Transcript
018: Women from History: Nellie Bly featuring Matthew Goodman

Theresa Christine: Welcome to The Wild and Curious Podcast, a show that's part travel, 

Suzanne Schmedding: Part feminism, 

TC: And completely inspired by extraordinary women worldwide. I'm Theresa Christine,

SS: And I'm Suzanne Schmedding. So we were talking about extraordinary women and how far we've come and we kind of got into the idea of, of the women who had made it possible for, you know, steps that... 

TC: The trail blazers. 

SS: Exactly, exactly the trail blazers. We are limited sometimes, because our guests that we would like to talk to are dead.

TC: Yes. So very sad.

SS: We will never be able to interview Susan B. Anthony. 

TC: Never. So we talked about like doing these...we've just been calling them history women episodes...and so we've got a couple more of these in the works, and I wanted to talk about Nellie Bly, and I actually found out about Nellie Bly through a 'Drunk History' episode. And as I was doing more research, and like, finding out who this cool lady journalist in the late 1800s in New York was, there's actually a book written about her. And, as we'll find out, like, as I've discovered, and you've discovered Suzanne, through reading through the book, like, everything that is, in this episode of 'Drunk History' is like, taken from his book, from Matthew Goodman's book. So, as entertaining as that episode was, I was just hooked and I was like, I need to know more about this woman. And that's why we're focusing on her today. Our guest today is Matthew Goodman, the author of multiple books, including '80 days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History Making Race Around the World.' He's going to be talking to us all about Nellie Bly.

SS: Nellie Bly was an American journalist who told her newspaper editor she could go around the world, just like Phileas Fogg did in 'Around the World in 80 days,' except she could do the journey in less time.

TC: At 9:40am on November 14 1889, and with only two days notice, Nellie Bly was sent on a groundbreaking trip around the world, bringing Jules Verne's book to life.

Matthew Goodman: It was Nellie Bly's idea, originally, to do this, to see if she could accomplish in real life what Phileas Fogg accomplished in fiction, and as you say, she went to her editor the year before and proposed it to him and he said, 'It's impossible.' you know, with a 'No woman can go without, you know, 12 steamer trunks,' and, and, and the idea of going, of a woman going around the world unchaperoned was just anathema. You know, this was a time in journalism when women weren't really allowed to go across, women reporters, weren't allowed to go across the city, unchaperoned by a man much less around the world unchaperoned by a man, you know. Women reporters were not supposed to go out at night. by themselves, they weren't supposed to go out in the rain, because it was considered unladylike. So this idea was really, it was just impossible. And the editor said to her, 'Only a man can do this.' And Nellie Bly said 'Very well, you send a man, and I will, I will go myself and I'll beat him.' And she left the office having gotten the promise that if they were going to send anybody, they would send her. So, a year later, what's happened is that the the circulation of her newspaper, 'The World,' which was run by Joseph Pulitzer, the eponym of the Pulitzer Prizes, their circulation had begun to go down. And they were looking for something that was a quick kind of shot in the arm of publicity. And they knew instinctively, they understood that the idea of their 'star girl,' as she was known, their girl reporter, going around the world would be a huge boon for publicity. So they said to her, uh, 'You know, we'd like you to do it. Can you, can you leave on Friday?' And she said to them, according to her, she said, 'I could start this afternoon, if you need me to.'

TC: So awesome.

SS: Oh, and I mean, like, there's so many, there's so much commentary in your book that includes perspectives from other people on Nellie Bly. And she's described as plucky 

TC: I love that word. 'Plucky'

SS: Well, I mean, like, that's a very plucky answer, you know, like, and I know it's the wrong timeframe, but I just imagined it and like, 'I'll still right this minute!' But, you know, so so you spent so much time getting to know her for this book, what is your commentary? Like, how would you describe her?

