The Girlfriends: Spotlight, E3: Nelly Goes Undercover
41:27 Share

How to have fun. Anytime. Anywhere. Step one. Go to ChumbaCasino.com. ChumbaCasino.com. Got it. Step two. Collect your welcome bonus. Come to Papa welcome bonus. Step three. Play hundreds of casino style games for free. That's a lot of games. All for free? Step four. Unleash your excitement. Woohoo! Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

Chumba Casino has been delivering thrills for over a decade. So claim your free welcome bonus now and live the Chumba life. Visit ChumbaCasino.com. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. We have a lot of great support.

With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com.

Hi, listeners. It's Anna, host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast. And I'm excited to share these fascinating stories with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of the Girlfriend season one and season two and every single episode of the Girlfriend Spotlight 100% live.

ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love like The Real Killer, Betrayal, The Godmother, Monster BTK, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, American Homicide and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey listener, in this episode we'll be mentioning themes like physical and sexual abuse. But we'll also be talking about probably the most kick-ass female journalist you've ever heard of. And in the spirit of the show, there's also going to be some inevitable bad language. Oh well. I was having dinner with some of my oldest friends the other night. The kind of old friends who you don't ask about work because we're not entirely sure what the other one does. And I was like,

But at some point in the evening, after saying I was still jet-lagged from one of my recent reporting trips to New York, one of them actually asked what I was doing there. And so I told them. I was interviewing some convicted murderers, and for safety reasons, I was assigned a chaperone. My friend, who is a therapist, audibly sighed.

The last time I think she sighed at me like that, I'd just described the moment I was on an industrial estate at night, the sound of gravel being poured into a pit behind me while a prolific gangster threatened to kill me and my family. Or actually, was it the time that an interviewee insisted I fired their AK-47 at a gun range?

Or when someone suddenly changed route and drove me, without warning, out into the Alaskan abyss, where there's no electricity or plumbing. I forget. She sighs at me a lot. And so does my mum. And occasionally, so do I. Because in all of those moments, I've been truly fucking terrified.

And yet I keep on doing it, chasing my story like some crazed dog following a rabbit into a burrow and getting stuck. The scary thing is I think I actually even like that feeling, knowing I'm on that knife's edge of things going really horribly wrong. This is the point where my therapist friend would cite me again. As a journalist, I thought I'd seen some shit. But then I heard about someone who blows all of that out of the water.

Nellie Bly, the original female investigative reporter. The more I read about her, the more I realized I'm part of a long lineage of stubborn women obsessed with chasing their story no matter what. And that all started with Nellie. In this episode, we're going back to the 1800s on the trail of Nellie's dazzling and groundbreaking career.

I want to find out how Nelly, as a woman in the notoriously un-emancipated 19th century, did something so brave, so, you could argue, stupid, that she changed journalism forever. You see, really, Nelly Bly was pretty punk.

For her first ever story, Nelly literally risked her life by going undercover in an insane asylum. She was drugged, half-starved, manipulated by doctors as the screams of other patients echoed around the corridors. Nelly didn't know if she would ever get out. I'm Anna Sinfield, and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcast, this is The Girlfriend Spotlight, where we tell stories of women winning.

Today, Nelly goes undercover. I got you, I got you.

As soon as I heard about her, I knew Nellie Bly would be the perfect guest for the girlfriends. But unfortunately, not even extreme levels of girl power could keep someone alive for 150 years. So instead, I turned to Kim Todd. Kim is a researcher and author who wrote the definitive book about Nellie and the revolution that she started. So Kim, I'm fascinated to learn all there is about Nellie. She sounds so cool.

She was like the first original female investigative journalist, wasn't she? Yeah, she really was. So what do we need to know about Nellie? What's her story? Who is she? So Nellie Bly was born in the mid-19th century and grew up in small-town western Pennsylvania. Her father died when she was pretty young, and her stepfather was really horrible and very abusive. So she grew up in this household where she was, you know,

watching him choke her mother, call her mother like whore, call her mother bitch. So the idea of marriage wasn't particularly attractive to her. And also the idea that like she was going to need to pay her own way and find a job and support herself and not have to depend on a man was really instilled in her from very young.

