Transcript
Hayden (0:00)
Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
Stephen (0:08)
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
Hayden (0:12)
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
Stephen (0:20)
That's right.
Katie Charlwood (0:21)
Hey.
Stephen (0:21)
Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
Hayden (0:25)
And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. So, spoiler alert, he'll be wrong.
Stephen (0:32)
News flash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lowe's Advertiser (1:13)
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Katie Charlwood (1:56)
Hello, delicious friends, and welcome to who did what now, the history podcast. That is not your history class with me, your host, Katie Charlwood, history harlot and reader of books. So I fainted in work today. I know, I know. I just threw that in there. Just started off strong with fainting at my place of employment, which was a wee bit embarrassing and like, a tiny bit concerning because, like, for. Why, for why did I faint? That was very unpleasant. I didn't appreciate that at all. 0 out of 5 stars. Like, I'm like, why am I deficient in something? Like, what is going on? Because I know I'm getting enough iron between, you know, the meat I eat and the cereals so there should be that. That and the supplements. Right. I mean I take my vitamins so one would assume that they do, you know, get absorbed. I mean, I hope they get absorbed. Very expensive. So like I should be fine. So that leaves some kind of illness. And I thought, oh, maybe that's, you know, connected to the excruciating pain that I've been in the last couple of days. And I've been in quite a lot of back pain. More than usual. More. More. Which is a little bit, again, concerning. And I thought maybe they're connected. And then I was telling a co worker about my weekend and I was saying, oh, I was in the pool with the kids and then the swimming lesson started so they cordoned off part of the pool and so it's quite deep. So my daughter was on my back and like I was giving her piggybacks in the water and she was like, hey, hey, maybe you were giving piggybacks in the water, maybe that's what hurt your back. And I'm like, oh, yeah, perhaps that could be what that is. Perhaps that could be the issue. Yeah. Doesn't explain the fainting but you know, that is, that is something. But I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Katie, quit your jibber jabber and fact me, in fact you. I will. But first we've got to get our source on. Our sources are 10 days in a madhouse by Nellie Bly 80 days Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History Making Race around the World by Matthew Goodman Nellie Bly by Arthur Fritz Sensational the Hidden History of America's Girl Stunt Reporters by Kim Todd Nellie Bly, girl reporter, Daredevil Journalist by Jane Garrison and of course we have our old favourites, biography.com and history.com. i also didn't comfortably. Good. Then let's begin. Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane on 5 May 1864 in the Borough Township which is a suburb of Pittsburgh that is in Pennsylvania, United States of America for those of you who do not know. So this area which is now like Burrow Township, it used to be known as Cochrane Mills. Now if you may notice that her original born name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, that is not a coincidence because Cochrane Mills is named after her father, Michael Cochrane, who started off as a millworker who worked his way up and eventually ended up buying a local mill and the surrounding lands. So the lands around the mill and and his family farmhouse. Now he is very important. Some might even go as far as to call him a high value Male. So anyway, Michael Cochran, he is. He's. He's kind of a big deal, you know what I mean? And he also, you know, clearly was a very virile fellow, right? Because the man clearly was. Was getting some because he had buckets and buckets of kids, okay? So Michael was married twice with his first wife, Catherine Murphy. He had 10 children. 10, right? Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. I think any more than three is quite a lot of children to deal with. So Catherine Murphy gives birth 10 whole times. Now, eventually, after she has 10 children, she dies. Now, Michael is a man with 10 children. This very important man is quite Busy and has 10 children. So he is the local postmaster as well. Like, he's kind of got his fingers in many pies and more than one woman, apparently, because the postmaster needs a wife. And so he marries Mary Jane Kennedy, with whom he had five more children. Now, this is clearly. I'm gonna say it, an Irish town, because the name Corcoran, first of all. Then we have Murphy. Now we've got Kennedy. Oh, come on. This is an Irish settler town. So Nellie here, young Elizabeth, as she was then known, is from the second marriage, and she is his 13th daughter. He has 15 children. Michael here seemed to be producing a lot of girls, right? So he's got 13 daughters and two boys. Now, here's. Here's where the issue is, because Michael, what happens is he dies when Elizabeth is only six years old, which is obviously sad, okay? But also, in addition, furthermore, it is a bit of a problem because when he kicks the bucket, he does so without leaving a well. Now, I don't know who needs to hear this, so sidebar, but if you don't have a will, and you have the means in which to have a will, get a will drawn up, right? Because you need legal documents, because otherwise it can lead to just hassle after you die. Now you're dead, then it won't matter to you. So you can just do whatever you want with your will and have it sealed until your death, and then you can do whatever you want. People just have to deal with the consequences of that as long as you're of, like, sound mind and stuff, which means you need to do it, like, sooner rather than later. So, yeah, you need to sort out your will, lads, because I know people who don't have wills because they think it's tempting fate, which is stupid. Two reasons I'm gonna go into it. I wasn't, but I am. You cannot tempt fate, okay? Because even if Fate were real, right? Then you believe that everything is preordained and destined and is going to happen no matter what. Things will happen for a reason. They are going to happen. Which means fate is locked in. You cannot tempt it. Okay, just get a well done arseholes, right? Because people fight over money. People kill over money and land and. And honestly, ugh, it's