Women’s rights were a major topic of discussion in the campaign that handed Donald Trump a sweeping election victory – his second triumph over a woman trying to break the nation’s highest glass ceiling.
Post-campaign, pundits are pondering many reasons for Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris, including speculation that in some masculinity circles, women are thought incapable of handling the presidency.
Gender disparagement, always with us, provides a reason for appreciating the impending anniversary of how one woman overcame it and won enduring fame in the process.
This happened 135 years ago, on Nov. 14, 1889 – the day 25 year-old journalist Nellie Bly, toting one small suitcase, sailed off from Hoboken, N.J. to challenge a fictional record of going around the world in 80 days.
Her path to notoriety began five years earlier while she was living in Pittsburgh, and under her original name of Elizabeth Jane Cochran was helping her divorced mother run a boarding house.
Her life forever changed when she read in a local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, complaints about working women by columnist Erasmus Wilson.
Wilson wrote that women belong in the home, are simply ornaments for their husbands, and are good only for birthing and domestic duties. The woman who works outside the home, he opined, is a “monstrosity.”
Thusly enflamed, Elizabeth fired off a rebuttal letter to the paper that impressed editor George Madden so deeply he offered her a reporter’s job at five dollars a week.
Among her first contributions was a piece in which she asked, “if ambitious young men could start as errand boys and climb up the ladder to responsible and well-paying positions, why not girls – just as smart, and quicker to learn… “
Editor Madden began handing her more assignments, but not before suggesting that she enliven her byline by becoming Nellie Bly, after the character in a song written by Pittsburgh native son Stephen Foster.
After later moving to New York, Bly convinced Joseph Pulitzer‘s New York World to hire her, and there she made a major professional mark.
Feigning mental illness and getting admitted to a local “lunatic asylum,” she spent ten days there undercover, later reporting on and gaining relief for intolerable conditions.
In 1888 she pitched to her editors the idea of a global race to break the travel “record” set by a character in Jules Verne’s popular novel, “Around the World in 80 Days.”
But once again, gender bias crept in. Her editors were enamored of the idea, but waffled because they favored giving the job to a man. Only when Bly threatened to compete with a male substitute by jumping to another newspaper did they finally relent.
That put her on a pier in Hoboken with a small suitcase of essentials and a newspaper grubstake of a few hundred dollars worth of gold and cash. She was bound for Europe, the Middle East, Japan, San Francisco, and back home – a journey of 28,000 miles.
According to contemporary accounts, Bly went round the world in “72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds.“
When a reporter told her the accomplishment was remarkable, she responded, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not so very much for a woman to do who has the pluck, energy, and independence which characterize many women in this day of push and get-there.”
Kamala Harris, in her gracious post-election remarks, told supporters, “Don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before… Do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.“
Nellie Bly couldn’t have said it better.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net) is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
