between the shadow and the soul
E uma sacudidela dos meus nervos e um ranger de ossos na ida.
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fuckyeahhistorycrushes: The badass you see before you none other than Nellie Bly — the woman who pioneered investigative journalism and my hero.  To fully appreciate this woman for everything she was, you have to understand that there were like maybe two female reporters in the whole country in the late 1800s, and both of them were writing about flowers and cotillions.  Nellie Bly got her first job when she wrote The Pittsburgh Dispatch an angry letter to the editor because some asshole columnist was super sexist. The editor, Erasmus Wilson, who was also the columnist, read the letter, thought it was fiesty, and decided to hire her. The editors gave her a few real stories at first but then put her on the women’s beat — you know, flowers and cotillions.  She tried a couple of times to get off it and do real journalism, even went to Mexico and did some culture reporting, but to no avail.  So she sent quite a scathing two weeks notice to Wilson and went up to New York City, where, wouldn’t you know it, people still weren’t too keen on the idea of a female reporter. She spent six months knocking on every newsroom door in the city before finally The New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer, gave her a chance.  The editor there, probably trying to give her some impossible task, told her to go write a feature story about conditions inside the local insane asylum. But the only way to do that would be to get yourself committed. So that’s just what she did, before any other reporter ever thought to go undercover to get the story. Nellie came up with a fake identity, fooled a bunch of psychiatrists, and spent ten days inside Blackwell’s Island. And while conditions in asylums and health care homes are still often abusive, back then it was a guarantee. People use to send their family members there if they acted weird of if they just got sick of them, and often you didn’t get fed properly, you were beaten, sexually abused, and subjected to all kinds of pioneering psychological tests. Once you went in, it was doubtful that you’d ever come out.  Not only did Nellie manage to make her way out after ten days, with the help of her editor, who was afraid he had accidentally stuck Nellie with spending the rest of her life in that awful place. She wrote a series of articles about Blackwell that absolutely shocked New York and forced psychiatrists and care facilitators to start treating their patients with a little more humanity. And then Nellie moved on and continued to go undercover on important social issues and later decided to see if she could go around the world in less than 80 days.  In other words, Nellie Bly was a star reporter despite the limitations on her sex, and if someone told her she couldn’t do something, she’d go out of her way to prove them wrong. Making her my ultimate historical journalism crush. reblog
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