Nellie was determined to lead an independent life. That meant she needed to find a career for herself. And one of the most common routes available to women at the time, in the late 1800s, was teaching. She tried to get her teaching certificate, but she ran out of money before she could even finish the training. When Nellie surveyed what other options were available to her as a young woman, tumbleweeds rolled past her. And then, a newspaper.

She was reading the local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and there was a debate at the time about, you know, where do women belong? Should they be at home taking care of kids, you know, making it a little paradise on earth? Or should they be out in the world?

And she wrote in to the Pittsburgh Dispatch and said, you know, we need better jobs for women. And she signed this letter, Lonely Orphan Girl. And there was something about the letter that really intrigued the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. And he put a notice in the paper and said, you know, Lonely Orphan Girl, come by the office and, you know, we might have something for you.

And her first article is called The Girl Puzzle. And it's elaborating on the case that she made in her letter where she says, you know, we really need better jobs for women. Not all women marry. They're still going to need money. So she says, you know, well, why can't we let girls do better things that will get them a better start in the world? And then this is one of my favorite quotes from this very early piece of hers when she's still figuring out how to write books.

Instead of gathering up the real smart young men, gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life. I love that one. That one's so good. And so she has to do that for herself, though. She's given herself this shove and then she goes to work as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch for the next couple of years.

It wasn't totally unusual for a woman to be a journalist when Nellie was starting out. But the opportunities for female journalists kind of mirrored what was available to women in the general society. You know, like they weren't expected to worry their pretty little heads about complicated manly stuff like politics or societal injustice.

She kind of gets shunted into the writing that most women who worked for newspapers did at the time, the society writing, the fashion writing, and she wasn't really interested in that. After a while, Nellie got frustrated with the work she was allowed to do at the Pittsburgh Dispatch. She set her sights on much bigger goals. She's very ambitious and has, like, a great sense of what she might do in the world. So...

After two years, she goes to New York and she anticipates fame and fortune and tells her friends of the Pittsburgh Dispatch to watch for her as she, you know, makes a splash in the big city, which she completely does not. She spends months there, like trying even to get in the door at various editors. There's lots of people who want to work as reporters and not many people want to hire women.

But finally, she talks her way into the office of the editor of The New York World, which is the biggest, splashiest paper at the time. The New York World. This was the big leagues. At the time when Nellie stomped her way into the editor's office, the paper was owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Yes, the one the prize is named after. The New York World circulation was nearly one million copies a day.

Standing in front of the editor was the biggest opportunity Nelly would probably have in her entire career. She was determined to land a job and to prove to those hacks in Pittsburgh what she was really worth. She tells the editor, I will literally do anything to write for the world.

And he says, well, do you think that you can get yourself committed to the Insane Asylum for Women on Blackwell's Island, which is this notoriously bad insane asylum, which there's just been rumors of mistreatment there for years and years. And she answers, I don't know what I can do until I try. And the editor says, well, you can try. But if you can do it, it's more than anyone would believe.

Just a few weeks later, Nellie Bly's first ever article for the New York World is published. It's splashed all over the front pages, being flogged by newsboys across the city. The headline reads, Inside the Madhouse. In the first paragraph, she writes, Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could, and I would, and I did. Okay, Miss Bly.

Up next, we find out how Nelly smuggles herself into the asylum and tries not to get stuck there forever. Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. With family, cannolis, and spins mean everything. Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business. Introducing the Godfather at choppacasino.com.

You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Tell me about it.

Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship,

or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com.

Hi, Drew and Jonathan Scott here, reminding you that a lot of life's firsts are better with help from American Family Insurance. Like your first home expansion or your first big lightning strike.

There's a first for everything. Get the right home policy at the right price with the right help from American Families agents. Life's better when you're under American Families' roof. Insure carefully. Dream fearlessly. Get a quote and find an agent at AmFam.com. Products not available in every state. American Family Mutual Insurance Company S.I. and its operating company, 6000 American Parkway, Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, listeners. It's Anna, host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast. And I'm excited to share these fascinating stories with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of the Girlfriend season one and season two and every single episode of the Girlfriend Spotlight 100% live.

ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love like The Real Killer, Betrayal, The Godmother, Monster BTK, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, American Homicide and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Okay, so how on earth does Nelly manage to get inside this notorious, insane asylum, the women's lunatic asylum?

So she books herself into this boarding house for women and starts to act very odd. She keeps asking for her trunks and she doesn't know where her trunks are and is very concerned about them. And she doesn't go to sleep at night. Like she is acting very, what we describe today as paranoid and afraid. And she's

She says that people are looking at her very oddly. And eventually the other women in the boarding house just start to get very disturbed by her behaviors. And that's at the point where the matron calls the police and has her taken away. Wow. That is such a courageous and scary and maybe slightly stupid thing to do. I mean, how old was she at this point? So she was in her early 20s.

Okay. That's amazing.

And was this sort of big stunt, you know, going and getting yourself committed to an insane asylum, was that something that was going on generally in journalism at the time, perhaps obviously by male reporters? Or was this a whole new genre? I mean, people did do undercover work at the time, but the particular way that Nellie Bly did it was really not something that had ever been done before.

And I guess, like, I know she was asked to do it by her editor, but did she also have a personal reason for wanting to cover this story? I think that she really wanted to do...

meaningful work which is what she had been arguing for from the beginning so I do think that she saw a great value in helping out these women and reforming the system and that was something that would be important to her throughout her life. So can you tell us a little bit about her story with this insane asylum like how did it go what did she uncover? Yeah

So when she gets committed to the asylum, she gets put on a boat across the East River and

And on the boat, she meets another woman consigned to the asylum, Tilly Mayard. And this is sort of a clue as to what she would find in the asylum when she gets there, because Mayard seemed actually sane. She just seemed very sick. And she thought that she was being sent to like a place that would help her get better. And she was really devastated when she found out that she was on her way to the asylum.

Bly describes being driven in what was some sort of ambulance from the place where the boat docked to the asylum. And then they go up this rather grand entrance.

to this white building called the Octagon, which is where the asylum was. And when they arrive, Bly hears Mayard pleading her case. You know, Mayard is saying, you know, test me for insanity. I'm not insane, but she's ignored. Then they're checked in and they're processed and executed.

given these freezing cold baths and had their usual clothes taken away from them and transformed into patients at the asylum. And so what sort of things did Nellie Bly witness inside the asylum? Bly sees women getting slapped, they're being fed rancid food, they're being bathed in freezing water and not given warm enough blankets and night clothes.

And like Mayard, like most of the women that I talked to did not seem to be mentally ill. They seemed to be sick or they were poor and didn't have relatives to take care of them or they had committed adultery and their husbands wanted to get rid of them or they didn't speak English.

Yeah, I mean, it's so depressing, isn't it? That this is how they were using mental illness at the time as a sort of handy tool to just remove and imprison women who didn't fit into the mould of society.

What does Nellie say about what sounds like very common abuse of the patients by the staff? She makes it clear that many of them, the nurses in particular, enjoyed tormenting the patients. You know, they were people without any recourse or without any friends who they had power over. Yeah, I mean, it's a perfect place for abuse to manifest, isn't it? Yeah, the idea is that no one's watching, right? And then all of a sudden there's someone watching.

In the article, Nellie quoted one of the women, Mrs. Cotter, describing how she'd been beaten because she'd been crying. "'The nurses beat me with a broom handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally so that I shall never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet and throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat so I could not scream and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless.'

Nellie writes that Mrs. Cotter then showed her, and I quote, the dent in the back of her head and the bare spots where the hair had been taken out by the handful. But it seemed that the treatment Nellie was uncovering wasn't even the worst of it. You see, Nellie was placed with the general population.

But she soon learned that there were other wings too. The most severely mentally ill patients were kept in separate areas called the lodge and the retreat. And Bly said that she didn't even attempt to get herself committed there because she thought it'd be too dangerous. But she talks about hearing the sounds from the patients there and how much distress it seems like they were in.

