Tag: Women Writers

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Nellie Bly and the incognito ‘stunt girl’ reporters

A close up of the young Nellie Bly. She is wearing a high collar dress and has a short fringe. Text next to it reads "Nellie Bly goes around the world 25 January 1890"
Bly is wearing a travelling outfit of a dress with a long skirt and tight bodice. Over it is a floor length check coat. She has a bag in one hand a is raising her cap with the other.
Nellie Bly in her travelling clothes

On 25 January 1890, American journalist Nellie Bly stepped off a train in New York and into a huge crowd that was waiting for her. She had just become the first person to travel around the world in less than eighty days. Not only had she done it, she had beaten her rival, Elizabeth Bisland, by four days.

The 1890 race around the world reveals that Bly, perhaps the most famous newswoman then writing, was not unique. From 1887 through to the middle of the 1890s, the ‘stunt girls’ made front page news. They wrote it, and they became it.

So in this post we’re looking at the rise and fall of stunt journalism, and the women involved in it.

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Sixty years of Silent Spring

Rachel Carson standing in front of a bookcase in 1962. Overlaid is the cover of her book Silent Spring

Olga Owens Huckins watched the birds falling lifeless all around her property in Massachusetts in January 1958. It was just after the area had been sprayed with DDT from a plane. She wrote to the Boston Herald and sent a copy of her letter to her friend Rachel Carson. Carson was a marine biologist and a best-selling nature writer who was already very concerned about the use of man-made chemicals, especially pesticides, on the natural world.

Carson already had three best-selling non-fiction books: Under the Sea Wind, The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. She added her friend’s letter to the evidence she was building for her next book.

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