Today would have be the 151st birthday of the unforgettable journalist Nellie Bly and Google Doodles decided to honor Bly, also known as Elizabeth Jane Cochran, with a video and an ode titled "Oh, Nellie," sung by the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O.
"Oh, Nellie, take us all around the world and break those rules 'cause you're our girl," the indie rocker, Karen Lee Orzolek, sings in reference to a column written by Erasmus Wilson, "What Girls Are Good For." Cochran got her start as a journalist at the Pittsburgh Dispatch in which she wrote a letter in response to a column that changed her career. The column that said females belonged in the house completing domestic work and mocked the idea of a real working woman, calling it "a monstrosity," notes CNN.
The letter fascinated her editors so much that they hired her and Cochran then begun writing under the pen name "Nellie Bly." The first line of the Google Doodle song openly refers to the misogynistic column with "Someone's got to stand up and tell them what a girl is good for."
After taking on an assignment to pose as a mental patient in New York's Blackwell's Island for ten long-lasting days, she exposed stories of forced meals, harsh physical abuse and freezing cold baths. She went on to unveil serious corruption dealing with poverty in the poor, women and the disenfranchised. When covering the 1894 Chicago Pullman Railroad Strike, she completed a momentous task the other reporters didn't--interview the striker's and write about their perspective.
Bly saw the peak of her fame when she competed against a fictional Phileas Fogg by winning in a race around the world. Instead of going "Around the World in Eighty Days," as Jules Verne wrote, she returned to New York in just 72 days, reports the Huffington Post.
Each of those significant moments as a revolutionary journalist are worked into the doodle, which was crafted in two months by Google artist Katy Wu. For the first time ever, Google features stop-motion animation on their homepage.
"She gave women a space in newspapers when they were generally preserved for men's perspectives," Wu said, notes CNN. "She gave women a voice in current events and media and dared to do a lot of things that women weren't generally allowed to do."
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