WHOA, Nellie! Happy Birthday to the Both of Us
She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 5th. For a good chunk of her life, Elizabeth was a writer/journalist, under the pen name Nellie Bly. In those days there were many women writers, but most of them "hid" their real personas under a false name. Nellie and I have two things in common - our birthdays, our passion for writing, and of course journalism. So it should be no surprise that on the eve of our birthdays, I'm writing about someone that I would definitely have hung around with a lot. After a stint at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Nellie fled to New York, where editors would not hire her because she was a woman. Now that's not news. But Nellie had what in those days people would have called gumption. Broke and desperate, she somehow wrangled her way into the New York World offices and talked her way into a job. The assignment - pretend to be insane and get herself into the Women's Lunatic Asylum on what is now called Roosevel
