Bly was also known for her record-breaking trip
around the world in 72 days (Library of
Congress)After working for the Pittsburgh Dispatch for a few years, Bly got the dangerous assignment to infiltrate the
infamous asylum from Joseph Pulitzer himself, after she blustered her way into his offices, according to
Kroeger’s book.
She promised Pulitzer she could deliver a major story, and, impressed by her moxie, he gave her a whopper
of an assignment: to go undercover at the asylum with no guidance even on how to gain entry, never mind
how to get out.
In her first piece for a major metropolitan daily, in late September 1887, Bly threw herself into the role of a
deranged woman to get committed.
Bly practiced looking insane in front of a mirror with the idea that “far-away expressions have a crazy air”,
she wrote in her article. Then she checked herself into a working-class boardinghouse, hoping to frighten
the other boarders so much that they would kick her out.
Using the name Nellie Brown, she pretended she was from Cuba and ranted that she was searching for
“missing trunks”. Her ruse worked and the police were called. She had a hearing at a New York City court,
where a judge ordered her to Blackwell’s Island, which at that time held a poorhouse, a smallpox hospital, a
prison and the insane asylum.
The horrid condition of the food in the mess hall was her first dose of deprivation. Tea “tasted as if it had
been made in copper”, she writes. Bread was spread with rancid butter. When she got a plain piece it was
hard with a “dirty black colour ... I found a spider in my slice so I did not eat it”. The oatmeal and molasses
served at the meal was “wretched”. The next day she was served soup with one cold boiled potato and a
chunk of beef, “which on investigation, proved to be slightly spoiled”.
Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6am to 8pm on straight-back
benches, do not allow her to talk or move, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will
take to make her insane
To add to the torment, Bly wrote, the building was freezing: “The draught went whizzing through the hall”
and “the patients looked blue with cold.” Within her first few days, she was forced to take an ice-cold bath
in dirty water, sharing two “coarse” towels among 45 patients.
“My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the
other, three buckets of water over my head – ice cold water, too – into my eyes, my ears, my nose and my
mouth. I think I experienced the sensation of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and
quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane.”
Despite the autumn chill, Bly and the other inmates were given threadbare dresses with poorly fitted
undergarments after the frigid baths.
“Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6am to 8pm on straight-back
benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours ... give her bad food and harsh treatment, and
see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck,”
Bly wrote.
Bly made a point of talking to as many women as she could. Among the sane ones, she found that many