Stunt Women, past and present

For the past week, I have sifted through writings on historical events and long-since passed women of significance, battling over which event may represent women’s history at its most interesting point. And my search has proved difficult. Which got me thinking—what defines an important moment in women’s history? Is it the immediacy of the event’s effect? The number of women affected? Is it the passage of a law? The first time a woman participates in an otherwise male-dominated activity? To all of these, the answer is yes.

Sometimes, however, all that changes is perspective. A woman’s act serves to shake us out of dreary acceptance, or simply expands our vision of possibility. So let’s look to past and present: late 19th century journalist Nellie Bly, and present-day blogger Angie the Anti-theist (Angie Jackson).

Nellie Bly is most famous for her 72-day journey around the world in 1890, beating the fictitious 80-day record created by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. But it was the beginning of her career in journalism that made her a pioneer. To secure a job at The New York World, Bly was given an assignment to masquerade as a patient in New York’s most notorious mental hospital—the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. In doing so, she exposed the place as more prison than hospital, housing immigrants whom society could not be troubled with. Beyond that, Bly created a new form of journalism—investigative reporting that requires reporters be fully immersed in the lives of their subjects. Bly asserted that being a woman provided her with access that the boy’s club journalists could never achieve.

At the time, Bly’s work was considered stunt journalism, and her reporting inspired a whole legion of imitators—women who used their feminine wiles to experience ‘a day in the life’ of some underbelly of society. In some ways, the practice made a sick spectacle of those without. But Bly held mostly true to a goal of advancing social equality and exposing the injustices of a society where rapid advancement for some meant extreme setback for others. Following Bly’s story on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum, a grand jury launched a formal investigation of the site, which ended in significantly increased funds for the for treating the mentally ill.

Today, the prominence of social-networking sites has allowed everyone to be a journalist in their own right. And while some immersion journalism (i.e. tweets) means recounting the funny shit your dad says to a wide audience, other instances reflect a boldness that Nellie Bly would likely revel in. This past week, the blogger Angie the Anti-theist live-tweeted her medical abortion. Angie took RU-486, the abortion pill, and wrote about her experience as it happened, intending to de-mystify the abortion process to allow women a look at abortion without a politicized and morally driven lens attached.

I look at Angie’s work, and back to Bly’s. Regarded originally as stunt, the journalism Bly pioneered became a legitimate and respected form of journalism. Modern-day social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich, immersed herself in a life of poverty wages to write the book Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. But both Bly and Ehrenreich were writing about people other than themselves. Their words were still filtered through their journalistic perspective and the eyes of their editors. But Angie’s is a first-hand account. And her story, likely considered a stunt by many, may open an entirely new door for bringing attention to the politics that so heavily affect our lives, and may shift our perspectives, in as few as 140 characters.