This month we are featuring feminists. The two I have selected are unique. Born into wealth and privilege in England, Hugh Franklin decided to embrace the Women’s Suffrage Movement. He was among a small minority of men who lent their support to this cause.

Franklin was one of only a few men ever to be arrested at a Women’s Suffrage rally. His methods were brazen and unorthodox. Elizabeth Cochrane (aka Elizabeth Cochran) was better known by her pen name Nellie Bly. She was an American journalist and pioneer in her field, suffragist, inventor, and activist. Bly’s investigative journalism helped change the way women were regarded and treated in the United States.

Hugh Franklin (1889-1962) was a British suffragist and politician. He was born into a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family in London in 1889. He was educated at Clifton College and moved to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to study engineering. After his first year, Franklin angered his father by renouncing his religion and attending a speech made by Emmeline Pankhurst about women’s suffrage. He also transferred his major from engineering to economics and sociology.

Franklin became an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union(WSPU), the Young Purple White and Green Club, and the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement. Franklin was so passionate about his new calling that he temporarily left Cambridge to promote the WSPU in London. When he returned to his studies, Franklin had lost interest. In 1910, he left Cambridge without a degree.

Franklin’s father disowned him over his religious views, but other members of the family did not abandon him. With his uncle’s help, Franklin was able to secure a position as a private secretary to the Secretary of the general Post Office, but his support of women’s suffrage and his participation in The Black Friday Rally put an end to that position.

At the rally on Parliament on November 18, 1910, The Conciliation Bill which would have granted limited suffrage to female property owners didn’t pass. Three-hundred angry and frustrated suffragists descended on the Palace of Westminster. The police reacted swiftly and violently to quell the disturbance. Many suffragists were injured.

Franklin took personal umbrage of the way Winston Churchill, then the Home Secretary, mobilized the police during the incident. He began following Churchill and heckling him at public meetings. He even went so far as to attack Churchill with a dog whip on a train. Franklin served six weeks in prison for the assault. In 1911, he was sentenced to another month for throwing rocks at Churchill’s house.

During his incarceration, Franklin participated in hunger strikes started by suffragists to bring attention to the plight of women under current British law. He and others were repeatedly “force fed.” These forced feedings turned Franklin’s attention to the need for prison reform.

In 1912, Franklin set fire to a railway carriage. He fled the scene and spent months in hiding before being captured. For this offense, Franklin was sentenced to six months in prison. He was “force fed 114 times during his captivity. He grew so weak that he was released early under the new Prisoners (Temporary Release for Ill Health) Act of 1913. Franklin was the first prisoner released under the new act. Franklin fled the country as the end date for his release drew near.

In 1915, Franklin married Elsie Duval, a fellow suffragist. They were married until her death in 1919 during the Spanish Flu epidemic. In 1921, he married Elsie Tuck. When Tuck would not convert to Judaism, Franklin’s father legally disinherited him.

When World War One broke out, Franklin’s eyesight was too poor for military service, but he returned to England to work in a munitions plant to support the war effort. He stopped all militant activities and charted a new course for his life involving politics.

In 1931, Franklin joined the Labour Party and unsuccessfully attempted to become an MP. He did succeed in local politics winning a seat on Middlesex County Council, and later joined the Labour Party National executive Committee. He died in 1962.

Because of Franklin’s gender and social standing, he faced milder consequences for his actions. If a woman had stalked and assaulted Winston Churchill, she would have probably ended up committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.

Elizabeth Cochran (1864-1922) was born in Pennsylvania. Her father started out as a laborer and mill worker before buying a mill and most of the land surrounding his family’s farmhouse. He later became a merchant, postmaster, and associate justice.

Michael Cochran had ten children with his first wife and five more children with his second wife, Mary. Elizabeth was his thirteenth daughter. He died when Elizabeth was six years old.

When she was a teenager, Elizabeth changed the spelling of her surname to include an “e” at the end.

In 1879, she enrolled at Indiana Normal school (now Indiana University of Pennsylvania), but had to drop out after her first term for monetary reasons.

