The stunt that started a reporting revolution

Hey there,

Where do you draw the line between a journalistic scoop and a publicity stunt? Well, in the 1880s, they were very much one and the same: “stunt girls” was a name given to some of the first and most prominent female reporters.

The name wasn’t exactly flattering. Not only were these reporters adult women, not girls, they were also doing work we’d now call investigative journalism, much of it with a strong commitment to the public good. They went undercover – also a dirty word for some back then – and wrote about the difficult stuff, including exploitative conditions for factory workers, access to abortion, and how it felt to travel as an immigrant to the US.

At the time, newspapers were fiercely competitive. In New York, rival papers were run by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose names may ring bells a hundred or so years later. (One’s lent his name to a major media company, and the other to the Oscars of journalism.)

Journalists working for these papers indulged in what we here in the UK would call tabloid reporting, and what they knew as “yellow journalism”: sensationalism, grisly murders and plenty of sex appeal. A lot of it was misleading, some of it was downright propaganda, and the literati strongly disapproved.

The stunt girls got lumped in with that, pretty unfairly. Their stories were true, if dramatic. Sure, they probably didn’t go through the rigorous processes today’s journalists do before they decide to lie their way into an Amazon warehouse, or film secretly inside a nursing home, but they were diligent, brave, and a lot of their work has stood the test of time.

The most famous one known today is Nellie Bly – or rather, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, who used a pen name for her journalism. While her peers may have looked down on her as a stunt girl, she’s now seen as a pioneer of investigative journalism, and she kickstarted undercover reporting in the US.

Her career began with a furious response to an article in her local paper suggesting that women belonged in the home. But it was her first undercover investigation – after she moved to New York and bullied Pulitzer into giving her a job – that was her big break.

The brief was simple: she would get herself committed to a mental asylum. At some point, her editor assured her that he’d swing by and get her out.

Reading her account today, she makes it look easy. Bly went to a boarding house for women, and spent only one night there before the matron was convinced to call the police and have her committed. All she had done was act moderately paranoid, refuse to take off her hat, and spend the whole night awake.

But that was part of the problem – as Bly was pushed through the courts, medical exams and eventually two asylums (Bellevue and Blackwell’s Island Women’s Hospital) she encountered other women just as sane as she was, trapped in the system. Bly was trying desperately to make it to Blackwell’s, an infamous asylum on an island in New York City’s East River. But the women around her wanted to avoid that fate at all costs.

The horror of it was obvious to her. At Blackwell’s, she watched the intake of the other patients who’d been brought over with her. She wrote of a German woman, Louise Schanz:

It only got worse from there. Bly, along with hundreds of other women confined to the asylum, was stripped for ice cold baths using water so dirty it became “thick”. She was kept awake in frigid, noisy sleeping cells and given blackened, inedible meals. Nurses regularly reminded her she was a “charity case” who didn’t deserve any better.

She watched women who’d arrived physically ill get sicker and eventually succumb to the mental illness they’d supposedly had all along. And worst of all, she saw nurses beat patients: choking, slapping and punching the women, some with what we’d now recognise as developmental disabilities, who were supposed to be in their care.

Throughout her time in the asylum, Bly challenged doctors on what they were doing. But they dismissed her intelligent, withering critiques as “ravings”. Any sign of resistance or protest was treated as another confirmation of the diagnosis. “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap,” Bly wrote. “It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.”

Bly, of course, had her editor and friends on the outside ready to rescue her. After 10 days at Blackwell’s, she was released. She wrote: “I left the insane ward 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.”

An investigation was immediately launched. Bly testified before a grand jury about what she’d seen and experienced. The investigation team ended up visiting the island, and Bly cynically noted the hasty changes that had been made after her article was published. The women she’d spoken to had been moved around, and most of them couldn’t be found. But it wasn’t enough to fool the grand jury, who agreed with Bly’s recommendations. The next year, New York increased its funding for mental healthcare by $1m. Extremely roughly, that’s about $35m in today’s money.

Bly later published her serialised article as a book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. A hundred years on, it’s still a moving, empathetic and powerful work of investigative journalism (and pretty zippy too – she’s a brilliant writer). So much for a “stunt”.

That said, there was one Bly story that really was a stunt. In 1889, two years after her asylum articles, she set off on a round-the-world trip to try and beat the fictional time set by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World In Eighty Days. Bly beat Fogg by eight days, and another journalist racing to make the same trip in the other direction, Elizabeth Bisland, by five. (The current record is, annoyingly, held jointly by all astronauts who’ve had the pleasure of orbiting the Earth, so I won’t be making my attempt any time soon.)

Circling the world didn’t change it, even if travelling as a solo woman was pretty inspirational for the time. But effectively launching undercover investigations is a legacy that changed the world for the better.

And journalists still use undercovers today to expose and put an end to wrongdoing. Longtime readers will remember Patrick Strudwick’s undercover work exposing gay conversion therapy, which is a great issue to reread this Pride month, and one of the first stories I ever covered, on the Kenyan fake fertiliser scandal, hinged on undercover filming.

Until next week,