Joseph Pulitzer Told Her To Get Thrown In An 1887 Insane Asylum. She Did
What they did to women was brutal. That wasn’t the worst part.
Her first night in the asylum, she laid in bed listening to a 70 year old blind woman crying about the cold and begging God to just take her, already.
The bizarre and sick bedtime ritual was a big part of that.
Sometime after dinner, nurses would start dragging women away, one by one. At the sight of the nurses, women would begin to shake and cry. When they came for her, that first night, she didn’t know what was happening.
They dragged her into a room with a tub and told her to take her clothes off. When she asked for some privacy, they laughed and forcibly tore her clothes off. They told her to get in, or they’d put her in. She got in.
The water was ice cold.
The nurses dunked her under the ice cold water and held her down while she shook and gasped in shock. They scrubbed her viciously with some piece of cloth that was so rough it made her skin red. They weren’t nearly done.
Then they poured three buckets of ice cold water over her head.
When they pulled her out, she was shivering, shaking and gasping from the cold and shock. There was no towel waiting. The nurses pulled a thin cotton slip right over her wet body.
Then they shoved her in a bedroom and locked her in. She begged for a warm nightgown, but they told her to shut up. “Charity cases” should be grateful for what they get. That’s what they said.
She was shivering and cold, hair dripping wet. The one blanket she was given was too short to cover her shoulders and feet at the same time.
They called her Miss Brown, but that wasn’t her name.
She wasn’t Miss Brown and she wasn’t insane. She was a journalist, and Joseph Pulitzer had challenged her to get herself thrown in an asylum.
It was research for a story he wanted to run in his New York newspaper. If she could pull it off, it would make her career.
Providing he could get her out. Because he wasn’t sure.
From private school to pauper…
Her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran and she was born to the wealthy elite of Cochrans Mills, Pennsylvania.
The town was named after her father, who was judge, mill-owner and a wealthy landowner.
Her pampered childhood was short lived. When she was 6, her father died without a will, leaving her mother penniless with three kids. All his money and property went to his 5 sons from his first marriage.
In the 1800s, women weren’t welcome in the workforce so her mother moved them to Pittsburgh and ran a boarding house. It was one of the few ways a woman could make ends meet without a man to support her.
At 15, she became a teacher, but the pay was appallingly low. The common practice was that if a woman was hired for a job in the first place, her pay was 50% of the pay a man would get for the same job.
Women were supposed to get married and raise kids. Not work.
The butterfly effect…
The butterfly effect is more than a movie starring Ashton Kutcher. It’s the theory that tiny changes can lead to dramatically different outcomes.
The phrase was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz and validated by Rutgers biophysicist Troy Shinbrot, who said the butterfly effect is firmly rooted in the physics of chaos theory.
That’s kind of what happened to Elizabeth Jane.
She was 16 when she read a misogynistic column in the daily news paper, ‘The Pittsburgh Dispatch.’ It made her angry. So, so angry.
All around her, she saw women struggling. Her mother. Herself. All the teachers working at half pay. So she fired off a scathing reply and signed it ‘Lonely Orphan Girl.’
The newspaper offered her full time employment as a writer.
Women writers often used a pen name so no one knew who they were. Less trouble that way. She chose ‘Nellie Bly’ after the Stephen Foster song.
Her first articles were about sexism and the poor working conditions faced by women. The editors were not happy. They gave her fluff to write. Home, hearth, society and childrearing. The male writers didn’t want those.
She tried working as a foreign correspondent, but was kicked out of Mexico for for criticizing the dictator.
Finally, she moved to New York. In a meeting with Pulitzer, he challenged her to get herself thrown in the infamous Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. There were rumors about what happened there, but no one knew for sure. No one who went there had ever got out.
Pulitzer wanted to break the story.
A day in the asylum…
The day started at 5:30 am. After sleeping on wet hair, the women lined up to get their hair combed. The nurses were not gentle, which resulted in tears and punishment. Then, they lined up and had to stand still for up to 45 minutes before being allowed in the dining room.
Breakfast was cold lumpy oatmeal, a slice of bread with rancid butter and a cup of tea that was weak, bitter and tasted like metal. If you didn’t want the rancid butter, you had to ask in advance.
