In one of her escapades as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York
World, the renowned Nellie Bly feigned insanity in 1889 and slipped,
undercover, behind the grim walls of Blackwell's Island mental asylum.
She emerged ten days later with a vivid tale about life in a madhouse.
Her asylum articles merged sympathy and sensationalism, highlighting a
developing professional identity - that of the American newspaperwoman.
The Blackwell's Island story is just one example of how newspaperwomen
used sympathetic rhetoric to depict madness and crime while striving to
establish their credentials as professional writers. Working against
critics who would deny them access to the newsroom, Margaret Fuller,
Fanny Fern, Nellie Bly, and Elizabeth Jordan subverted the charge that
women were not emotionally equipped to work for mass-market newspapers.
They transformed their supposed liabilities into professional assets,
and Sympathy, Madness, and Crime explores how, in writing about insane
asylums, the mentally ill, prisons, and criminals, each deployed a
highly gendered sympathetic language to excavate a professional space
within a male-dominated workplace.
As the periodical market burgeoned, these pioneering, courageous women
exemplified how narrative sympathy opened female space within the "hard
news" city room of America's largest news- papers. Sympathy, Madness,
and Crime offers a new chapter in the unfolding histories of
nineteenth-century periodical culture, women's professional authorship,
and the narrative construction of American penal and psychiatric
institutions.
