American Experience

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Narrator: November 1889... a young reporter prepared

to embark on one of the most publicized journeys of all time.

Her mission: To break the record

set by the legendary fictional character Phileas t. Fogg.

For the next two and a half months

the whole world would follow the adventures of Nellie Bly.

Man: This was new and this was different and this was exciting

and when Nellie Bly actually decided to go

all around the world

I mean, that was like going up in the space shuttle.

Narrator: Nellie Bly became one of the most famous women in the world

by doing things a woman wasn't supposed to do.

She posed as an unwed mother to expose the baby-buying trade...

A thief to experience a night in jail...

An insane woman to report on life inside a madhouse

and everything she did sold newspapers.

Woman: There was something about her voice...

Something about the bravado that her pieces exuded

that I think really captured readers' imagination

and really made her the premiere female reporter of her time.

She seemed to know how to pick the assignment

that would put her on center stage.

I think it was her most remarkable gift.

Woman: "I wonder when they'll send a girl to travel 'round the sky"

read the answer in the stars, they wait for Nellie Bly."

Narrator: A few years before her death, Nellie Bly wrote:

"If one would become great

"two things are absolutely necessary.

"The first is to know yourself.

The second is not to let the world know you."

The world never knew

what lay at the heart of her remarkable ambition.

She never spoke of the darkest days of her childhood.

Her given name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran

but everyone called her "Pink."

She was born in the last year of the civil war, May 5, 1864

in Cochrans Mills, Pennsylvania.

The town was named for her father

judge Michael Cochran.

He had ten children with his first wife.

After she died, he married again.

Pink was his 13th and most rebellious child.

Great confidence.

Dressed in pink, everyone else is dressed in brown and black.

Her mother has taught her to gather attention

and revel in it

and these are lessons that were never, never lost.

Narrator: When Pink was six years old

her life changed suddenly and forever.

Her father died, leaving no will

to protect the interests of his young second family.

The elegant mansion they had lived in for only a year

was auctioned off.

With 15 heirs, there was little to go around

and Pink's mother felt she had no choice but to marry again.

She and her mother were thrown on very hard times

when her father died

and then her mother made a disastrous marriage

after her father's death

to a man who abused her and who she finally had to divorce

so I think Nellie saw a lot of tough times

and a lot of the dark side of life.

Narrator: When pink Cochran was 14 years old

she testified at her mother's divorce trial.

The future reporter painted a devastating portrait

of a marriage.

"My stepfather has been generally drunk

"since he married my mother.

"When drunk he is very cross, and cross when sober.

"I have heard him scold my mother and call her names:

"A whore and a bitch.

I've seen her cry."

Kroeger: Watching these events unfold

and you're someone with Nellie's spirit

what do you say to yourself?

This is not a sure thing.

Love, marriage may be nice

but it is not going to secure my future or my family's future.

Narrator: Pink Cochran would depend on no one.

In a victorian world, she would be an independent woman.

At age 15, she enrolled at the Indiana Normal School

in Western Pennsylvania

determined to enter one of the few careers open to women.

She would become a teacher.

But after only one term, her money ran out.

She would have to seek her fortune

without the advantage of a formal education.

"Looking down on the city of Pittsburgh"

said a writer for the Atlantic monthly

"is like looking into hell with the lid off."

Pittsburgh would be pink Cochran's home

for the next seven years

and the place where luck and ambition

would finally come together.

Kroeger: Pittsburgh was industrializing.

Great fortunes were being made.

It was a place of opportunity and growth.

Her brothers had preceded her to the town.

Her mother came to make a home for them.

They found their way, they took in boarders.

They made it work.

Narrator: In the lives of the young working women she met

pink saw the dark side of industrial America.

Girls as young as nine or ten

worked in canneries, foundries, glass factories.

Their only way out... marriage.

But Pink Cochran yearned for more than factory work

or a husband.

She wanted the same opportunities as her brothers

who landed white collar jobs quickly

in spite of their meager education.

Kroeger: Why can't she be a clerk?

Of course at this time

only young men can be clerks, not women.

Why can't she be a conductor on a Pullman palace car?

Why can't she do the same thing?

Simply because she's a woman?

Narrator: For five years she struggled

helping her mother run the boarding house

seeking work as a nanny or a tutor.

Pink was 20 years old and going nowhere

when she read a column in the Pittsburgh dispatch

by erasmus Wilson, known as q.O., "the quiet observer."

Q.O. Was a civil war veteran with a courtly manner

who looked on the past with nostalgia.

He said that girls were useless outside the sphere of marriage.

They should learn to spin, sew, cook

and raise obedient children.

A woman who tried to make a living outside that sphere

he wrote, was nothing less than a monstrosity.

Kroeger: Nellie reads this column

and just goes into a rage

because, of course, he has not addressed the question

of the young women who have really no choice

but to make their way.

They don't have families taking care of them.

So she writes a letter

that is really imbued with all this passion.

The editor himself reads the letter.

He says, "this writer"

who has signed herself 'lonely orphan girl'"...

So he probably has an idea that it's a woman...

"has no style, no punctuation, no grammar

"but I see a spirit here.

I see a spirit here."

He runs an ad

a little snippet on the editorial page that says

"lonely orphan girl, will you please come forward?"

And she does.

Narrator: As she later told the story, pink Cochran so impressed

the managing editor of the dispatch

that he hired her on the spot.

The odds are astronomical against such a thing occurring.

At the same time, it was an unsettled age

and amazing things did happen

and her very life is the evidence of that.

Narrator: Pink Cochran took her byline from a Stephen foster song.

She wasn't the first woman to work for a newspaper.

There was Margaret Fuller

who wrote for Horace greeley's respected tribune...

Amelia bloomer who started her own newspaper, the lily

filled with editorials about women's rights...

And Jenny June, who pioneered the women's page.

But Nellie Bly wanted to write about what she saw

all around her... Poverty, child labor, divorce.

In one story, Bly interviewed factory girls

not about their jobs, but about their lives after work.

Some came home to emptiness and boredom.

Others went to bars and got drunk with strangers.

Bly asked one young woman

"why do you risk your reputation in such a way?"

Kroeger: The girl says, "I have no money, I have no books"

"I have nowhere to go.

"I work all day in a miserable place.

What do you want from me?"

And I think that...

It's a much more powerful way of telling the story

of the drudgery of their lives

than simply chronicling what they do hour by hour.

Narrator: But over time, Bly's editor assigned her stories

about flower shows, fashion and rubber raincoats.

Trapped on "the ladies page," she rebelled

and invented herself all over again.

Kroeger: She gets the idea to go to Mexico

become a foreign reporter...

As she put it herself

"to do something no girl has ever done before."

She writes fantastic letters back from Mexico

about the food, about the character of the people.

There's no detail that escapes her.

When she goes to a bullfight

she describes how they keep their breeches up...

I mean, things that you might

not even have the sense to think to ask