Listen to the episode here.

Join us this week as Angie and Theresa serve up some fabulous stories of strong-willed women. 

Theresa starts with Rosemary Bryant Mariner. This naval aviator holds many firsts. She was the first woman to fly a tactical jet, the first woman to command an aviation squadron, and she was one of the first women to serve aboard a navy warship. 

Angie goes on to tell the story of Nellie Bly. This hard-hitting journalist elevated investigative journalism. She’s most known for infiltrating a New York City asylum and taking a record-breaking trip around the world. 

This episode pairs well with: 
The WASPs of WWII 
“Mrs. Sherlock Holmes” – Grace Quakenbos 

Transcript

Theresa: Hi, and welcome to the Unhinged History Podcast. The podcast where two compulsive book nerds are going to kick the dogs out of the office. Get out!

Angie: Look at how happy they all are. They’re including you. No. They were so proud and so happy. How dare you crush their dreams?

Theresa: I don’t know if you could hear Mike cackling from the other end of the house. That was delightful. I might leave that in and edit that out. Anyhow, this is the podcast.

Angie: What was the second one on the couch towards the shelving unit?

Theresa: I would have to look at the video to be able to see. I was too busy standing up and screaming.

Angie: They were the most delighted about the situation.

Theresa: I’m assuming it wasn’t the puppy.

Angie: I think it might have been the middle one. Ruby? Yeah. Anyhow, this is the… Smaller but not big. That’s Ruby. Okay.

Theresa: So this is the history podcast where my dogs will sporadically enter into the episode to get edited out later and might have indelibly entered this episode despite the bestest of my intentions.

They are not the bestest of dogs right now. But anyhow, this is a history podcast where two friends will compulsively consume history and then come back and tell each other the stories we’ve only recently learned. I’m host number one. I’m Teresa. Hi, Angie. That’s host two. She waited knowing that her introduction was coming and then started drinking out of a bindi straw.

Angie: Listen, you’re never too old for a bindi straw. And if you’re going to be judging about it, it’s metal. Only the top is bindi.

Theresa: Look, I’m not judging for that. I was trying to tell the podcast listeners at home what that delay could have been.

Angie: Imagination, Teresa. It can be anything.

Theresa: I have a story that I want to start with. Go. Okay. I’m going to tell you a story of Rosemary Bryant Mariner.

Angie: Okay. I can’t say I know this name.

Theresa: Okay. Good. I’m grateful for this and I’m going to change that. My sources. Wings of Gold. It’s a book. It’s the story of the first woman naval aviators by Beverly Weintraub. NBC News. A bad-ass pilot, Captain Rosemary Mariner. First woman to fly a tactical fighter jet dies by Elizabeth Chuck. And podcast, Literary Aviatrix, the Aviatrix Book Club, October 2022, featuring the author, Beverly Weintraub.

Speaker 4: Okay. I’m excited. Let’s go. Okay.

Theresa: Rosemary Mariner, she ends up having a 24-year military career. She starts it as one of eight women chosen as an experiment of women pilots in the Navy. In 1974, she’s the very first woman to fly a tactical jet. In 1990, she’s the first woman to command an aviation squadron. Yes.

So, these are just some highlights. She is one of the first women to serve aboard a Navy warship. The World War II-era aircraft carrier, the Lexington, she qualified as a surface warfare officer. She’s logged more than 3,500 flight hours in 15 different types of aircraft. Oh, that’s a skill set right there. So, anybody who knows anything about these planes, she’s done the A4C Skyhawk, the QF-86 Sabre, all the way through to the S-2 Tracker and the A7E Corsair II.

Okay. Even crazier, she’s had 17 aircraft carrier landings. That’s such a skill.

It is. Get a girlfriend. She had a master’s degree in national security strategy from the Naval War College and was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and she was the Joint Chief of Staff’s chair in military strategy at the National War College. Wow. Okay.

So, that’s just the sizzle reel. Are you ready for her life? Let’s go.

Okay. She’s born Rosemary Mirams. Mirams, actually, if not, she says how she’s born. Mirams is her stepfather’s last name. She is the daughter of an Air Force captain, World War II U.S. Army Air Force veteran. He dies in a plane crash when she’s only three years old. And her mom is a World War II U.S. Navy nurse.

Okay. So, servicemen is in her blood. But she grows up in San Diego watching the planes at Miramar Naval Base takeoff. And when she’s eight years old, she knew that that’s what she wants to do with her life.

I mean, yes. And in the podcast that Beverly Weintraub is featured on, she tells a story about how when Mariner would babysit her younger siblings, she would take them to watch the Jets land. That’s awesome. Which is such a cool older sibling thing to do.

Angie: It is. I take the boys to watch the dear listener at home. We live in Northern California. That is kind of the heart of air attack for wildfires. And when the big ones come through, I take my sons to watch them. Because you get, you’re right up there on the runway. It’s all, it’s actually a really cool experience.

Theresa: Oh, I can only imagine. Honestly. By the time Rosemary is 17, she’s earned her pilot’s license. Okay. And she scrimped and saved for this thing. She was cleaning houses and washing planes to pay for her lessons.

That’s awesome. She was the first woman to graduate from a professional pilot program at Purdue’s University Aviation Technology Department. I didn’t know Purdue had that. Yep, apparently.

Now, here’s something even crazier. She is young, obviously. She’s college age. And that’s when she hears that the Navy is going to open its doors just a crack for women aviators. And so she speeds through college at Purdue. She graduates in 2.5 years. Wow. She’s only 19 when she just received her bachelor’s degree.

Wow. So she is motivated. And I can’t emphasize that enough. Yeah.

Now, what she’s heard about was there’s, it’s 1973, there was a program devised by Maverick Chief Naval of Operating, by the Maverick Chief of Naval Operations named Admiral Elmo Zumalt Jr., which is a hell of a name.

Angie: And I am just picturing that person right now. And they are completely as you would imagine, I think.