All of these women were locked away on Blackwell Island without any real recourse, just out of reach of their old lives, which used to unfold on the other side of the East River. From the island, you know, you can look over and see New York City, you can see Manhattan, you can see like the lights of people who are still embraced by society.

playing out, but feel so isolated and feel so shunned to be put on this island. Nellie, who remember was in her 20s and who had never done anything like this before, had to stay focused on the task at hand. One of her big struggles was how to report this story while she was there being treated as a patient.

And she's smuggled in a pencil and a notebook so she can take notes and do her work. And they are confiscated when she gets into the asylum. And she asks about it. It had been in her purse. And she's told, you can't have it, so shut up. And when she asks about it again, the doctor tells her that she hadn't brought a pencil and that she should stop hallucinating.

At all times, Nellie was dancing on the line of losing herself, losing her sanity to the darkest recesses of the asylum. She was very much at risk. She was at risk of being drugged. She was at risk of staying there.

She was at risk of sexual assault, which isn't something that she plays up, but kind of hints around a little bit in the storytelling and was certainly something that happened to women who had been discarded by mainstream society. And there's this one instance where they give her a drug and she knows that she needs to keep her wits about her while she's there. And so as soon as the nurse is gone, she throws it up.

Throughout her time in the asylum, Nellie remains close to Tilly Mayard, the woman she met on the boat at the very start. One of the saddest things in her expose, she just talks about how Mayard really declines rapidly under the strain of the cold and the terrible food. One day they're sitting together on a bench and Mayard just collapses into a fit. And when the superintendent comes in, Bly describes later that

He caught her roughly between the eyebrows or thereabouts and pinched her until her face was crimson. And Bly said that when, you know, Mayard came to, she was never really the same after that. And for the women who were committed to the asylum, what was their fate? Would a lot of them just kind of languish there for years on end? Or were they actually being treated to be released? I think that they just languished there for years on end.

Very notably, Bly describes the asylum as a human rat trap and wrote that it's easy to get in, but once there, it's impossible to get out. By now, Nellie had spent 10 days in the human rat trap. It was time to attempt that impossible feat, her escape.

How did Nellie actually manage to get herself out of the asylum? So Nellie spent 10 days there and then the world's lawyer came and said that he was a relative and that he would take care of her and got her released. It turns out that actually, if one of the most powerful media entities in New York or, you know, a long-lost uncle came to your rescue, it wasn't actually so difficult to leave the women's lunatic asylum.

Which just sort of underlines the level of abandonment most of the women on the inside were facing. Once out, Nellie got to writing. She worked incredibly quickly because it was just a few weeks later that she publishes the first of two very long pieces in the world detailing her experience at the asylum. Coming up, how Nellie's article shook the city of New York and made Nellie into a superstar. I've got you, I've got you.

Talkspace.com.

With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com.

Hi, listeners. It's Anna, host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast. And I'm excited to share these fascinating stories with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of the Girlfriend season one and season two and every single episode of the Girlfriend Spotlight 100% live.

ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love like The Real Killer, Betrayal, The Godmother, Monster BTK, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, American Homicide and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert came. I'm the son of...

I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. I never expected to find myself in this place.

Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

What happens to Nellie and her article once it gets out? Does it have a big impact?

It has a huge impact. It's this explosive story, and it's not just the story of what happened in the asylum. It's also the story of this young woman being able to sneak her way into the asylum. And she tells it very vividly. She tells it through this engaging, funny, descriptive narrator herself, the character of Nellie Bly. And she just makes people really feel like they're there.

Here's Nellie's fantastic description of having dinner at the asylum. We were marched into a long, narrow dining room where a rush was made for the table. The table reached the length of the room and was uncovered and uninviting. Placed close together all along the table were large dressing bowls filled with a pinkish-looking stuff which the patients called tea.

By each bowl was laid a piece of bread, cut thick and unbuttered. A small saucer containing five prunes accompanied the bread. One fat woman made a rush and, jerking up several saucers from those around her, emptied their contents into her own saucer. Then, while holding to her own bowl, she lifted up another and drained its contents at one gulp. This she did to a second bowl in a shorter time than it takes to tell it.

