Nellie Bly and the Development of Feminine Perspective

Nellie Bly circa 1890

Part of what made Nellie Bly such a successful reporter was her aggressive demand for publicity and the calling of attention to women’s roles in the community.¹ Not only did she provide a female voice starkly different from that of her male counterparts, she also made her femininity and personal physical experience an integral part of the conversation. During a period in which women were “relegated to the background… Home-making and  child rearing [as] their primary roles,”² Nellie Bly challenged this understanding of womanhood. Experiencing firsthand the prejudice against women reporters and ideas surrounding their abilities, Bly was repeatedly told that women could not have anything to do with muckraking journalism topics such as scandals and criminals, as it would ruin her reputation.³ It was through this prejudice that Bly determined that “if she had to find a space for herself among her male peers, she would have to prove that a woman could report hard-hitting news just as informatively and accurately as a man.”⁴ Directly challenging traditional gender roles stating women were unable to compete in investigative journalism, Bly did just that, highlighting the fact that she was a woman, and successful, by relying on her feminine voice and turning her womanhood into an asset.⁵ Bly emphasized her femininity by consistently referring to her female identity throughout her writing, emphasizing her name and female identity within the headlines,⁶ as well utilizing traditional women’s clothing to remind those she was reporting on that she was indeed a lady. Furthermore, her blatant womanhood often became the subject of her own story, making Nellie Bly the subject as much as she was the reporter.⁷ This technique of stunt reporting gave women the ability to act as “the sensation heroines of their own stories, [redefining] reporting and [using] their bodies not just as a means of acquiring the news but as the very source of it,”⁸ offering readers a fresh narrative by women as much as it was about women, and challenging traditional gender roles and what the feminine voice meant without appearing radical. Nellie Bly quickly became an agent of publicity throughout her career, however her success depended on her becoming the object of discussion. It is through this discussion of her own objectification and “the specific sensations of a decidedly non-sensational female body… [that] distinguished the stunt reporters from the better-educated Progressive-era investigators,”⁹ and asserted Bly’s role as “the primary storyteller.”¹⁰