When I say bread, don’t think lovely thick slices of homemade.
It was black and dry, with dry flour throughout and riddled with bugs. One morning there was a spider in Nellie’s slice. She pushed it away. Another woman ate it. They were always hungry.
“I cannot tell you of anything which is the same dirty, black color. It was hard, and in places nothing more than dried dough. I found a spider in my slice, so I did not eat it.”
— Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad House
Lunch was just bread and tea. Dinner was a bowl of broth, one cold boiled potato and a chunk of meat. Usually rancid beef or rubbery boiled fish. No beverage at dinner, because bathrooms were locked at night.
The dreaded “sitting” room
There were few variations in the daily routine. Some days, some women were allowed to go for a walk outside. Roped together and beaten if they stepped on the grass.
After breakfast, some women were assigned chores. They made beds, washed walls or floors, sewed the garments inmates wore and cleaned nurses’ rooms. Staff did not take care of the place. Inmates did.
But mostly, they sat. Hour after hour. Silently. On hard benches.
If they moved or talked they were slapped, kicked, choked or beaten with broomsticks. The hours of sitting could make even a sane person crazy.
“Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
— Nellie Bly, Ten Days in a Mad House
Even worse than how they were treated…
10 days later, Joseph Pulitzer yanked Nellie out of the madhouse. She didn’t just write one article for his paper. It was a series that became a book.
Those articles resulted in a massive investigation that shamed New York into providing more funding for asylums and curtailed some of the abuses.
But even worse than how they were treated?
Why they were there in the first place.
Some of the women locked away in institutions like Blackwell’s were struggling with mental illness, true enough. But many were not.
All it took was 2 signatures to put a woman into an asylum for the rest of her life. One signature if it belonged to a judge.
Nellie knew how easy it was to get thrown in an asylum. She’d deprived herself of sleep for one night so she would look tired and haggard. Then she walked around muttering about missing luggage.
The woman who ran her boarding house called the police. She babbled and cried and told them she came to America from Cuba and doesn’t know where her luggage is. The police told the judge she’s crazy.
And voila. She was on her way to an institution.
Nellie heard lots of stories about how women got committed.
Margaret had been a cook. She’d just washed the floor when the maids dirtied it. On purpose. Spite. They didn’t like her. She lost her temper and screamed at them. The wealthy woman who employed her called the police. The police filed a report. The judge signed the form, and voila. Asylum.
A French woman named Josephine Despreau became ill while her husband was in France. The woman running the rooming house didn’t know what to do with a sick foreigner, so she called the police. Josephine didn’t understand the questions they asked her. She ended up there, too.
Sarah Fishbaum’s husband committed her because he believed she had a fondness for other men than himself. He told the doctor she was mentally ill and the two men signed the forms.
Older women often were committed when their husbands wanted to move onto greener pastures without having to support aging wives.
Being poor, being an immigrant or most often — being an inconvenience to your husband. That could get a woman locked away until she died.
When she heard those stories from women, Nellie made a point of telling the doctors she was sane and asking to be released or at least tested. They laughed and said she was just having delusions of sanity.
No one ever listened to them. Crazy bitches.
The echo that still screams…
Nellie Bly became one of America’s first investigative journalists. She faked a robbery to prove male police were strip searching women. She exposed a fraudulent employment agency that was robbing immigrants, a health clinic where unqualified doctors were experimenting on patients, and a lobbyist that was bribing politicians.
She changed how people were treated in mental health institutions.
What she couldn’t do is change the way a woman’s voice is perceived by people in positions of authority. 99 years after her death, we are still asking women why were you there? Why did you wear that? What did you think was going to happen?
We mock women with “daddy issues” instead of the men who caused them. We ask women why they stay in abusive relationships instead of asking why men abuse. We tell women not to get raped instead of telling men not to rape.
Doctors still don’t listen to women, male bias in medical trials affects our health, women are still not equal in a court of law, and men like Joe Rogan call women crazy bitches and think it’s funny.
It’s not funny. And it needs to stop.
It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world. ~ Nellie Bly
Linda, this is a fine article on Nellie Bly. I am inspired to read more about her