MG: You know, she is a, you know, an amazingly admirable person in a million different ways. She's a complicated person. And I think that she's been, in a way, a caricature. Not, not in a bad way necessarily, but, you know, she's, she's seen as being, you know, this plucky, as you say, you know, this kind of plucky, you know, daring, you know, young woman, which she was, courageous, and so forth. She was also very competitive, which made her very good as a reporter, you know. It made her kind of difficult to be around sometimes. But it made her a very good reporter. She was very ambitious. This was a time when there were very few women reporters who were not stuck on the women's pages of the newspaper, you know. You know, writing about tea parties and, and, and child rearing and recipes and so forth. Nellie Bly refused to do that. You know, when she was assigned to the women's page of a newspaper, she quit rather than do it. She wanted to prove that she could do all of the reporting that a man could do. So she was very ambitious. And, you know, don't forget, this was a time when most newspaper articles had no byline. You know, they were unsigned. Nellie Bly always had a byline on her pieces. And not only did she have a byline, her name was often in the headline of the article. So it would be you know, 'Nellie Bly Learns to Ride a Bicycle,' 'Nellie Bly Takes Up Boxing,' 'Nellie Bly Goes Dancing,' whatever it might be. So she, you know, she was very conscious of herself, as, as a, as a, 

SS: Like as a persona 

MG: As a persona. That's exactly right. As a persona. So that was extremely unusual for a woman at that time. So I would say, you know, that she was, you know, daring, courageous, admirable, ambitious, she had, you know, an instinctive sense of what the public wanted. She was competitive, she was impatient. She was tough talking, you know, she was no nonsense. She was deeply competitive. She was a complicated person, but the sum total of all of those characteristics, you know, was someone who was really one of a kind, and, and someone who is really worth celebrating today.

TC: Yeah. And it makes sense that she would be the person who would push for doing a trip like that. The way that you describe her,

MG: She brooked, no, she brooked nobody saying no to her, you know. She was very, you know, she was very single minded, very stubborn, strong minded, you know, it might be a better way to put it, you know, she was a very strong minded individual. And she was very self confident, which again, was hard for a woman of her time, woman reporter of her time, but she was very self confident, she had a very strong sense of her own abilities.

TC: It's so wonderful to follow her journey in the book that you wrote. It's so well written, it really like takes the reader along on the journey. And there's, I mean, there's so many aspects of the trip that we can't go into in great detail because it would take hours and hours. But, 

MG: Well, I have all afternoon, so, you know,

TC: But as you were researching, like, is there an experience that you felt stood out as one that was just super memorable or something that is, I don't know, something that stood out to you that was very special?

MG: You know, I loved when she first arrived, you know, she, she went around the world, mainly by ocean liner and railroad train, you know, which were the two great technological innovations of that, you know, for travel of that time period, the steam, steam ship and the steam locomotive. So she goes across the Atlantic on an ocean liner and arrives in England, and then is kind of hurried across the continent to make her next ship in Italy. But she, but she's met in England by a reporter for 'The World' who asks her if she would like to meet Jules Verne, you know, the great, who probably the most famous writer in the world at that time, and obviously the person who had written 'Around the World in 80 days.' And he said to her, you know, this reporter said to her, 'You know, it basically means going without sleep for two days.' This is a, you know, basically the beginning of her trip. But she said, 'That's fine. I'm happy to do it.' And so they made a kind of a quick detour, to Amiens, France to meet the great Jules Verne, who welcomes her, with his wife, into his mansion. And they spent a, you know, a lovely afternoon together trying to communicate because he didn't speak English very well. And Nellie Bly spoke no French. And, you know, Jules Verne, Jules Verne says to her, you know, 'If, if, if you make it I will clap with both hands,' you know. But, and, you know, he takes her upstairs and he shows her on the, the wall of his study the the map of the, you know, the trip that he set out for his character, Phileas Fogg, and Nellie Bly talks about how she's going to go, and it's slightly different than his trip. And he asked her why she's going to do that, 'Why don't you, why don't you cross India?' And she says, 'Because I would rather save time than save a maiden,' you know, which is what happens in the book. And he kind of was charmed by her. And when she arrives in San Francisco on the last leg of her journey, she's greeted there, the first telegram that she gets is from Jules Verne, you know, congratulating her on her accomplishment. And that was, that was a memory that she had that stayed with her for the rest of her life, you know, meeting the great Jules Verne. So I found that to be a scene that I loved. I loved writing the two great writers together.