In 1885, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published a column titled, “What Girls are Good For.’ According to the column a girl’s only value was tied to her ability to bear children and keep a tidy home. The author referred to women as girls and men as men. Elizabeth responded using the pseudonym “Lonely Orphan Girl.” The editor of the paper was so impressed with her response he ran an ad asking her to come forward. When she did, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the paper using her pseudonym. “That Girl Puzzle’” argued that not all women would marry and stressed the need for society to create more employment opportunities and better jobs for women. Female journalists of the period typically used pen names to disguise their identity.

Her second article, “Mad Marriages,” was about the negative impact of divorce on women and the need to reform divorce laws. The editor chose to change Elizabeth’s pen name to “Nellie Bly” after an African American character in a Stephen Foster song. “Mad Marriages,” was published under her new pen name. Technically her pen name should have been “Nelly Bly,” but the editor misspelled the first name and the new spelling stuck.

Nellie focused her work on the lives of working women. She wrote a series of investigative articles on women factory workers. After the newspaper received complaints from factory owners, Nellie was reassigned to the women’s pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening.

At twenty-one years old, she traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent reporting on the lives and customs of the Mexican people. Her articles were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. Bly was forced to flee the country after she protested the arrest and imprisonment of a Mexican journalist who criticized the Mexican government.

On her return, Nellie was once again assigned to the Women’s Pages, so she left the newspaper and moved to New York City. After four months of editors refusing to hire a woman as an investigative journalist, Nellie took an undercover assignment with Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World. She agreed to feign insanity and go undercover to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum.

In order to get herself committed, she took a room at a local boarding house and stayed up late to give herself the wide-eyed look of a deranged women. She began making ridiculous allegations against the other boarders and roamed the halls at all hours disturbing the peace. She was arrested and taken to Bellview for observation before being transferred to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s island.

Nellie remained at the asylum for ten days experiencing firsthand the deplorable conditions and inhumane treatment of the women there. After that time, The New York World secured her release.

Her report published on October 9, 1887, and later published in book form titled Ten Days in a Mad-House caused public outrage and forced the asylum to implement changes to protect the safety and dignity of their patients. Nellie Bly became famous.

Nellie used her celebrity to call out the unfair treatment of women in our society. She also began to perform “stunts” designed to highlight women’s capabilities and debunk the notion that women were so physically and mentality inferior to men they needed a man to take care of them.

In 1888, she convinced her editor to let her attempt to actually complete Jules Verne’s fictional trip  around the world in eighty days from his book by the same name. One year later, she began the 24,898-mile journey. The newspaper held a contest. Whoever guessed the exact time and date of Nellie Bly’s completion of the trip would receive an all-expense paid trip through Europe.

She completed the rip in just over seventy-two days setting a new world’s record which would be broken a few months later by George Francis Train who completed the trip in sixty-seven days.

Nellie stopped working as a journalist and took a job writing serial novels for publisher Norman Munro’s weekly New York Family Story Paper. Between 1889 and 1895, she wrote eleven novels. In 1893 she returned to journalism and  began reporting for the world.

At thirty-one years old, Nellie married the seventy-three-year-old millionaire manufacturing tycoon, Robert Seaman. After his health declined, Nellie left journalism to run his empire. Nellie received patents in the United States for a novel milk can and a stacking garbage can. She became so involved in creating new products that she neglected the day-to-day business of running the business. After unscrupulous employees bilked the company for millions of dollars, it went under.

Nellie returned to reporting and began covering the Women’s Suffrage Movement. She accurately predicted it would take until 1920 for women to secure universal suffrage. During World War One, she traveled to Europe to report on Europe’s Eastern Front. She was the first women and one of the first foreign journalists to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria.

Elizabeth died at the age of fifty-seven of pneumonia.

Non-Fiction Works by Nellie Bly:

Ten Days in a Mad-House

Six Months in Mexico

The Mystery of Central Park, New York

Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days

Works of Fiction by Nellie Bly:

Eva the Adventuress

New York by Night

Alta Lynn, M.D.

Wayne’s Faithful Sweetheart

Little Luckie, or Playing for Hearts

Dollie the Coquette

In Love with A Stranger, or Through Fire and Water to Win Him

The Love of Three Girls

Little Penny, Child of the Streets

Pretty Merribelle

Twins & Rivals