Theresa: I mean, you have to have a certain level of hutzpah to rock a name, first name, Elmo. Truly. Yes, you do. Now, he’s launched this program for women aviators against the backdrop of women’s liberation movement. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Now, this, there’s, I need to give you even more background because I know when we cover the night witches, I expressed that the Russian military didn’t allow for female combat pilots because they were thinking about DEI, about equity between the genders.

They allowed female combat pilots because there was a personnel shortage. Which you got to do, I suppose. Yep.

Now, the US is experiencing the same looming personnel shortage because we have the upcoming end of the military draft from the Vietnam War. Okay. I mean, and that’s one of the things we hear, you go, oh, I can see the cause and effect. So we have a bulk of men getting ready to leave.

We’re going to experience a vacuum. And so the concept of opening the door for women aviators in the Navy makes it much more palatable because the Navy is trying to make themselves seem more desirable than the Army. Okay. So if they allow for women aviators, now they have a greater candidate pool. Mm-hmm. So, Zumalt, he ends up being an outspoken supporter of greater opportunity for the female enlistees and officers.

He sees them as this untapped resource and he kind of views this experiment as the first step towards fundamentally changing the roles of women in the Navy. Nice. Okay. So he’s very progressive. I like him.

Okay. Rose Mary is one of six women who make it through the women’s officer school. Only six. Well, there were eight that were brought in. Okay. Now, while they’re there, she’s taught that it’s quote, undignified for female officers to sit at top bar stools. Yeah. Your quizzical look. So do we just stand there then?

Angie: I mean, or do we just not go into the bar period?

Theresa: You’re supposed to maybe sit at a booth, maybe sit at a bistro table with a high back chair. I mean, I’m not sure what the alternative was, but that was one of the lessons that the women were taught.

Angie: That seems so useless at the end of the day. Like, okay.

Theresa: Yeah. But she goes through, she learns all of this. She earns her wings of gold. And this is the official winged anchor insignia that denotes the Naval Aviator. And it’s the exact same training program as male pilots, aside from the, they’re also taught not to sit on top bar stools.

Okay. You know, while they have the same training program, the women are not allowed what’s called aircraft carrier qualification. They’re not allowed to land on aircraft carriers.

That’s so stupid. Well, the reason is they want to preserve and protect the women from combat. And that’s a combat vessel, and that vessel could, even if we’re not in combat or it’s not headed on a combat mission, it could be used for combat. So we have to keep them safe.

Angie: That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Theresa: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. But I should mention that the carrier qualification, that is the defining achievement for naval flyers, and it’s a prerequisite for command. So if you don’t get carrier qualification, you cannot get command, but women should have the same opportunities as men.

Agreed. Do you see, well, I mean, that’s, but that’s the thing. It’s like, oh, no, you can do anything a man can do, but you can only get command with carrier qualifications and you can get carrier qualifications because.

Because you have ovaries. Yes. So they, they know everything. They’re fully qualified to fly. And they’re just simply not permitted to exercise the skills that the country might need, you know, in case of combat.

Angie: Like, I don’t know. Desert Storm.

Theresa: I mean, and it’s funny you mentioned that. So hold that thought. Okay. Because you’re mentioning the nineties. And so we’re still in like the late seventies. But like, we’re not too far. No, no, no, no, no, no, but everything leads up to something else. Right.

Okay. So it’s true. Now the public, when they learn about all of this, they have a, I mean, it’s surprising.

Maybe it’s not surprising. They have a response to women being put in Mabel cockpits in a New York Times article in January of 73 that said there will be quote, no prohibition against their carrying feminine gear such as makeup in their capacious pockets of the flight suits should they desire. The writer of this article goes on to say that the male pilots also allowed to carry personal objects as well.

Angie: Like so capacious pockets is my new favorite phrase. Ruminous. Love this for me.

Theresa: The newspaper coverage when it’s talking about these female pilots always mentions their physical traits like their blue eyes, their petite, their blonde, their Burnett, their fetching bangs and also their marital status. Of course. Yes.

Angie: It’s the seventies equivalent of Tinder. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. On accident. Like I’m sure that that’s not what the pilots were going for, but here we are. Right.

Theresa: Now, and see, this has been one of those interesting things because in the book, you kind of hear like Rosemary realize like what is happening. She like as she was younger, she didn’t necessarily catch all of the misogyny in the reporting and all of the needs for the photo shoots. But as she gets older, she realizes that this is PR stunt every single time and it is more and more obnoxious.

Angie: I was literally just having this conversation with the end of the day about like particularly famous women of all sorts of types that are out in the world doing things and all the media can tell us is whose dress they’re wearing today. Yeah. Like cool, I guess if I wanted to go buy that dress, but I was more interested in what said woman was doing.

Theresa: What she thought about why she did this, what she overcame to get here. You know the same questions we would ask a dude. Yeah.

Angie: Or if we’re going to do it that way, then sir, where’s your jacket from? Right. Like we have. Yeah.

Theresa: Just having the same question. Mm hmm.

Theresa: Or the women who are famous in their own right, but married to a famous man. And so you hear so and so’s wife. It’s like you mean the doctor who holds several patents in her field. Yes.

Angie: My goal in life is for Ian to be referred to as so and so’s husband. Oh, I love this for you. He seems cool with it. He’s like, I don’t mind being arm candy that works just fine. Right.

Theresa: Now, okay, so all this is happening with women and the reporting, but women are doing their best and they’re starting to really rise up to the ranks of naval aviation. And as this is happening, this is occurring under some really steady support from male superior officers. And it’s these four looking people that really understand the historic importance that the women that they’re shepherding is going to have.

And so they’re doing their best to make sure that these women are successful. And one incredibly poignant example is the commanding officer of Rosemary’s first squadron, a black commander named Captain Raymond Lambert. Okay. And Lambert, he was the first black squadron commander at NAS Oceana.

Okay. He knows women are legally barred from flying jets, but runs a chest, but runs a request at the chain of command to get her permission. And he gets his admiral to agree.

Angie: Love this. This is the first step to being able to land on an aircraft carrier.

Theresa: Eventually. Now, again, what they’re doing is illegal, but the admiral’s like, yeah, of course she can, she can fly this jet. And in the book, they talk about how he seemed like a proud father telling her that she gets to do the same thing that literally all of her coworkers can do. Love this. Okay. Yes, you too can use the copy machine. I’ve got permission for you. Here’s your note.