TC: What an extraordinary experience

SS: I know. And now, to bring it down a bit, what do you consider the low point of her journey?

MG: There were certainly a couple. One was, when she was in Hong Kong, and she goes to the ticket office, she's ahead of her schedule, and she meets the guy at the ticket office, and he says, 'You're going to lose,' and she says, 'What do you mean, I'm ahead of ahead of time?' And he says, 'Thyme? I don't think that that was her name, Thyme'. And Nellie Bly says 'What are you talking about?' He says, 'The other woman was just here. She's, you know, ahead of you.' And it turns out that there was this other woman, Elizabeth Bisland, who was heading in the other direction, to try to beat Nellie Bly, which Nellie Bly did not know until that moment, because she started out after Nellie Bly. And when Nellie Bly left, she had no idea that there was anyone racing against her. So that was the moment when she's halfway around the world, and when she first discovers that she's not just racing against the calendar, she's actually racing against a real person. And not only that, but she's losing. She's behind by several days at that point. So that was definitely a low moment.

TC: I remember, Suzanne and I talked about that, how we read that part in the book, and we were like, Oh, boy, like, this is the dark moment, you know.

MG: And by the way, she, she was angry at Elizabeth Bisland for the rest of her life, you know, because she thought wrongly, that this was Elizabeth Bisland's idea. And that Elizabeth Bisland was trying to capitalize on Nellie Bly's idea and kind of, you know, horn in on the publicity and so forth, which wasn't true, but she bore a grudge against Elizabeth Bisland, you know, for a very long time afterwards. So that was certainly one, and then there was probably one other one, when she was in Sri Lanka, Ceylon as it was called back then. And it turned out that her ship had a mechanical difficulties, and she was basically stuck on the island for I think it was five days. And she was just slowly going crazy, you know, as time was passing, because as she put it, 'I would rather die than return to New York behind schedule.' So that was really a bad time for her to because she thought, 'Okay, I'm gonna, I'm going to lose as a result of this.'

TC: Yeah. And because she's doing this journey on her own, like a female solo traveler, it can get lonely when you're traveling. And so to have the like, work pressure, and, you know, she's this competitive person and to feel like, it's not gonna happen. She, she was probably really, really down.

MG: She was really down. You know, the thing about Elizabeth Bisland, and one of, for me, one of the really fun things of writing the book was that they were these two women, each of whom was a really admirable character, but they were very different, you know, in a lot of ways. And you know, Elizabeth Bisland was much more kind of literary than Nellie Bly. She was more intellectual, she was more of a world traveler, really, you know, she had never traveled before, but this trip made her into a world traveler, she, you know, traveled for the rest of her life, which Nellie Bly didn't really do. And, and for Elizabeth Bisland, this was kind of an opportunity for her to see the world, which, and she kind of fell in love with Japan, and she went back to Japan several times over the course of her life. For Nellie Bly, it really wasn't like that, you know. She wasn't really interested in seeing the sights of these places, you know, if it had been up to her, she would have just gone straight out, you know, flat out around the world the whole way, without really stopping at all, because for her, it was really about beating this record, you know, and, and coming, you know, and proving that she could do it, that a woman could do it. So for her, anytime that there was a delay or a layover, or whatever it is, she was very impatient, and, you know, kind of, you know, chomping at the bit to get back on and get back in movement.

TC: And she did end up beating the 80 day record, she arrived back in New York 72 days after she departed. And I really appreciate how your book goes into sort of what happens after that, because, you know, she's basically like a celebrity while she's on this trip. Like, she might not realize it, how crazy people are going back home and following her journey. But, so, she got back, and people were like, fanfare in New York when she arrived. And she goes on this tour to talk about her experience. And then people kind of like, didn't receive her very well, it seemed. And so they loved her for this moment. And then suddenly they didn't. And I'm, I'm just wondering, like, why were people so quick to switch on her like that?

