Her name, when she began her journalistic career in Pittsburgh, was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. But by the time she left the area where she had grown up, she was known as Nellie Bly. It was a name chosen by her editor, taken from a Stephen Foster song. So, a man was able to name her and forge her identity. Women were not allowed to write under their own names at that time, because—according to their publishers and editors—being weak and helpless, they would be much too vulnerable to the wrath of the men who were subjects of the undercover stories they wrote.
Bly—or Cochrane—became famous worldwide by circling the globe in a record-breaking seventy-two days, leaving the fictional character Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, in the dust. The statue in Pittsburgh depicts her outfit on the day of her departure, on November 14, 1889. The satchel she carried, the size of a small toaster oven, held everything she needed for those seventy-two days of journeying by ship, train, and horseback, including her writing materials and a small flask with a drinking cup. Bly had confronted a great deal of resistance when she proposed her around-the-world plan to her editor, who told her, “No one but a man can do this,” to which she replied: “Very well, start the man, and I’ll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him.”
She won the assignment and the race against Fogg. Her editor was well aware that Bly could do anything she set her mind to, not despite the fact that she was a woman, but because of it.
For her first big story for the New York World the previous year she exposed the horrific living conditions of the patients of what was then known as an “insane asylum” on Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, in New York. Her plan was to get herself committed to Blackwell’s by convincing officials that she was insane, a performance that might have earned an Academy Award if she had been making a movie.