Yeah. Now it’s Lambert who draws on the lessons of black service members who integrated the US military to empower Rosemary and her own quest for equality. And the book, I mean, I can’t recommend the book enough and the book’s wings of gold, which I said before, but incredible book. There’s this powerful story where in talking with her, he reaches into his desk and he pulls out a file of all the black naval officers and black aviators. He’s in this file is like active duty retired. It’s everybody from ensign to admiral. It’s everybody. That’s awesome.

And he’s keeping tabs on them. This is before cell phones. Email may or may not be a thing.

So everything is extremely manual. And he’s watching out for every single one of them. That’s awesome. And he tells her the only way black service members are going to succeed in the Navy is by working together, not being like in one unit where it’s just like everybody is black and all like segregated together, but distributed dispersed and networking.

Angie: I feel like that’s humanity in general. He’s not wrong. No. And he tells her that

Theresa: she needs to do the same for the female aviators. Love that. Okay. She takes all of this to heart. She said, he taught me how black men in the Navy and all the services networked. He told me how it was going to be and what we would need to do as women. And she said this to the University of Tennessee where she taught US military history for years.

And that was in November of 2017. Okay. She goes on to say he was adamant that women should never have a separate chain of command. Racial segregation in the armed forces was a major barrier that African Americans had to overcome.

Facts. And it really was, when you read the book, you realize just how impactful having him who understood the struggle so well, shepherding and mentoring her. In 1982, she was named one of 10 outstanding working women of 1982 in Glamour magazine. And then she appears on the game show, What’s My Line?

Okay. So she is like in pop culture. Love this. When she’s in Glamour magazine, she is quoted as saying that the machine gun is the great equalizer. Okay. She’s championing for women to be able to go into combat because she’s like, your plane doesn’t know your gender. Well, it doesn’t.

Angie: And there’s a high chance in an airplane, neither does the other guy. Yeah.

Theresa: If you keep your helmet on, nobody knows.

Angie: Yep. We’re just, yeah. Okay. Go on.

Theresa: So we’re going to fast forward a little bit to 1991. She’s still having her career and she goes on to argue publicly about the tail hook scandal. And I’m going to explain what that is because this was bonkers, but it perfectly encapsulates the shenna. Nanogins as the kindest way to say it. Now, the tail hook convention is this huge convention happens in Vegas. And gosh, okay, it’s massive, but it’s basically for aviators, for contractors. It is like the who’s who event. And in 91, since the comic con of pilots, for Navy pilots.

Right. Because I think tail hook is the term used when you land on aircraft carrier and you hook on the cable on the landing. That’s a tail hook.

So this is the event, right? Now during the 1991 tail hook convention, Navy pilots, male, I that goes should go without saying sexually abused military and civilian females in the halls as the Las Vegas Hilton. That is the opposite of okay.

Yeah. And a third. But we can’t sit on bar stools. No, no, no, no.

No, well, the women aren’t supposed to sit on bar stools, but the men are allowed to get away with this. During this event, a third of the Navy’s aviators are at this event. So this is, like I said, the who’s who.

There is a massive amount of people here. Mariner, when she’s reflecting on this, she frames her argument like this. She says during the symposium, Lieutenant Monica. Revin, I should have figured out how to say her name. Revin De Nier stood up and asked nine admirals when women would be allowed to fly in tactical combat missions off aircraft carriers.

I’m going to note here that Mariner herself had asked the same question at the 1979 tail hook convention. Oh, okay. Okay. When. When. Revin. Revadunera asked this question, the crowd booze and hisses her and the nine male admirals remained silent.

Angie: Okay. Like so dumb. Yeah.

Theresa: Now, go ahead, please.

Angie: No, I’m just, I’m, I’m like, are we trying to protect the boys club that is living on an aircraft carrier? Like it’s so stupid to not allow that to happen. Yeah. It goes to me, it’s so dumb that it automatically goes back to all the years that sailors were afraid of women being on boats.

Theresa: Yeah, like because we’ll affect the seas. Like I don’t know what sort of mythical capacities that my memories have, but apparently they carry all of the magic. I’m told. Yeah, I’m never able to utilize it when and how I want. Just, I know it’s there. Okay. Yeah.

I’m like standing in line at customer service just can’t rally a storm. So useful. Okay.

Goals. So she’s, she asks this question, the admirals remain silent and this silence and while she’s being berated by all of her peers proves to everybody in the crowd that there’s no support for equity and it goes on to expand on everything that happens later on. Like where women are horrifically assaulted getting out of the elevator walking down the hallway trying to get to their hotel room. Like you’re there just in Vegas to be in Vegas and your shirt is removed as men are grabbing you. They may or may not be your coworkers.

They may or may not be your husband’s coworkers. Right. Now, what she goes on to say is that this problem will continue as long as women are barred from combat duty because she’s looking for straight equity across the board. Right. Military.com had an article about the stand, the scandal stating that Navy squadrons footed the booze bill which could run upwards of $7,000 per suite per day.

Angie: How many people are in a suite?

Theresa: I don’t know, but not enough for, I mean, me in a class I don’t know could rack up seven grand in today’s money and this is 1991. They spent a total of $190,000 which in today’s money is half a million. On, on booze.

Angie: And we can’t let women fly off aircraft carriers.

Theresa: No, we’re too drunk to see if that’s a dumb idea. Wow. Now, she’s talking about how the, you know, the full concept of the whole let’s just be boys will be boys, the little the old man’s club, whatever it’s called. That entire thing illustrates that the men weren’t going to be held accountable.

When the admirals don’t stop and shut down the booze at the symposium, nor do they answer the question, they’re illustrating the institutional discrimination and using using it to cover the individual assaults like all of it is just carte blanche. Just be thankful we let you into the room, little lady. My word. She goes on to say that the sexual harassment that that was experienced will continue to be a problem in the military as long as women are barred from combat duty, as long as they’re considered institutionally inferior. Just as in matters of race is separate is inherently unequal and she said this in Los Angeles Times in 1992.

