The Journalist Who Invented Undercover

In a few days it's March 8th. A date that comes from the labor and suffragist struggles of the early twentieth century, from women who demanded more rights and got arrested, beaten, and fired for it. That's why we want to dedicate this issue to the journalists history has forgotten, to the women who literally invented undercover journalism as we know it today, to the reporters who infiltrated places no male journalist could enter, in an era when they couldn't even sign an article with their real name without bringing social disgrace upon themselves.

Among them is the reporter who became a true myth of the undercover method, and whom we had never discussed on these pages. Her name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran. But the world knew her as Nellie Bly.

This issue is written by Luigi and edited by Sacha.

When women journalists couldn't even sign an article

Pennsylvania, 1885. Elizabeth Cochran is twenty-one years old, penniless, and helping her mother run a boarding house in Pittsburgh. Her father, who had been a judge and owner of the local mill, had died when she was six, leaving the family in serious financial difficulty. Her mother had remarried a violent man, then divorced him, one of the first women to do so in Pennsylvania, at a time when divorce had just become legal but was still considered almost a social crime.

To understand the world Cochran grew up in, you have to remember that in America at that time, a married woman barely existed as a legal person. Despite a growing sense of change, the law provided that the legal identity of a wife was absorbed into that of her husband. She could not own property, sign contracts, file lawsuits, control her own earnings, or vote (women's suffrage would not arrive until 1920, thirty-five years later).

In this climate, newspapers played their part. In January 1885, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published an editorial signed by a certain Quiet Observer, known as Erasmus Wilson, titled "What Girls Are Good For". The answer? Simple, according to Wilson: keeping the house in order and raising children. Women seeking a career outside the domestic walls were, he said, unnatural.

Elizabeth Cochran read that article and was furious. She wrote to the paper's editor, George Madden, a letter so passionate, so fierce, so well-argued that he published an appeal in the paper: whoever the author is, come forward. Cochran went to the paper, and editor Madden offered her a job. But a woman journalist couldn't sign with her real name. She might be publicly shamed. She had to use a pseudonym. So Elizabeth Cochran became "Nellie Bly", after the title of a popular Stephen Foster song (and because of a typo by the copy editor, who wrote "Nellie" instead of "Nelly").

Cochran, a gifted writer, was assigned to the women's pages; she was supposed to cover fashion, society, and gardening. But she refused. She wanted to go into Pittsburgh's factories to document working conditions for women workers, to write investigations into the exploitation of female and child labor. So Cochran left for Mexico, where she wrote reports on the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. When the Mexican government threatened her with arrest, she was forced to flee. She returned to Pittsburgh, but that city felt too small for her now. In March 1887, she left a note on a newsroom desk: "I am off for New York. Look for me."

In New York, she knocked on every door for months, but no editor wanted her. Until one day, just as her money was nearly gone, she managed to get a meeting with John Cockerill, managing editor of the New York World, the paper run by Joseph Pulitzer. Cockerill offered her a mission no male journalist could do: document what was happening inside the women's asylum on Blackwell's Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) and find out whether the rumors of abuse were true. She accepted immediately.

Ten Days as a Madwoman

In 1887, you couldn't simply walk up to an asylum and ask to be committed. Getting admitted to Blackwell's Island required a report, followed by police intervention and a judge's decision, partly based on a medical examination. Only at the end of this long, convoluted process could there be a forced commitment. Bly therefore had to navigate the entire chain without anyone suspecting it wasn't the truth. It was, in every sense, an undercover operation: the first carried out with the full awareness that such an investigation requires, and certainly the most famous in history.

Bly chose her cover name: Nellie Brown. The initials matched her own, so the monogram on her laundry wouldn't give her away. The publisher gave her just three instructions: use that pseudonym so we can track you down, report what you see honestly, and stop smiling. She checked into the Temporary Home for Females, a boarding house for working women at 84 Second Avenue. She claimed to have lost her luggage and money. She said she couldn't remember where she came from. She feigned amnesia, spoke incoherently, and held her eyes wide open and vacant. The landlady was frightened. She called the police. Officer T.P. Bockert took her before Judge Duffy of the Essex Market Police Court. Duffy declared her insane. She was transferred to Bellevue, the city's largest public hospital, where doctors examined her and confirmed: Nellie Brown was a mentally ill woman. So, within less than a week (from the plan's conception to the forced commitment), she was sent to Blackwell's Island.