The article didn't just make for breathless reading. The outrage it caused among the people of New York led to a grand jury being called, probing the conditions of the asylum and debating solutions. When testifying in front of the jury, Nellie said this great line about what she hoped her work could do for the women inside. If I could not bring them that boon of all boons, liberty, I hoped at least to influence others to make life more bearable for them.

And she visits the facility with people from the grand jury and it's determined that the asylum should get an extra $50,000 to care for patients. And the grand jury also recommends the hiring of more female doctors to eliminate that possibility of abuse. That's amazing that after her first article like this,

Nelly managed to create so much real impact. What kind of impact did it have in terms of her being like a female reporter?

The secondary impact was that Bly's work was so popular that editors all over the country thought, I would like to hire somebody to do this kind of work and run these kind of articles. And it was a genre that became known as girl stunt reporting. And lots of women all over the country who, like Bly, were looking for meaningful work thought, okay.

I would like to be one of these kinds of reporters and launch this entire decade of female investigative journalism. I can totally imagine if I was around back then, if I read this article, that would have been me done. I would have been writing into newspapers and saying, can I please be a Girl Stunt reporter? That sounds great. No, editors describe being besieged by women showing up at their offices. The revolution has started. Yeah.

I guess that means that also Nellie's career must have taken off at that point too. Oh, hugely. It's very interesting to watch. Originally her articles are signed on the bottom, but soon she is in the headline, like she is the news. It's Nellie Bly investigates orphanages or Nellie Bly goes around the world. Tell me about that because that sounds like the best job ever and the budgets just aren't there anymore.

They definitely aren't. So she's been working at the world for a number of years at this point, and she's wondering what her next big thing is going to be. And she decides that she's going to try to beat the fictional record established by Jules Verne in his novel Around the World in 80 Days.

So she's like, I bet I can go around the world faster than 80 days. And the publisher supports her. And it is this huge sensation. It's this huge stunt. Like it really made her even more famous than she had already been. There's massive coverage of every stop and huge illustrations. And she makes it around the world in 72 days.

And triumphantly lands in New Jersey. And it's very much taken as a triumph of the new American girl. You know, what can't an American girl do? It's really showing this kind of new woman, which we're going to enter the new century with.

Yeah, like an influencer from the 19th century. Yeah. I mean, I think that it was similar to the way that we look at history or great feats of women today. Like, it's just the fact of her having done it.

was very inspirational to a lot of people and really definitively answered the question which she wanted to answer for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, which is like, where do women belong? Her answer was like, not even in the house, not even in the workplace. They belong all around the world. How did she feel about the fame and recognition that she got? I mean, I think that she always wanted to be a successful journalist. So

So I think that she was very happy to have her name out there, be desired, be able to command large amounts of money. At the same time, she kept her personal life pretty private. She had this persona of Nellie Bly, who is very lighthearted and free-spirited and brave and funny. But we don't always know what was going on behind the scenes and what was going on in her heart.

Nellie Bly was literally a persona. It was a pseudonym, you know, like Catwoman, Madonna, that kind of thing.

The reporter's real name was actually Elizabeth Cochran. And Elizabeth, unlike Nellie, well, she largely kept herself to herself. I mean, the gossip monger in me is curious. Do we know kind of what her love life was like, what her family setup was as she had this career takeoff? So she cared for her mother throughout her life.

She had a number of love affairs which didn't work out as she was working through her reporting career. Eventually, she married a very wealthy man and they had a reasonably successful relationship, it seems like, until he died and she took over his business and was swindled and the business went bankrupt. Oh, no. And then she went back to reporting. She had editor friends who were like, you know...

Nellie Bly, your forte is really reporting and you should come back and do it. And she did. And she reported pretty much up to her death, you know, through World War I. It was really her strength and she was really exceptional at it. Nellie was a reporter at heart. And so were those hundreds of women who besieged editors' offices inspired by her.