Angie: We were alive then. We were.

Theresa: And at like at many points in the book at different points of where she was interviewed, you know, she says, look, if you let women fly combat planes today, I could not do it. I am too old. I have aged out, but I am fighting not so that I can do it, but so that those coming behind me can.

Mm hmm. There is a woman named Catherine sharp Landach. She is the historian of the women’s Air Force service pilot.

So the wasps of World War Two. I mentioned her last week. She’s also a professor at Texas Women’s University. She’s she was friends with Mariner and said Mariners intelligence was one of her signature assets, along with her willingness to assist others to reach their potential. Mm hmm. I love that. She goes on to say she shaped generations of people with that confidence in them, helping them find their path. Which I want everybody to live in such a righteous way to have somebody say that about them.

Mm hmm. The last quote I have from her is she was a badass pilot to landing on carriers. That’s pretty badass. It’s you’re not just landing a jet. You’re landing a jet on a runway. That’s rising up and down in the seas. And I think as a woman doing it, you’ve got everybody on deck watching.

Mm hmm. In 1997, Rosemary is interviewed by the Washington Post and she was unimpeachable. She said that Navy women should receive the same training as men and be allowed to gain sufficient experience to repay the country for that training because training is expensive.

Mm hmm. Segregation of any type, whether by gender, race or any other measure destroys unit cohesion and inequality is an insult to the integrity of the chain of command. It’s quite simply a matter of honor and respect.

Get it, girlfriend. Later that year, just before retiring from active duty and joining the University of Tennessee’s Center for Study of War and Society, she specialized in military history at the juncture between war and consciousness. She wrote in the Washington Post quote, integrating large numbers of high quality female recruits into non traditional fields made the all volunteer force possible. Combat exclusion policies do not protect women from coming home in body bags or becoming POWs. Rather, such arbitrary restriction hurts combat readiness by limiting the flexibility of commanders to use all of their soldiers, however needed, especially under fire. In terms of plane fairness, if American women are good enough to die for their country, they’re good enough to fight. She’s not wrong. Yeah, because we have women who were flying just standard planes, you know, being stationed near combat zones and those that doesn’t stop them from being attacked doesn’t stop from mechanical failures. Right.

These things happen. We had lost die during World War Two and they were not anywhere near the front lines. Mariner advises on the naval defense policy and continued integration of women into the armed forces until her diagnosis of ovarian cancer. This disease would ultimately take her life, January 24th, 2019. Did she ever see another female pilot?

Angie: Yeah.

Theresa: I believe so. I believe so. She served as an expert on military matters for a number of media outlets and mentored young men and women in the classroom. Although throughout, she remained a trailblazer, a scholar and advocate for talented young people who wished to serve as she served. When she passed, a female crew of pilot and crew members volunteered to participate in the Saber Nine flyover that winter afternoon. It was the very first all woman flyover and it made news. Many had heard her words or heard her speak. Several had met with her and they were aware of the debt that they owed her as this groundbreaking aviator. One of the female pilots, Lieutenant Commander Paige Block, posts on Twitter, I told my parents my dreams of becoming a female fighter pilot at age eight. I am blessed to serve and regard the pioneering woman of naval aviation as foundational in making my dream possible. I met Captain Rosemary Mariner. She was a beacon of leadership. Another person that flew in that flyover in a video release said, we have top done graduates.

We have a commanding officer, an executive officer and a combat veteran. None of us are the first. She was the first.

The fact none of us are first is literally a testament to her. Lieutenant Amanda Lee goes on to say, when I come into a ready room now, I’m a pilot first, a person second and my gender isn’t really an issue. It’s people like Captain Mariner that paved the way for us. And another person put it succinctly when she said, I wouldn’t be standing where I am today if it wasn’t for her and the other first female naval aviators. At her funeral, her husband of nearly 39 years retired Navy Commander Tommy Mariner said, the fact that it was an all female crew wouldn’t flatter Mariner, but she certainly would not have said that that component was necessary. It’s wonderful that the Navy can do that and it’s good that to have so many women where they can fill out all the cockpits with women.

He said his voice breaking, but that would not have been a requirement for Rosemary. January 2nd of 2024, history.navy .mil published an article about Mariner. And as of February 8th, 2025, that page is unavailable. I’m not sure if this missing page is organic or planned. Presumably this could be the result of recent administration changes that in a push to erase the notable achievements of women and marginalized communities. As a history buff, I am concerned about this missing page. Looking at the way back machine, there is an instance of this page saved January 19th, 2025.

Now, despite all of this, I want to end on a little bit different note. Mariner’s husband had said that he is proud of the doors that his wife opened for women in the armed services. She never thought of her work as being revolutionary because she was female. She had hoped what she was doing would become the norm. She considered people, not men and women, he said. From a standpoint of getting the job done and the way you are treated in the world, she felt people ought to be treated the same. He said she took her cancer diagnosis the same way she approached everything else in her life by educating herself as much as possible about it, relying on her Roman Catholic faith to get her through tough times and by thinking of it as her mission. When she was diagnosed four and a half years ago, he said doctors believe she only had several months to live. In her 2017 interview with the University of Tennessee, she emphasized the importance of persistence and said, life can deal you a lot of curveballs. You hang in there and you don’t quit. Do you have pictures? I do.

Angie: You’re going to need to describe it though. I know, I’m sorry, I’m just enjoying it. She is in full flight gear standing in front of what I can only assume is her plane. I can’t remember exactly what this plane is called, but it looks like it’s smiling at her.

Theresa: You know the background? I think it’s a fighter jet of some sort.

Angie: It is, but I don’t remember. The front piece is throwing me off a little bit, but she is either getting ready to load up or had just finished her flight. She is exactly, this photo had to be taken, was it taken in the 90s? It had to be. Her hair is screaming 90s mom. Yeah, it very much so is.

Theresa: But I’m not sure of the date of any of these. That is a picture of her as a blonde. in the quintessential navy yearbook photo kind of style.

Angie: Yep, you have the flag in the background. She’s got her medals on her chest and her wings above them.

Theresa: Oh, I love it. We’ve got my favorites right here.

Angie: Yeah. Are those both from in the air? It looks like.

Theresa: The bottom one is from her in a cockpit, and this one I believe is her on the ground checking out her plane. But she’s in her flight food in both of them, black and white. This bottom one here is actually on the cover of the Wings of Gold book.

Angie: That’s awesome. It looked like in the picture above that she was in the air because of whatever’s in the distance. It looks like sort of a body of water. So it made me wonder if it was taken out of the side of a helicopter or something.

Theresa: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think so because I know, I don’t think she was a helo pilot.

Angie: Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that. I just that it kind of has that vibe. Yeah. I love her flights. Her flight food is fabulous.

Theresa: With its capacious pockets.

Angie: With its capacious pockets. And she’s doing it, you guys, in every one of these pictures, she has her hair down. I couldn’t do it. God bless her.

Theresa: All those little stray strands just bug in your face.

Angie: Oh, yeah, I couldn’t do it. But I threw my notes.

Theresa: I love her. I didn’t realize I went that quickly. But yeah, I am sure did. I know last week when we covered the stories we covered, I had blindly assumed that when the Tuskegee pilots or the Tuskegee airmen and the wasps were re-included in Air Force history that the rest of everybody was saved. But I don’t think they are. And that bothers me on a visceral level to know that the erasure of people exist just to make a handful of people in the dominant culture feel better and more secure about their already secure positions.

Angie: Well, you know, when you’re secure, you have to keep it that way. Otherwise, what website was it missing from?

Theresa: It was missing from history.navy .mil, which is a government website ran by the Navy.

Angie: I don’t think the Navy page not found on this server. Yep. Yeah. Well, the Navy.mil still has her page up. Share your screen. So I’m choosing to be optimistic that perhaps something is wrong with the website. If I could get to my share button, things would go a lot better.

Theresa: Can you see it? I can see that it says… Okay, can you make your screen bigger because I can’t see your full address?

Angie: Okay, here we go. I’m trying to, but the…

Theresa: Because what I want to see is the URL. The zoom commands are in the way, and every time I click them, I mute myself. Okay, so Navy and the past, or women in the Navy, backslash past. This would go away.

Angie: It’s… So it’s http://www.navy .mil.

Theresa: Yeah, no, that. I just wanted to see the full URL. But the people, forward slash trailblazers, forward slash Rosemary Mariner, that’s the one that’s done. There you go. That’s the one that is kaput. Gotcha. Because I’ll share my screen. Okay, that’s…

Angie: I think this was the first one I tried to click. This one? Yeah, that’s the one. Yeah.

Theresa: Yeah. And I don’t know. I mean, I’ve had pages that just organically go down, but… Right. That shouldn’t be.

Angie: 100% agree with you. She was so cute. I know that that’s completely irrelevant, but like, her hat and all of it, like, she just wore everything so well. Again, not relevant, because how she wears things doesn’t matter to how she lives as a person. Right.

Theresa: But we should pivot to your story.

Angie: I’m stuck on Captain Rosemary Bryant Mariner. Thank you so much. You’re welcome. There we go. Apparently I had to stop sharing screens to get my screen to actually do something. Let’s see.

Theresa: Okay. It was rewarding to see you wipe away tears as I was crying.

Angie: Well, so yeah, I guess you’ve got that going for you. Okay. I found it. All right. Women’s History.org has a biography on my person. PBS.org has an American experience feature.

NewYorkHistory.org, Modernizing America, has a fun little article. Two, National Park Services. Thought you would be proud to know.

They’re just chilling, hanging out. And there is an author that her name is Tanya Mitchell. She recently finished a book about my guest that I’m bringing to the show, if you will.

And you know what? I didn’t write the name of the book down, so I’ll have to find that and add it to some notes somewhere. But I’m going to tell you the story of Nellie Bly. Are you familiar with her?

Theresa: The one who’s the investigative journalist who goes into Bedlam? Mm-hmm. You’ve taken her for my list. Congratulations. Well done. Yes.

Angie: Well, you’ve taken like three of mine. And I told Ian the other day that I’m actually shocked you hadn’t done her first.

Theresa: I mean, truly, she is… She has all of the hallmark characteristics of somebody I would do.

Angie: She does. And I… So let me gift her to you. Nellie Bly, or rather Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was born May 5th, 1864, in Cochran’s Middle Pennsylvania. Her grandfather was an Irish immigrant, and her father, Michael Cochran, owned a successful mill and also served as an associate justice of Armstrong County. He basically works his way into success, like, my guy is the opposite of Button-Glenette.

Okay. He does well for himself. He does well for his family.

The author, Tanya Mitchell, points out in her research that he also, along with being successful in the mill and being an associate justice, he also holds real estate. The home that she was born in was a grand 10,000-square-foot estate.

Theresa: So just a small little bungalow.

Angie: Yeah, just a little bungalow. So for at least a little while, her family is living like the actual American dream that her grandfather crossed an ocean for, right? Which I think seeing that actually happen is really inspirational. However, in 1870, when Bly was just six years old, her father died suddenly and there’s no will. Now, previous to his marriage with her mother, Mary Jane Cochran, he had been married before and had several children with the first marriage. I believe at his death he had 10 kids.

So there’s, it might have even been more than that, but there’s a lot going on here, right? And he has no will, and so her family is basically unable to maintain the land or their home, and so they leave Cochran’s mill. Her mother remarries divorces in 1878 due to the abuse that she’s receiving from her second husband. In fact, at her mother’s divorce trial, Elizabeth testifies. She’s only like 14. She says, quote, my stepfather has been generally drunk since he married my mother.

When drunk, he is very cross and cross when sober. And I just think the kind of courage it takes at 14 years old to stand in front of a courtroom and defend your mother is wild to me. At 15, Blyne rolls, she’ll be, excuse me, her last name is Cochran at the moment. She’ll change it to Blyne shortly. She enrolls at the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania. This is the point where she adds the E to her last name, becoming Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She wants to look and sound more sophisticated, which I think is hilarious.

I don’t know why that E matters, but there we are. However, given that there are significant financial struggles within her family, right, like they had no real way of dividing the money up when her father died. So her mother, her brothers and herself are pretty much, I don’t want to say left destitute, but they run out of money fairly quickly.

Just because we didn’t plan for death in this particular circumstance. So she has to leave school after just one term because the money runs out. She moves in with her mom to Pittsburgh where her two older brothers had already settled. In Pittsburgh, she helps her mom run a boarding house while looking for other, more full-time, lucrative work. Now by the time her family is living in Pittsburgh, the city at this point is known as the steel capital of the country and has earned the reputation as being, well, the blackest, dirtiest, grimeous city in the United States. That includes the little area of the unincorporated portion of Allegheny City where her family lives.

This is wild to me. The city has only 60,000 residents, but seven newspapers. Well, they didn’t have the internet. Like, that’s true, but like seven?

I just feel like that’s one for every street corner with only 60,000 residents, but that’s just me. Elizabeth would spend the next few years looking for ways to help support her family. Time and time again, she would discover that there’s less opportunity for her than for her older, more educated brothers. It’s 1885 by this point. She’s about 20 years old. She’s reading one of the many newspapers in the area, and there’s this rather frustrating series of articles in the Pittsburgh Dispatch written by the Quiet Observer or QO with the pen name of Erasmus Wilson. This person, the Quiet Observer, if you will, is one of the most popular columnists, like around.

So everybody’s rating him. But in this series of columns, he’s basically saying things like women belong in the home. They need to be doing the domestic work. They need to be doing things like selling and cooking and raising the children.

And he called the women working outside of the home basically a monstrosity. Oh, Elizabeth is not having this. And having lived in the need to work along with many of the other young ladies in her community, she writes an open letter to the editor calling for more opportunities for women, especially those responsible for the financial well-being of their families. She signs the letter, quote, Lonely Orphan Girl. The newspaper editor, a man called George Madden, was so impressed with what he read that he publishes a note asking for the Lonely Orphan Girl to reveal herself. Excuse me, the Lonely Orphan Girl. I don’t know why I keep pronouncing it open.

Theresa: I think you’re just… Lonely Orphan Girl. If I were to write it, would there be a strange apostrophe there?

Angie: Yeah, it’s very weird to come off the…

Theresa: You’re streamlining it. Anyway, that’s what you’re doing.

Angie: Yeah, I’ve taken that H all the way out. Right. She does reveal herself, and she does so by just walking straight on into the paper. And they basically hire on the spot. This is the point where she takes the pen name Nellie Bly, which is what I’ll be calling her from here on out. Fun note, nod to my mom here. My…the pen name evidently comes from a song that the American composer Stephen Foster wrote. My mom adores Stephen Foster, and for years was convinced we were related to him.

Theresa: I’m assuming that’s a big ol’ negatory.

Angie: I have yet to find proof. If we are, he’s probably a distinct cousin. But my mom simply adores him, so here we are. At this point, she decides to make herself what we today would call an investigative reporter. Not surprising, her first stories would be about the plight of the working girl, and then calling for reform in the state’s divorce laws. She then did a series about the factory girls at Pittsburgh. Despite the fact that she’s killing it at this type of journalism, she’s often left to the ladies’ pages covering things like fashion and flower shows.

This is clearly not her jam. Bly somehow convinces the editors to let her be a foreign correspondent in Mexico, where she observes and then sends back stories about the everyday life of the Mexican people, as well as government’s unfair imprisonment and the censorship of Mexican journalists. That’s not a bad joke.

I know, right? She’s not there long before she is threatened with arrest. So she comes home. The dispatch, again, puts her back in the ladies’ column. She has had quite enough of that and leaves a note at the dispatch for Wilson, the original columnist who wrote the article she was not having fun with.

In the note, she basically says, Dear QO, I’m off for New York. Look out for me, Bly. Oh, I love that.

I think that’s so fabulous. So Bly moves to New York City, and for about six months she knocks on literally everyone’s door, just looking for a paper to take her work seriously. Women’shistory.org says that she wanted to write a story on the immigrant experience in the United States. And I just think that’s, we’re not even past 1900 yet, and I feel like she’s very forward-thinking in the topics that she wants to cover because she’s living them. And for me, that was a really interesting, like, I’m not juxtaposition, but like a really interesting moment to like realize that she is living in the early 20th century, but looking at topics that still today get such terrible coverage, and she is like, Nope, we need to talk about the thing.

And I love that. One day after all these months of knocking on the door, she meets John Cockrell. He’s the managing editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s The New York World. He does one of two things. Either he boldly challenges her in a bid to get rid of her, or, like, long story short, he asks her to do the story about the mentally ill her house and the notorious institution on Blackwell Island. More specifically, the women’s lunatic asylum there. Now, I didn’t know this before I started working on the story, but Blackwell Island, for a good portion of the early 20th century, housed asylums, prisons, and almshouses. I thought it was just an asylum, just an institution. I had no idea there was multiple things going on.

Theresa: Yeah, I was under the impression it was just the one. Right?

Angie: Local New Yorkers at the time referred to the place as Welfare Island. So I think in his mind, he is either she is going to knock this out of the park, so it’s a bold challenge, or this is going to go totally sideways and I won’t have to deal with this woman anymore.

Theresa: I mean, it’s a win-win for him. Let’s be honest. Right?

Angie: I think that’s what he’s thinking, like when he puts this challenge on the table. That’s what I meant to say earlier, but I just figured out the words in the right order this time. However, she does it. One source says she poses as someone with amnesia. Another source says she’s impersonating, quote, a mad person, which we know today could be representative of any mental condition. They’re totally not understood at the time.

They’re not well known at the time, so anything under the sun you could think of. But most sources, I think, suggest she goes in under the pretense of amnesia. While inside, she finds, quote, other patients who had been committed when they were also healthy. Many of these patients could not speak fluent English, so they could not convince the nurse that they were actually sane. While she was there, Bly documented the abuse and neglect, both the physical and the emotional abuse coming from the caretakers. And this could range from cold showers, discussing living conditions to spoiled food.

If you can think it like the gambit, they’re not caring for these people. Bly writes a book about her experience at Blackwell Island. The book itself is called Ten Days in a Madhouse. This book, as well as her story, which appeared in the New York world with illustrations, so she does like a series that are released over time in the New York world.

They spark the public and politicians alike, and they demand hospital and asylum reform, as well as the money to do so across the U.S. And as you can imagine, this shoe splited fame, right? Like, I don’t think he really realized what he was getting himself into when he put this young lady on the task. She was going to do the thing, and she absolutely did.

And it also must be said, she is only 23 years old. I love the chutzpah, right? Like, the panache the young lady has. Her peers are jealous enough to call her new reporting style stunt reporting, because we can’t call it anything else. We just can’t call her a journalist. She’s clearly doing stunts. This is just a PR thing. Bly would spend most of her life exposing all types of corruptions and injustice, like across the board, including calling people out by name.

Like, yes. She wrote your name on the wall if she felt that there was some sort of corruption within your program. That included doctors, even. Like, she had no qualms. In fact, in Chicago in 1894, she covered the Pullman Railroad strike as the only journalist to cover the striker’s perspective.

Theresa: Oh, that’s novel. Right?

Angie: Crazy idea, don’t you think? Right around this time, she decided she kind of wants to travel the world. She’s very inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. And I’m not sure exactly how she manages to get the New York World to cover it, but they do. It sounds like there might have been a little bit of competition amongst other journalists, and so the New Yorks, like, yep, let’s do it. But they cover the trip, and they publish daily updates on her journey.

And as you can bet, the entire country is following her story. However, the editor had only given her a couple of days’ notice to prepare for this. Oh, jeez. So she wants to, she wants, very inspired by Jules Verne, she wants to make it Around the World in 80 Days or less. She’s like, yes, I am on board the editor’s, like, great, you’ve got two days.

Theresa: Oh, it’s like I’ve got to find a cat sitter.

Angie: Exactly. So she has this fabulous traveling dress made. I’ll show you a picture of it. It’s pretty fantastic. And she purchases a bag. The bag itself is about seven inches tall and then 16 inches wide and is packed according to her words with, quote, two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink stand, and toilet articles. I’m assuming like you’re the, you know, shampoo, the brush, the things like that, the things you would use in the bathroom. But it’s an outfit with toilet articles? No, these are the things that she’s got in her bag.

Theresa: Oh, okay. I was imagining like a multi-pocketed robe that is just like a one-in-ton.

Angie: I, sorry, I was confused. No, this is what’s in her bag that’s seven by 16 inches. Okay. So the complete outfit of toilet articles, ink stand, pens, pencils, a copy paper, a copy, oh, copy paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask, and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs, fresh rochings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream to keep my face from chappie in the varied climates I should encounter. To keep my face from chapping.

Theresa: You know, honestly, her to-go bag sounds pretty in-depth.

Angie: I know, I’m here for it. It’s a nice little duffel. Her trip starts on November 14th and just two days later, a competitor would join the race, a one Elizabeth Bisland, going in the opposite direction.

Theresa: Now, Bly doesn’t know that this competitor has joined the mix, does she?

Angie: Um, I’m under the understanding that she does based on the fact that the American people are clamoring for stories about these two girls. And newspapers across the country are filled with information.

So I think she has access to this knowledge. However, they are not on the same vessels. They’re going opposite directions.

So they don’t cross paths. Um, like, the world is pretty much enthralled with this and everyone wants to know who’s going to make it to New York first, Nellie Bly or Elizabeth Bisland. About day nine, the London correspondent for the New York world informs Bly that he has received a letter from the Jules Verne himself, inviting Bly to visit him and his wife at their home. You can imagine she made time for that. On day 35, she, in Singapore, she adopted a monkey and called in McGinty.

I’m here for this. And I just know, I just know, if she was alive today, she would be your typical white lady in leggings and ugs and have 75 rescue animals. Yeah.

Theresa: She would have it out in my mind. Yeah. No, there would be the house pony.

Angie: I literally just going to say, and she’d be telling her husband she needs a house pony or mini Highland cows. Like, I just know it. In Canton, which is Gondon now, on day 42, she visits a leopard colony. So she’s seeing some things. Japan would be her favorite place. And after spending time with the gaseous, she would even write, quote, If I loved and married, I would say to my mate, come, I know where Eden is and desert the land of my birth for Japan, the land of love, beauty, poetry and cleanliness.

Theresa: I mean, she’s not wrong.

Angie: Our girl loves Japan. Day 58, as she’s preparing to leave Yokohama, she hears the band of the USS Omaha play a short concert in her honor. Later, that same day aboard the oceanic, which is her, the vessel she is boarding, she learns that the officers had written the following couplet all over the engine room for her.

For Nellie Bly will win or die January 20 1890. And I love how many people are totally invested on their part of her journey. Day 70, customs and railroad officials stay up the whole night to assure that she has transferred trains in as little time as possible. She leaves Oakland, California in a privately chartered train that consists of just the sleeping car and one engine. The little train goes southward past the farms and homesteads of California, San Joaquin Valley. She’s passing through places and I just had to share this because this is my neck of the woods. She’s passing through places like Lathrop, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield and everyone.

Theresa: Everything’s brown. Everything is brown. Wow. It has to be.

Angie: Everyone stops to watch as she flies by on her little train. At 3 51 p.m. on January 25 1890, the train pulls into the station in Jersey City, New Jersey. 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes since she left.

Elizabeth Bisland would complete the goal for the Cosmopolitan on January 30 at 1 30 in the afternoon, just five days later. So our girl sets the record for the first like speed record for global, I don’t say, I guess.

Theresa: Travel. Yeah, it’s like navigation works for me. Yeah.

Angie: Of her adventures, she would say, quote, it seemed as if my greatest success was the personal interest of everyone who greeted me. Because everybody took stock and assuming they were going to be part of her winning the race and I love that. She did continue to publish more great pieces of journalism after that. But then at age 30, she marries millionaire Robert Seaman and retires from journalism. Good for her. I know.

