Venturer Spotlight: Nellie Bly

Venturers

Sep 3

The Venturer Spotlight is our ongoing series highlighting women whose stories deserve to be told, as often and loudly as possible.

These are women who’ve chosen to live passionately, and to continue to question, challenge, and venture out with bravery and curiosity in whatever field or circumstance they found themselves in. These are our role models, and the women we want to be when we grow up.

HERE’S WHY WE LOVE HER…

When she was a teenager she read a newspaper article titled ‘What Girls Are Good For?’ The answer being, naturally, child-bearing and keeping house. She was so bothered by this that she wrote in an anonymous letter to the editor with her rebuttal. That must have been some damn good writing, because the editor published an ad asking that the author come to his office, and when she fessed up he offered her a job on the spot!

Over the course of her career, she became the first female foreign correspondent (until her honest report of the political landscape got her kicked out of Mexico), a champion of workers rights, a suffragette, A business-owner, a patent-holding inventor, an adventurer, and the world’s first female undercover reporter.

At age 23 she walked into Joseph Pulitzer’s office and asked him to fund her investigation of the rumored brutality and severe conditions of mental asylums. Somehow he agreed, and she got herself committed to Blackwell’s Island, releasing a report that quite literally changed how society handled mental illness in the United States.

Then, in a move that would be reason enough for me to develop a serious girl crush, she decided to circumnavigate the globe in less than 80 days, following the course of Jules Verne’s story. She sent telegraph reports along the way which were followed intently by the entire country, giving millions of people exposure to travel and adventure in a way that had never been done before… along with picking up a pet monkey in Egypt.