At the top of Women’s History Month, there’s no shortage of women who’ve shaped business in every sector and shown us the economic and human value of heart-centered leadership. When I think of women who’ve given us an example of women who can do anything, the first woman I think of is Nellie Bly.
History often paints Nellie Bly as a two-hit wonder. We know her as the fearless 23-year-old who invented investigative journalism by tricking police into committing her to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. She spent ten days there uncovering the abhorrent conditions and unethical reasons women were being imprisoned there. She wrote the exposé that sparked grand jury investigations and reformed mental health care.
We also know her as the 25-year-old who set out to beat a fictional record, traveling around the world alone in just 72 days with nothing but the dress on her back, a coat, and a single handbag the size of a toaster oven.
But at 25, Nellie Bly was just getting started. Over the next six years, she wrote 13 novels and three nonfiction books. Her most radical acts of leadership were still to come.
Leading with Care and Building an Ecosystem At 31, she married Robert Seaman, the millionaire owner of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company. She retired from reporting to run his Brooklyn factory. She refused to be a mere figurehead; she rolled up her sleeves, learned to weld, and racked up 25 patents to her name.
When her husband died ten years later, the world expected her to become a quiet Gilded Age widow. Instead, at 41, she fully took control of the company and completely changed how a business cares for its workers.
She built her 1,500 employees an on-site gym, a bowling alley, and a library. She became the first person to pay a living weekly wage instead of paying people by the number of pieces they produced on the line. She knew if she treated people well, they’d be happier, more productive, and more loyal. She took care of her people, and she proved that a business thrives when it nourishes the ecosystem that supports it.
Doing the Work That Needs Doing Her trusted managers eventually betrayed her. They forged her signature and spent nearly ten years bleeding her dry, stealing millions. When she caught them, she went to war, spending years in one of the most bitter and expensive legal battles in New York City history. She refused to let them get away with what they did to her and her workers, ultimately losing her fortune, her factory, and her home in the fight.
By age 49, she was broke.
She didn’t have a mid-life crisis; she created a mid-life conquest. Determined to revive her business, she packed her toaster-oven-sized handbag and sailed for Europe just before her 50th birthday to find a financial backer.
World War I broke out days after she landed in Austria. She didn’t head for a bomb shelter. She saw a job that needed doing, talked her way onto the Eastern Front, and became the first woman to report from the trenches. The military even arrested her as a British spy for getting too close to the gunfire. She told the officers they were doing their jobs poorly, filed her dispatches, and kept moving. She never carried literal or emotional baggage; she took what she needed, left the rest behind, and moved faster than anyone else of her era.
A Legacy of Action Returning to New York at 55, she took a job writing a newspaper column and used it to launch an adoption bureau, placing hundreds of orphaned or abandoned children into homes. She personally vetted parents to prevent fraud and abuse, demanding high standards for the welfare of the children.
At 57, Nellie Bly got pneumonia and died in NYC. She wasn’t a millionaire anymore, but she was still telling stories, giving a voice to the voiceless, and terrifying corrupt politicians by standing up, speaking out, and writing about all of it. She effectively used storytelling as a form of social activism, forcing city officials to address the suffering of marginalized people including women, people with mental illness, and children.
The Togetherhood Takeaway We often view our careers as linear paths. Nellie Bly proves our lives have chapters, and they can all be fulfilling. You can be an undercover reporter, an inventor running a factory, a war correspondent, and a social justice advocate all in one lifetime.
If we’re in the midst of reconsidering our careers and the value of our work, Nellie Bly’s story holds valuable examples for all of us. When we look around and see work that needs doing, we can step up and make it happen. When we see someone who needs help, we can be that support. When history places us in circumstances to be of service, we can serve.
Nellie Bly teaches us our prime isn’t a decade; it’s a mindset. We always have agency; we always have the choice to use what we have, where we are, to do the most good that we can.
Christa Avampato 