Nellie Bly — The Original Lois Lane

Late one April evening in 2016, sitting at my desk not writing, this article in The Atlantic caught my eye. The premise was that there were more female action stars 100 years ago than today. Most were in the mold of the Perils of Pauline, with an intrepid young woman leaping off horseback or clinging to the side of a train. From the article:

In 1914, a breakout year for the category, the actress Mary Fuller played a daring reporter in The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies. The same year, Grace Cunard appeared in Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery, which was billed as the “Most Sensational Series of Pictures Ever Produced … AEROPLANES — LION — TIGERS — CANNIBALS — SHIPWRECKS …”

Intrigued, I started looking up these films, and discovered most of these daring fictional females were newspaper reporters. Of them, the majority were based on one real-life figure. A woman reporter who was, at that time, still alive.

A woman called Nellie Bly.

The name rang a very specific bell. In the second season of the television show The West Wing, in the episode entitled And It’s Surely To Their Credit, the President’s amorous intentions are thwarted when he belittles the achievements of Nellie Bly, whose statue the First Lady had just unveiled. Bartlet dismisses the task, saying she shouldn’t bother with such unimportant events. The First Lady takes umbrage, and he quickly backpedals:

BARTLET
Yeah. You know what I did, just then, that was stupid?I minimized the…