From the moment Bly set foot in the asylum, she stopped playing the role she had needed until then. She spoke and behaved normally. Yet the more she behaved sanely, the more the doctors and nurses considered her mad. Her requests for explanations were read as symptoms. Her protests as delusions. What she found inside was a bureaucratic and daily hell. The nurses beat the patients, insulted them, and threatened worse punishments if they dared complain to the doctors. The food was inedible: rancid broth, bread that was little more than dry paste, rotten meat, dirty, undrinkable water. Dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. All were forced to sit on wooden benches for most of the day, with almost no protection from the cold.

But the most disturbing discovery was another one. Bly spoke with the other patients and realized that many of them had no psychiatric illness at all. Some had been locked up by their husbands or relatives. Others, and this detail says everything about that era, had ended up there simply because they didn't speak English well. Immigrants who couldn't explain to the doctors that they weren't insane, because the doctors didn't understand their language.

As in every undercover investigation, getting out was the hardest part. Had she told the doctors she was an undercover journalist, no one would have believed her. So after ten days, the World sent a lawyer, Peter A. Hendricks, to free her. Bly would write that she had left the asylum with "pleasure and regret: pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself."

The series "Ten Days in a Mad-House" that Bly published in the World became a national scandal. The journalistic investigation triggered a Grand Jury investigation, while the Department of Public Charities and Corrections was forced to increase funding for the Blackwell's Island asylum. Seven years after the investigation, the asylum closed for good. A twenty-three-year-old journalist, in a nation where women couldn't even vote, had just changed the law.

The Stolen Legacy

What happened after Nellie Bly's investigation was a revolution. Across the country, young female reporters threw themselves into immersive journalism. They were called stunt girls, with that mix of admiration and condescension the male world reserves for women when they do something extraordinary but doesn't quite know how to label it. In 1888, Nell Nelson, in Chicago, went undercover in the city's factories, documenting the exploitation of women workers in a twenty-one-part series titled "White Slave Girls." In 1889, Victoria Earle Matthews, a Black journalist, exposed the fraudulent agencies that lured Black women from the South with false promises of work, only to trap them in exploitation. In 1890, Annie Laurie, the pen name of Winifred Sweet Black, pretended to be destitute to expose conditions at the San Francisco public hospital; her investigation would lead to the creation of the city's first public ambulance service.

But this is where the story takes a bitter turn. The publishers and newspaper editors, practically all men, smelled potential profit. The stunt girls' investigations sold papers like nothing else. So the genre was pushed increasingly toward sensationalism: nights in haunted houses, electric chair trials, submarine rides, deep-sea dives in diving suits. What had started as an act of rebellion, journalists infiltrating to expose injustices, born primarily out of the sexism of an extremely patriarchal society, became a product to sell: "Here's a woman doing something no other woman would ever do!" "Look at her, a woman who thinks she can do a man's job!" The stunt girls were essentially used as circus attractions, to the point of becoming a cultural phenomenon.

Before long, stunt reporting was catalogued as yellow journalism, tabloid material, "women's stuff." One publisher of the era, W.C. Brann, wrote that "a careful examination of the 'great dailies' will demonstrate that at least half of the intellectual slime that is befouling the land is fished out of the gutter by females." And so, within a few years, these pioneers of modern journalism were completely forgotten. As the magazine The Journalist wrote in 1889: "Many of the brightest women frequently disguise their identity, not under one nom de plume, but under half a dozen. This renders anything like a solid reputation almost impossible."

It would take more than a hundred years for someone to truly rediscover these stories, and the person to do it was American author Kim Todd, in 2021, with the essay "Sensational: The Hidden History of America's 'Girl Stunt Reporters'": a book that reminds us that undercover journalism was born out of female exclusion, because, after all, when you're an outsider and the front door is always closed to you, the only option is to find another way in.

Until the next Debrief,

Sacha and Luigi

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