MG: You know, these are really interesting questions. And that I thought a lot about when I was writing the book. But as you say, Nellie Bly, when when she was on the trip, was a huge celebrity. You know, by the time she got back to New York, having achieved this world record, she was certainly the most famous woman in America. She was arguably according to 'The World Newspaper,' the most famous woman in the world. I mean, I don't think she was that. But she was maybe the first female celebrity or certainly one of the first female celebrities in the United States, you know, and in the year after her arrival, you know, suddenly there were Nellie Bly dresses and Nellie Bly hats and Nellie Bly lamps and Nellie Bly pens. And, you know, it was Nellie Bly horse feed, you know,

TC: Yeah, board games!

MG: And Nellie Bly board games! And, you know, she was in advertisements. And, you know, she was a huge celebrity that everybody, you know, want it to be like. And you know, and you know, when she arrived back in San Francisco, and it was clear that she was going to beat the record, there was this kind of triumphal train ride across the continent, where you know, every little town that they stopped in, you know, she was met by a marching band, and the town turned out to greet, you know, the great Nellie Bly, and so forth. So she, she arrived back in New York at the top of her fame. And then things kind of began to take a turn, and things start going so well, for her at that point, you know, she got into an argument with Joseph Pulitzer about money where she felt, rightly, that she, she deserved a raise, because she had brought in a ton of money for the paper, you know, you know, as the result of this trip, you know, through increased circulation. But she ended up quitting 'The World' in this fight over money. And then, as you say, she goes out on this cross country lecture tour, which was what celebrities did back then, you know, there obviously, there wasn't mass media. So the way that people got to hear or see celebrities was through these lectures, you know, that they would do. And she was not well received. And I think it was because when she was on this trip, she was the kind of woman that America wanted for itself. She was, she was patriotic, you know, she was plucky

TC: That word.

MG: Yeah, that's, that's what people said, you know, she was trying to beat, well think about it, she was trying to beat a fictional English traveler written by a real life French writer, and doing it for the United States. And, you know, she was pretty, but she wasn't too pretty. She was smart, but she wasn't an intellectual, she was very, she was overtly patriotic, you know? A lot of her reports, you know, from around the world were about how much better things were in America than they are there. Which is very different than Elizabeth Bisland, who was, you know, kind of matinee-idol-pretty and very intellectual, and erudite, and so forth. So Nellie Bly was exactly the young woman that America wanted for itself. But then when she decided that she was going to go out and do lectures, I think people began to feel that she was kind of pushing the boundaries too much. And the idea that a woman was going to presume to spend an hour talking to a large group, about her thoughts about her experiences, was considered to be too much. And people began to turn against her, certainly the newspapers in whatever town she was in turned against her and basically said, sometimes, in so many words, 'She should be back home trying to find a husband, you know, rather than presuming to lecture us, you know, this young woman.' So, so people turned against her. And then the other thing, too, was that, and this was really the kind of the height of irony, was that she, she, she was very, very good at being an undercover reporter. You know, that's how she had made her name. And that's really the thing that she was best at, you know, was going undercover to uncover social injustice in some way. Well, as a result of this trip, she was suddenly too famous to do that anymore. People knew what she looked like. And she was no longer able to do undercover work, she kept getting recognized. So suddenly, you know, you have a situation in which this lecture tour breaks down, she ends up getting sued by the promoter, she's getting sued by Joseph Pulitzer, she has quit her job, she's no longer able to do the kind of work that she really is best at and enjoys the most. You know, she tries to take up other writing, like fiction writing, which she's not especially good at. And it's sort of ironic, because she's achieved what she wanted to do. And yet, turns out that she might have been the loser after all.

TC: Yeah, like, kind of took a lot of things away from her in a way,

MG: Right. It took her many years to really recover from the experience of this, of this trip.

SS: Yeah, like I was just thinking, you know, it's, it's so interesting that there's this dichotomy of her journey being completely groundbreaking for both journalism and investigative reporting and traveling and just for women in general, and yet, like, it turns out to sort of be her downfall. But it is such a fascinating story to tell and to read about. And, and I mean, Theresa, and I love sharing the stories of other people. So why did you think that this was an important story to tell in a book?

