Nellie Bly: A Career Shaped by Misfortune

When Nellie Bly completed her famed around-the-world journey in 1890, the New York World hailed the intrepid journalist as “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today.” But had she not dropped out of college a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. In fact, Nellie Bly would never have existed. The woman born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who pioneered the concept...
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Pittsburgh’s Designing Women

A man does not marry an artist, but a housekeeper …. I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage.” So wrote Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815-1884) of Wilkinsburg, Allegheny County. Swisshelm’s bittersweet memoirs recall the painful sacrifice that she made to the Victorian code of...
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