Life Story: Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, aka Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. She was one of fifteen children. Her father, Michael Cochran, had ten children from his first marriage. Elizabeth was one of the five children from his second marriage to Mary Jane Kennedy.

By the time Elizabeth was born, Michael was a wealthy man. He had risen from mill worker to mill owner to local judge, and he was the founder of the town they lived in. Elizabeth enjoyed a very comfortable early childhood, but when her father died in 1870 his fortune was divided among his many children. Mary Jane was left with five young children and only a small portion of his estate. She remarried, but quickly divorced her second husband when he became abusive. After the divorce, Mary Jane moved her family to Pittsburgh for a new start.

Elizabeth grew up knowing that she would need to support herself financially. At fifteen, she enrolled in the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania. She also added an “e” to her last name to sound more distinguished. Her plan was to graduate with her teaching certificate and become a teacher. Unfortunately, she ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition. She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boardinghouse.

In 1885 Elizabeth read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that argued a woman’s place was in the home, “to be a helpmate to a man.” She strongly disagreed with this opinion and sent an angry letter to the editor anonymously signed “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

The newspaper’s editor, George A. Madden, was so impressed with the letter that he published a note asking the “Lonely Orphan Girl” to reveal her name. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Shortly after her first article was published, Elizabeth changed her pseudonym from “Lonely Orphan Girl” to “Nellie Bly,” after a popular song.

Elizabeth suggested a series about the lives of Pittsburgh’s factory girls, and her editor gave his approval. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced firsthand the unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours most factory girls lived with every day. Her honest reporting about the horrors of workers’ lives angered local factory owners. To appease them, her editor reassigned her as a society columnist.

Elizabeth was not interested in writing about weddings and parties, so she volunteered to travel to Mexico as an international correspondent for the Dispatch. After six months abroad, she was once again assigned to the society page. She promptly quit in protest.

Elizabeth moved to New York City, hoping the massive newspaper industry there would be more open-minded about the potential of a woman journalist. Although several newspapers turned down her application because she was a woman, she was eventually given the opportunity to write for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

At the World, Elizabeth got another shot at investigative journalism. She pretended to be mentally ill and got herself admitted to Blackwell’s Island, New York’s insane asylum for the poor. She hid her name and identity. For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients on Blackwell’s Island.  Multiple doctors certified that she was insane, which suggests how problematic diagnoses were at this time. Her scathing report about her experiences caused a sensation and earned her a permanent job as an investigative journalist for the World. It also kicked off an era of stunt journalism in national newspapers.

In 1887 Elizabeth published all her articles about her time on Blackwell’s Island in a book called 10 Days in A Mad House. In the introduction, she shared that the city government had invested an additional one million dollars a year to care for the mentally ill. Elizabeth’s stunt had led to real social impact. She was gratified to see her work make a difference, and eager to do more. 

Elizabeth was one of many activist journalists working in the late 1800s. Commonly known as muckrakers, activist journalists played an important part in the reform movements of the time. Elizabeth’s investigations brought attention to inequalities and often motivated others to take action. She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. She also interviewed influential and controversial figures, including Emma Goldman in 1893.

The most famous of Elizabeth’s stunts was her successful seventy-two day trip around the world in 1889. Elizabeth initially proposed the trip with two goals in mind. She wanted to beat the fictional record set in the popular Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, and knew readers would enjoy hearing about her adventures. But Elizabeth also wanted the opportunity to prove that women were capable of traveling just as well as—if not better than—men. Elizabeth traveled light, taking only the dress she wore, a cape, and a small traveler’s bag. She challenged the stereotypical assumption that women could not travel without many suitcases, outfit changes, and vanity items. Her world tour made her a celebrity. After her return, she toured the country as a lecturer. Her image was used on everything from playing cards to board games. She recounted her adventures in her final book, Around the World in 72 Days.

In 1895 Elizabeth retired from writing and married Robert Livingston Seaman. Robert was a millionaire who owned the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company. When Robert died in 1904 Elizabeth briefly took over as president of his companies.

In 1911 she returned to journalism as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. She covered a number of national news stories, including a parade for women’s suffrage in 1913 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth often referred to suffrage in her articles, arguing that women were as capable as men in all things. During World War I, she traveled to Europe and became the first woman to report from the trenches on the front line.

Although Elizabeth never regained the level of stardom she experienced after her trip around the world, she continued to use her writing to shed light on important issues. Her long career also paved the way for other intrepid woman journalists. She died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922.

• boardinghouse: A house where people rent bedrooms to live in.
• front line: The place where the fighting takes place in a war; also known as a battle line.
• investigative: Closely studied and researched.
• muckrakers: Activist journalists who wrote about the problems in society with the goal of motivating readers to take action.
• society page: The part of a newspaper that focuses on social news, including gossip and cultural events.
• stunt journalism: Journalism that includes the writer participating in some kind of unexpected and fantastical act.
• suffrage: The right of voting; in this era, suffrage often referred specifically to women’s suffrage, or the right of women to vote.

• Combine Elizabeth Cochrane’s life story with the life stories of Ida B. Wells, Jovita Idar, and Edith Maude Eaton, all of whom used careers in journalism to advocate for social reform.
• Connect Elizabeth Cochrane’s work to that of fellow muckraker Lewis Hine, who used photography to shed light on the challenges of life in the modern industrial US.
• Elizabeth Cochrane was one of many Americans who fought to eradicate what she perceived as the evils of modern life. Conduct a close examination of the “Woman’s Sphere” illustration from Life Magazine, which illustrates some of the evils middle-class Americans feared.

ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE; AMERICAN IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP