The Woman Who Checked Herself In (Nellie Bly)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Your real name was Elizabeth Cochrane
but you buried her in a newsroom in Pittsburgh
when you were twenty
and became Nellie Bly
because a woman writing in 1885
needed a name that sounded
like someone a city editor
would let through the door
You got the job by writing a furious letter
to a newspaper columnist
who said women belonged in the home
and the editor read the fury
and recognized it
as the most employable thing
he'd seen all week

[Verse 2]
They wanted you to write
about flower arranging and fashion
and you wrote about factory conditions instead
and the paper transferred you to the society page
which is where they put women
who are too good at their jobs
and too expensive to fire
So you quit
and walked into the offices of the New York World
and told Joseph Pulitzer
you wanted to get yourself committed
to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island
and write about what happens
to the women nobody visits

[Chorus]
You practiced looking insane in a mirror —
the wild eyes, the muttering,
the specific posture of someone
who has stopped negotiating with the room —
and then you checked yourself in
under a false name
and for ten days you ate rotten food
and slept on thin straw
and watched the nurses
tie women to benches for the crime
of not speaking English
or crying too long
or being poor enough
to be mistaken for broken
You walked out with a notebook
and the notebook
burned the asylum to the ground
without a single match

[Verse 3]
Then you went around the world
in seventy-two days
because Jules Verne said eighty
and you took that personally
You left New York with one dress
and a small leather bag
and a monkey you acquired in Singapore
that you carried the rest of the way home
The New York World printed a board game
so readers could follow your progress
and a million people played it
which means you turned the entire globe
into a newspaper stunt
and the newspaper stunt
into the most effective piece
of geographic journalism
anyone had ever read

[Bridge]
After the fame you married a millionaire
and when he died
you ran his manufacturing company
yourself — iron and steel,
the forges and the furnaces —
and you patented a design
for a better oil barrel
because you had never in your life
seen a problem
without also seeing the paragraph
it would make
and the paragraph
always suggested a fix
You lost the company to embezzlement
by employees you trusted
which is the only kind of theft
that teaches you anything

[Outro]
You died at fifty-seven
still writing, still furious,
still the woman who checked herself
into the asylum on purpose
to prove what everyone suspected
and nobody would print
The drawer where they keep your name
is shaped like a door
that only opens from the inside —
you checked yourself in
so that everyone locked in after you
would have a way out
and the notebook is still burning
and the asylum is still ash
and the door still works