There was Nell Nelson, who worked for the Chicago Times and went undercover as a worker at female factories in Chicago, exposing physical and sexual abuse and child labor. There was Caroline Lockhart, who worked at the Boston Post, who went undercover as a drug addict in a women's rehab center to expose the conditions for the women on the inside.

But she also did these weird and cool tabloidy stunts, like going inside a lion's cage for an article or diving to the bottom of Boston Harbor in a diving suit. I never get those gigs. There was also the story that fascinated me most about a Chicago Times reporter whose identity had never been revealed.

I would love you to tell me the story of this anonymous girl reporter who investigated the abortion story. So the story of the girl reporter is that one November day in Chicago,

A young woman went around and she visited doctor after doctor and she pretended to be pregnant and she requested an abortion and recorded their response. The procedure was illegal and she was investigating how many physicians and midwives were willing to break the law. By the end of her investigation, she had visited more than 200 doctors and

And in December of that year, she published her reporting about the availability of abortion in the city. And the paper scolded the doctors and the woman who just went by the name Girl Reporter said that she was against abortion and hoped that the doctors would be shamed. And what impact did her reporting have then? The effect of the reporting was that it was clear that anyone who wanted an abortion in Chicago could get one.

It was available, you know, to anyone for a wide variety of prices. The girl reporter documented the addresses, the kinds of operations that were available, which medicines you could take and at what dosage. Wow. So it ends up being a kind of Bible for how to get an abortion, basically. It really was. And I don't know what her actual purpose was, but

Again, you know, she said that she was against it and that the paper was doing it to highlight these abuses. But she provided more information about abortion than would have been available in any other highly public space like the pages of The Chicago Times.

Yeah, I mean, I desperately hope because it's just such a cool thing to do that she wrote that line in to get it past her editors, but actually she was doing this really amazing act, you know, getting all this information out there. Whatever anonymous girl reporters' true motives were, I think her story shows just what a radical new era American journalism was in and the huge impact of this kind of daring female-led reporting.

It wasn't only women's issues specifically that this generation of women journalists were now creating space for. Another woman who was doing very innovative investigative journalism at the time, but not in the girl stunt reporter mode, was this reporter named Ida B. Wells, who wrote about lynching in a really unflinching way.

And a lot of the names these women used were fake, weren't they? They were pseudonyms. And to be fair, they're all way cooler than my real name, so I'm starting to consider that. But why were they working under these pseudonyms? It's a complicated question. I think a lot of women did it because it wasn't quite respectable enough.

You know, reporting itself, putting yourself out into the public sphere was on the edge of respectability. But also, as time went on, the role became somewhat of an expectation.

So if women showed up into newspaper office and wanted to do a different kind of newspaper work and the editor was like, what you really need to do is get yourself arrested and talk about what's going on in the jail, that wouldn't have been so attractive to women who wanted to cover the presidential race or something like that.

So I do think that this opportunity became a bit of an imprisoning expectation. Yeah, well, even the title Girl Stunt Reporters, it feels, you know, it's a little cheap. Oh, it definitely is. But Girl Stunt Reporters is definitely a slur often used by male reporters at the time who were jealous of their high paychecks and high profiles. But it's also, to me...

a useful term to describe exactly what was going on during this 10-year period because they didn't hide that they were female. So I think there's something valuable about the term, even though I recognize, yes, female investigative reporters sound much better. Yeah, I think I'd go for that. Though girls don't report track. I'm leaning. I'm leaning in.

And generally, what was the playing field like in terms of rights for women in the late 1800s in America? What did Nellie have available to her as well as the other women that she was writing about?

One of the things that's always so astonishing to me about these women doing this work at this time is that they couldn't vote and they would not be able to vote for decades and decades. Some of them interviewed the president, but were not able to vote for the president.

So many fewer rights than you'd imagine, given the quite prominent position that some of them occupied. Yeah, and often reporting on very political things. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that's kind of at the heart of The Girlfriends is this idea that it's

looking out for each other. We celebrate female friendship and how powerful that can be actually as a force of change, not just as a force of connection. How did Nelly's work help give a voice to women's issues? How did she go about doing that? Well, it was really one of the ways that she was most revolutionary because she

Only a woman can go undercover in women's spaces. So when all of a sudden you had demand for this kind of reporting, you were able to see what's going on inside women's factories. You were able to see what's going on inside jails where women are imprisoned. You were able to see, you know, how women were treated in public hospitals.