Get it girl. Blythe husband dies in 1903 and he leaves her in control of his massive ironclad manufacturing company and American steel barrel company, something her father was not able to do for her mother. And she’s successful in business as well. She would go on to patent several inventions related to oil manufacturing.

Many are still used today. National Parks Service tells us that she wrote in the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. and in her coverage of the event, she predicted that it would be at least 1920 before women would get the vote. As a, as a, as a business person as a boss, she prioritized the welfare of her employees, providing both healthcare benefits and recreational benefits. And she also worked with the national facilities. Pre 1920, this woman has seen the things she knows what’s important and provides healthcare benefits.

Theresa: You go to a leper colony or two and suddenly you get the idea that maybe seeing a doctor preventatively is helpful. Right.

Angie: Unfortunately for Blythe, she wasn’t great with finances and fell victim to some fraud committed by employees that led her to eventually have to declare bankruptcy. Women’s history.org says that quote, in her later years, Bly returned to journalism covering World War One from Europe. And she continues to shed light on major issues that impacted women while still working as a writer. Bly died from pneumonia on January 27 1922. She was just 58 years old.

Theresa: I’ve got some really fabulous photos. I am here for it.

Angie: So I love, I don’t know if you can you see it?

Theresa: Can you scroll down so I can see the full image? Okay. Yep. So there is a photo that has a background of almost a shields green wallpaper with Nellie Bly rock and some very intense bangs. She’s got the fringe. Girl got the fringe. Now the fringe, it goes up in a semi circle and her hair is pulled back in a bun, but she has some bright eyes.

Angie: I think this photo is obviously due to colorizing of the time, but you can see it all over the internet. It’s a pretty fun photo. The photo to the right, I believe, was her trip while she was investigating the world.

Theresa: Yeah, it looks like she’s using a Pendleton woven wool blanket as a backdrop as she’s in this very frilly gown.

Angie: Yeah. This is a plate from her journey home, which I think is really fun.

Theresa: Okay. So she is in kind of a Sherlock Holmes outfit, but it’s a dress. It looks like she is in a crowded place, maybe at a train station being greeted by a variety of people.

Angie: Now this is the dress. Is that dress?

Theresa: Ah, okay. So it is a brown, maybe black. It’s a black and white photo, so it’s hard to tell the exact color, but it’s a very checked or gingham pattern. She has a dark gown underneath with a crosshatch pattern, and she’s holding her bag and her hat. She has a very, I just traveled a long ways kind of look.

Angie: Right. And that bag she’s holding is the bag that held all of her stuff. So one of the fun moments of her time was that particularly men, but everyone in general suspected that a woman could not travel without, you know, 10 trunks and all of the porters needed to carry all of her things. And Nellie would have absolutely no qualms. Like when she was boarding a vessel, they would be like, oh, where are your trunks, ma’am? We’ll send the porters down to get them.

And she would just hold up her bag and be like, oh, I’ve already brought my things on. Thank you. And it lived to throw people for that loop that we actually don’t need 27 steamer trunks to make it from point A to point B.

Theresa: I mean, to know that she traveled the world in a purse, that outdoes even me, and I can do an international trip with a carry-on in winter. Right.

Angie: Like she had plans and she was going to stick to them and she was going to stick it to the man. Like, we’re just, we’re very capable. Thank you. But she seems to have done it with a lot of, like, delight and humor. Like, no, no gentleman serves. It’s very, it’s really okay. And one of the really fun things is one of the sources that I gave you actually has like a breakdown of her day of the journey so that, you know, you as the reader can go through and find them. It’s HeinzSistoryCenter.org, Women Forging the Way, Nellie Gly, Around the World. You can actually scroll down and it gives you like day by day, day one, day six, day three, day nine, like what she was doing, where she was, what she experienced. And it was really, really hard for me to not just do her story on that. But I thought her, her origins and her upbringing were so important to who she was and what she overcame and the fact that she had this desire and willingness to go into the asylum just to investigate the conditions there at a time when that seems so unlikely to have happened. That I couldn’t not just do like a brief snapshot of her whole life. Like, she coined, I don’t know if she coined the phrase, but she was the trailblazer behind investigative journalism. Like, we have what we have today because she was willing to do what she did. And that’s pretty cool.

Theresa: That is really neat. Thank you for sharing her.

Angie: You’re welcome. You can thank my husband who was like, oh, girl, I got you.

Theresa: I mean, I’m here for that. I really am. And I will say that thankfully some of our listeners have been emailing us stories because they recognize that I checked the email and your husband gives you all of your stories.

Angie: He’s me a lot of him. He gets, if I don’t, if I pick a story that I found on my own or that I like came across my desk of my own free will and I don’t tell his story that week, he gets very upset.

Like, he’s betrayed that I didn’t choose one of the offerings he gave me. And I’m like, well, I am capable. I can find things off of my own free will.

Theresa: I love that you get guilted by that, that he uses you to like, hey, I want you to research this for me. I found this great little headline.

Angie: Yes. Like, okay. And he does these really fun things. Like, we’ll be sitting at dinner. And typically the rule in our house is at dinner at the table, your phone is not with you.

However, we have spent a lot of time on the road the last six months because of sports and things. So while we’re waiting for our food, we’re either playing pool with our kids from across the table via our phones or my husband is looking at fun little articles and he will get the weirdest set of words and make, he’ll find something out of it. And I’ll be like, what did you type in?

What would you put into Google to find that? Like, I must know. And he’ll just smile and be like, enjoy. I love this for you. See the stinker. I’m not going to tell him you love this because he’ll only feel more vindicated in his actions when I don’t pick his story.

Theresa: I mean, look, these are all things and I can text him myself. If you’ve enjoyed the story, if you’re thinking, wow, I have loved this mashup. I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I want to hang out again. Come back next week, but you can rate and you can review and you can do this really cool thing where you subscribe.

We prefer the rating, but the subscription part is cool too. Also email us unhinged history pod at gmail.com. And by the time this episode airs, check out our website, which is unhingedhistory.com. So cool. And on that note, good bye. Bye.

Angie: Um, okay, I’m getting my act together. I don’t do it on my account.