And someone's like, would you like my tea? And she's like, no
[00:26:32] Rod: and from everything you've described, I'll take the prunes.
[00:26:34] Will: I will take the prunes. Absolutely. Bath time. What do you think bath time was like?
[00:26:37] Rod: Oh, goody. Well, I'm thinking it's communal and the water doesn't go above whatever the ambient temperature is.
[00:26:44] Will: Yeah. It was definitely not above. Yeah. And when she was there, I don't have the month, but I think it was a cold month.
[00:26:49] Rod: Cool. I'm guessing also the only way you can have a bath is with vigorous assistants. Okay.
[00:26:55] Will: But what you aren't guessing is who the vigorous assistant is.
[00:26:59] Rod: So definitely male.
[00:27:00] Will: Nope.
[00:27:01] Rod: Oh, I'm disappointed.
[00:27:02] Will: No. So it seemed to be bath time like it was a bath.
[00:27:06] Rod: But if you don't bath with your head underwater a lot.
[00:27:08] Will: It was one at a time. You're each person's getting into the bathroom, but I think they got some of the other inmates to do the washing. They're like, okay, bath time, take your clothes off. And she's like, ah, and she takes the clothes off down to her underpants and they said no, you got to take it all off. And she's like, ah, but that's got my initials.
[00:27:30] Rod: I need to shave my thighs.
[00:27:33] Will: So she takes it all off and gets into this bath and then she is described being scrubbed by the crazy woman.
[00:27:42] Rod: scrubbed is not a good word because that involves abrasion.
[00:27:46] Will: Well, she literally says the 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.
[00:27:59] Rod: Scrub is a very strong word.
[00:28:02] Will: 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.
[00:28:10] Rod: Oh, she's old and crazy. Okay, good to know.
[00:28:12] Will: 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, ice cold water too, into my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth. I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping and shivering and quaking from the tub.
[00:28:29] For once, I did look insane. Yeah, this is the interesting thing that the point of Nelly's investigation here is to show what conditions and to remember that there were, well, many decades after this, and perhaps still now people with diminished capacity treated in ways that are not human. And she's like, I'm going through this process and my God, they brutalized me. It was just horrible.
[00:28:57] Rod: Well, they touched her pretty hair.
[00:29:01] Will: The weird thing was. All the way throughout this, because of the New York times article, there was a whole bunch of reporters showing up there trying to identify who this lost woman was. So she's trying to keep up the pretense in some ways and with others but they're trying to like all of New York is looking for this missing waif who has lost her trunks and she's turned up in the insane asylum.
[00:29:22] So her ordeal. Okay. Not nearly as long as many of the other. Ten days. Not as long. No. But she was the first. Like there hadn't been, there hadn't been investigative journalists going into and doing something like that. There hadn't been encounters people covering this kind of thing.
[00:29:41] So she opened up a window. The New York world, her editors, Joseph Pulitzer's paper, they did organize for her to be released. They, from the outside, said this lady is one of our reporters.
[00:29:54] Rod: We fucking with you. Don't worry. Don't worry about it. Is a joke. Look at her. She's obviously not crazy.
[00:30:00] Will: But the thing that she said is from the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of being insane. That's like, that's just interesting. But all the way through they're just like, no, you're here. You're here. You must be nuts.
[00:30:14] And the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be by all except one physician. So, so she's going. No I'm sane here, and they're like, nah, that's just proof. Oh, we got you. It was a sensation throughout New York, but throughout America and had ripples around the world straight away, people are like, Whoa, this is a, undercover reporting of practices within insane asylums. And look, it didn't change them like that for a long time they were still terrible. Nellie Bly got the the governors in New York to invest, I think something like a million dollars in improving conditions there. But it opened up the idea that, hang on we've got to, we've got to do things a little bit differently.
[00:31:00] But the other thing that Nellie Bly did is in some ways, invent the idea of undercover journalism and at its time it was called the stunt girl journalism.
[00:31:10] Rod: Well, at least it's diminishing.
[00:31:12] Will: Yeah, it was. It was.
[00:31:13] Rod: What happens when a guy does it? I bet it ain't stunt boy.
[00:31:16] Will: She went and did an investigation of how it feels to be a white slave. So that was in a box making factory. or something like that. Another book, Visiting the Dispensaries, Nellie Bly narrowly escapes having her tonsils amputated.
[00:31:28] Rod: That's funny language.
[00:31:29] Will: I know. And then of course, as I've said previously she pitched to her editor I can beat the around the world in 80 days thing and traveled around the world.
[00:31:38] A bunch of other women at the time followed in her footsteps and they were, you know, pejoratively called the stunt girl journalist, but they did really important and interesting things. So there was one like later on when the suffragettes in the UK were being force fed by the government, by police.
[00:31:54] One of these American women said how it feels to be forcibly fed. And yeah, there's pictures of them, you know, with a tube down the throat. Hats off to Nellie Bly, this idea of, no, you can get good stories. You can get good stories by going and seeing the parts of the world that look like this.
[00:32:11] And the idea of uncovering what it looked like in a madhouse in 1885.
[00:32:16] Rod: Oh God, doing it as a woman. I mean, that is beyond, like, it's one, doing it as a guy at all, crazy. Like that's an amazing, but doing it as a woman, incomprehensible. If there's anyone who knows that it's two white guys, but it's true, like it's insane
[00:32:29] Will: but it's absolutely a trope of how sexual violence within these sorts of facilities. Could you imagine?
[00:32:38] Rod: I can, but I don't like to.
[00:32:39] Will: Yeah. And so, you know, she went and did a whole bunch of other investigative reports, traveled around the world like that. Eventually she married she was, I think 35 at the time, married a much older iron magnate. Like he makes iron stuff and she became like an industrial baron and apparently may have invented the 44 gallon drum. You know, the oil drum, she might've invented that, but she might've not.
[00:33:03] Rod: Because someone else had done the 40 gallon drum. She's like, you know what we can make this bigger. Got an idea. Let's add four gallons. I don't even care what I say.
[00:33:14] Will: I was going to say though, like as a 21 year old to, to go out and go, I'm going to go all in. Whoa. That's wild.
[00:33:21] Rod: Nellie, you rock star.
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