And that was a perspective that only these female investigative reporters could provide. And so all of a sudden you had very different kinds of stories on the front pages before coverage of women was really like you were murdered or you were wearing the spring's best new hat. But now all of these women dominated spaces were really taking up cultural space.

What I love about Nelly's story is that it's kind of twofold. Undoubtedly, Nelly made a genuine difference for other women in America. But what actually inspires me, I guess selfishly as a fellow journalist, are the opportunities that she afforded herself. Through her sheer will to live an independent life, she created an entirely new genre of journalism.

Not only that, but she lived well and on her own terms. That's so cool. I mean, what more could somebody want? She was celebrated for her courage and her contemporary writing, not her spring hat. In a world where spring hats were a really big deal. So I guess my main takeaway from all of this is that I should keep doing what I'm doing. I just hope that people will see past my seasonal hat collection too, as fabulous as it is.

Thank you so much to Kim Todd for taking us through Nelly's epic story. Kim's book is called Sensational, The Hidden History of America's Girl Stunt Reporters. You should read it. There's so much fascinating stuff about Nelly and the other women doing journalism at the time that we just couldn't fit into this episode. Next time on The Girlfriend Spotlight, June rocks America. We're starting a band.

I might as well have said, we're going to walk on the moon. We just got better and better, and they would gobsmacked, and they would rush up after the sentence and say, not bad for chicks. Hey, you've reached the Girlfriends Hotline. You can leave your mini story after the tone. Right, catch you later. Bye.

A time that my girlfriends really, really had my back was when I got savagely broken up with in a pub of all places. And I was so distraught, I could not stop crying. I thought I was going to be sick from crying.

The only thing I could think to do was call my best friend, who lives an hour away. I called her. I told her what happened. She said, give me an hour and meet me at your house. And by the time I got home to my house, she had assembled not only her, but three of my other best friends and my sister were all waiting there for me to give me the softest landing possible and catch me.

And it makes me emotional even to think about it because it was exactly what I needed. She just did it without asking. And I felt so supported and held by my friends. And that's just the kind of situation that you would not be able to survive without your girlfriends. So it made me appreciate my girls even more. Bye. Bye.

If you have your own story like the one you just heard and you'd like the whole Girlfriends gang to hear it, then please send it to us. You can record it as a voice memo under 90 seconds, please, and email it straight to thegirlfriendsatnovel.audio. Please don't include your name. We're keeping things a little anon.

We want stories like, say, that one time you faked an emergency on an awful date and your bestie bailed you out with a phone call. We love her. Or that time when all of your girls showed up on your doorstep with five pizzas, two tubs of ice cream and three bottles of Sauvignon Blanc because the man of your dreams just dumped you.

I want stories that are meaningful or silly. I want big. I want small. I'm desperate to hear them. So send them over.

This season, we're supporting the charity Womankind Worldwide. They do amazing work to help women's rights organisations and movements to strengthen and grow. If you'd like to find out more or donate to help them secure equal rights for women and girls across the globe, you can go to womankind.org.uk. The Girlfriend Spotlight is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

The show is hosted by me, Anna Sinfield. This episode was written and produced by Jake Otajewicz. Our researcher is Zeyana Youssef. The editor is Hannah Marshall. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are our executive producers. Production management from Joe Savage, Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Jake Otajewicz, Nicholas Alexander and Anna Sinfield.

Original music composed by Louisa Gerstein and Gemma Freeman. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcoul. Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development. And special thanks to Katrina Norville, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME. I'm your host, Carly.

You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need.

With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com.

Hi, listeners. It's Anna, host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast. And I'm excited to share these fascinating stories with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of the Girlfriend season one and season two and every single episode of the Girlfriend Spotlight 100% live.

Ad-free and one week early with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love like The Real Killer, Betrayal, The Godmother, Monster BTK, Paper Ghosts, Murder Homes, American Homicide and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.