MG: Well, I mean, you know, just just selfishly as a writer, I mean, I loved having two women, as I, as I mentioned earlier, who were each so fascinating, and so admirable, in their own way, who were so similar in certain ways, you know, as young women who had come from other parts of the country to New York, to try to, you know, succeed in the male dominated world of journalism in New York. So they were very similar in that way. They were, you know, close to each other in age and so forth. But, you know, in terms of their personalities and their perspectives, they were so different. And I've been so gratified by the fact that like, half of the readers of the book, you know, say to me, 'I was rooting for Nellie Bly to win the race,' and half of them say 'I was rooting for Elizabeth Bisland to win the race,' you know, which is exactly what I wanted, you know, I didn't want it to be, you know, like, the hero and the villain. You know, I wanted it to be two heroes, you know, who and depending on what your perspective was, you might be rooting for one or the other. So, that, to me, was very satisfying as a writer, and it was also, you know, satisfying for me as a writer to be able to write about all of these exotic places, you know, that, that, to me was exciting in the beginning to think, 'Oh, I can write about Hong Kong in the year 1889, or the Suez Canal or, or, or France or China or whatever it may be.' So those are all the things that attracted me just as a writer, but also, I just think it's really important to be able to tell stories that are not especially well known about people who challenge social conventions, who stand up for what's right, who try to show the world that there's a different way of doing things. And Nellie Bly was all about that. And, and I'm just, I've always been fascinated by the dialectic between the individuals and history about individuals who get caught up in history, and who get caught up perhaps in waves of history, or forces of history that are perhaps larger than they even knew.

SS: When he was talking about the kind of women these were and the stories that he liked to tell, you know, about trailblazers and people who were, who are changing the wave of time that they happen to be in and you know, being of a certain zeitgeist like, I don't know, it sounds really corny, but like, I could hear music swelling in my head, like it was this movie moment. It was like, dadadadaaaa

TC: Yeah. And what's wild is that these, when you're doing something like that, like, do you know, what you're doing is so phenomenal in the world? Like, Did Elizabeth Bisland and did Nellie Bly know that they would change the way that people view women journalists and women traveling for the, like, for the rest of time? 

SS: For the rest of time! You know, and, and I think also, what's so crazy to me is that, you know, they're, they're these two totally different women. Elizabeth Bisland, did not want to be a celebrity. And Nellie Bly, like, regularly had her name in the byline, but just the idea of, of being a celebrity being a woman, and that, you know, like we set that sort of persona and embodying it during that time. Like, what an incredible and strange thing.

TC: Yeah, I found that to be probably the most interesting part of the book, like I was like, oh, Nellie, Bly's like the Kardashians. But, you know, because it's just like, people were so into her, and like, it was painful to read about how they were accepting of what she was doing, and they were supportive, until suddenly they were like, 'No, this isn't your place.' When Matthew was saying that she was kind of like the first female celebrity in the United States, I can see how that's the case, because this wasn't, this was before movies. And so that was really like, the news, like newspaper, that's what people were reading every day. And they were following it. And it was, it's a truly incredible story to get to follow.

SS: Read about all of Nellie Bly's 72 days, six hour, 11 minute, and 14 second journey in Matthew's book '80 days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History Making Race Around the World.'

TC: Check out all of Matthew's work and learn more about him at matthewgoodmanbooks.com or follow him on twitter at @m.goodman books. If you enjoy listening to The Wild and Curious Podcast and would like to contribute to helping us make this thing run, you can! You can Venmo us at @thewildandcurious or via paypal at paypal.me/thewildlandcurious. Anything you send, big or small, will go towards the costs of running a podcast that's dismantling the patriarchy.

SS: It means so much to us when people rate our show on iTunes and leave reviews. We read those sweet nothings and yes, we cry about them. We also love it when people send our podcasts to someone who they think will enjoy it. Feminists sharing feminist content is the best.