such a hassle. So get your well drawn up. So Mary Jane Kennedy, she is the second wife, right? So she. And unlike, you know, his sons, she has no legal claim to his estate. And so Nelly starts life in a very privileged place. But after the death of her father, it's not exactly the easiest of situations. Like they can't even afford to keep their home or maintain the lands, right? So they move away. Now, Mary Jane. Mary Jane Kennedy Cochrane remarries, but the guy she marries is a dick. And before you say to me, Katie, you think every man is a dick. First of all, no, I do not. Some of my best friends are men. Second of all, you know, he was a dick. He was abusive to the point that she divorces him. Do you know how difficult it was to obtain a divorce in the 1800s? Like, it's not an easy task to do. And they really needs to be like a pure, solid, like 100% justification that this guy is an absolute dick in a legal sense that you have to be separated from him. And so they split. When Nellie is like 14, 15, she enrolls in the Indiana Normal School, which is now the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. So if you don't know, the Indiana Normal School was an institution created to train teachers, right? So it was to train teachers to work in the Commonwealth schools. Okay? So Nellie's plan here was to become a teacher. Like that was her goal. Now she only lasts one term because the family simply cannot afford it, right? They just can't afford for her to go to like this higher level of education now. Nelly. So as she's growing up, right, she has this nickname like Pinky. The reason she's called Pinky. Wait for it. Wait for it. She wears a lot of pink, right? So like her lord and savior, Miss Piggy, she likes pink. And so she gets called this growing up, and she doesn't want this childish nickname anymore. And so when she actually attends the Indiana Teachers College, right, she stops being called Pinky and adds an E onto the end of Cochrane to sound more sophisticated by adding an E. Sidebar. I know I'm doing it again. So the thing about nicknames is, is I've Been called Katie most of my life. It's not my legal name. It's just what everybody called me. Now, here's a fun thing is at one point, I think I was in college and I had an auntie who was like, I'm gonna call you Kate from now on because I think Katie is such a, you know, childish name. And I was like, no, I like it. It's like everyone's called me it. I like it as a name. Now I've. I will basically answer to most variations of it. Like, you'd be surprised what I would respond to, by the way. But, yeah, they were like, it's really childish. I want to change it. And I'm just like, no, thank you. So the year after Nelly dropped out, the family upsticks and moves to Allegheny City, which is now part of Pittsburgh. So Mary Jane and Nelly, they run a boarding house because it is one of the few career options available for women in this era. Which leads me to a newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, which has a column called what Girls Are Good For? It basically reads like a tradwife mission statement. Women girls are only good for keeping house and birthing them babies. Nelly, as one can imagine, is less than impressed by this column. And so she writes a response under a pseudonym, of course. The pseudonym Lonely Orphan Girl. Nelly, you spooky little bitch. What are you doing? Lonely Orphan Girl. I would like to remind everyone that the initials to that are log. That was a choice. That was a choice that was made. So Nelly, as Lonely Orphan Girl absolutely destroys the column. And the editor, George Madden, is so impressed by this that he wants the author to come forward. Like, he publishes an ad in his paper offering the writer a job. You know what? No, I'm turning two pages at once with that one. Basically, he puts out this ad, and he's like, who are you? Who is she? Who's writing this? Identify yourself. And so she does. And when she does introduce herself to him, he's just like, would you like to write a piece from my newspaper? Of course, under your pseudonym, Lonely Orphan Girl. Nellie takes him up on his offer because clearly she's got the smarts, but also because this is a paid opportunity and you have bills to pay. You know, they're running a boarding house. They don't have a lot of other opportunities because it's the 1870s or 1880s at this point. Like, she needs. She needs the money. You know what I mean? And so for the Dispatch, she writes under the pseudonym Log, Lonely Orphan Girl, and writes the girl puzzle. And in this, she argues that not all women should marry or would marry, and that women. Women don't need marriage opportunities necessarily. What they do need are better jobs. There needs to be more employment opportunities for women because there basically aren't any. After this. Like, she changes her pseudonym from, like, Lonely Orphan Girl to Nellie Bly. And the reason she chooses Nellie Bly is probably because Nellie is one of those names that's short for Elizabeth, like Ellie and Nelly and Betty and Lisbet and Lilibet and Beth and probably more that I didn't have there. So she changed it to that. Not only because that. But there is a song, right? There's a song by Stephen Foster and the. Well, the main character in that song is called Nellie Bly. And so she's like, let's use this. It's, you know, it's common, it's contemporary. It's like, pretty good. Okay, now, Nelly and Nellie Bly, the song is spelled with a Y, but Nelly, her name is spelled with an ie because the editor made a mistake and they're like, that's fine, it'll do. And I think it's also, by giving her, like, a full name, pseudonym, it's sort of moving up, because Lonely Orphan Girl, apart from the fact that it's very vague, it's also could be misconstrued as sort of young and childish, whereas having a name name kind of gives a wee bit more authority behind it. So her second article was about how divorce affects women, right? It was called Mad Marriages. She argued about how women were disadvantaged upon divorce because men could just turn a woman out, keep her dowry if they had one, and they had custody for the kids or, like, all the kids. And so she's, like, fighting for divorce reform here. Like, that's not something you did. And Nelly, she is. She's writing for the Dispatch, and she is earning $5 a week, which in today's money is $164.84. So she's writing for them full time by the time she's 21. And a lot of her work focused on working class women. And this is when she starts investigating.
