Leymah Gbowee (February 1, 1972- Present)

"The one thing I have never been afraid of is standing before important people and speaking my mind. I represent women who may never have the opportunity to go to the UN or meet with a president. I'm never afraid to speak truth to power."

Liberian peace and women's rights activist Leymah Gbowee is the Newsweek Daily Beast's Africa columnist. As war ravaged Liberia, Leymah Gbowee realized it is women who bear the greatest burden in prolonged conflicts. She began organizing Christian and Muslim women to demonstrate together, founding Liberian Mass Action for Peace and launching protests and a sex strike. Gbowee's part in helping to oust Charles Taylor was featured in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Gbowee is a single mother of six, including one adopted daughter, and is based in Accra, Ghana, where she is the executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network (WIPSEN-Africa).

Leymah Gbowee has spoken publically numerous times on the issue of women in conflict situations. She was a panelist at several regional and international conferences, including UNIFEM's "Women and the Disarmament, Demobilization, Reintegration and Repatriation (DDRR) Process," and the United Nations Security Council's Arria Formula Meeting on women, peace, and security. In October 2007, the Women's Leadership Board at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government honored Ms. Gbowee with the Blue Ribbon Peace Award. This annual award is given to individuals and organizations that have made a significant contribution to peace-building through innovative strategies that promote women's leadership in peace processes on the local, national, or international level. Other honors include:

Recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize
Recipient of the 2010 John Jay Medal for Justice from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Recipient of the 2009 Gruber Prize for Women's Rights
Recipient of the 2009 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award
Recipient of the Women's eNews 2008 Leaders for the 21st Century Award

Eunice Kennedy Shriver (July 10, 1921 -August 11, 2009)

Eunice Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1921, the fifth of Rose and Joseph Kennedy’s nine children and their third daughter. She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart School in Noroton, Connecticut, and Manhattanville College, and received a B.S. degree in sociology from Stanford University in 1943.

Following graduation, she served in the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State, and then headed a juvenile delinquency project in the Department of Justice. In 1950, she became a social worker at the Penitentiary for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, and the following year she moved to Chicago, Illinois to work with the House of the Good Shepherd and the Chicago Juvenile Court.

In 1953, she married Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School and former Navy officer who had joined her father's firm in Chicago, the Merchandise Mart, in 1948. The Shrivers have five children: Robert III, Maria, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony.

In 1957, Mrs. Shriver took over the direction of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation, established in 1946 as a memorial to her oldest brother, who had been killed in World War II. The Foundation’s goals were to help prevent mental retardation by identifying its causes, and to improve the means by which society deals with citizens who have mental retardation. Under Mrs. Shriver's leadership, the Foundation has helped achieve many significant advances.

In June 1962, Mrs. Shriver began a summer day camp for children and adults with intellectual disabilities at her home in Maryland to explore their capabilities in a variety of sports and physical activities. From that camp came the concept of Special Olympics, an organization dedicated to empowering people with intellectual disabilities to realize their full potential and develop their skills through year-round training in sports and competition.

In 1968, working with the Chicago Park District, the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation planned and underwrote the First International Special Olympics Summer Games, held in Chicago's Soldier Field, where 1,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 26 states and Canada competed in athletics. In December 1968, Special Olympics, Inc. was established as a non-profit charitable organization under the laws of the District of Columbia. The National Association for Retarded Citizens, the Council for Exceptional Children and the American Association on Mental Deficiency pledged their support for this first systematic effort to provide training and competition in sports for individuals with intellectual disabilities based on the Olympic tradition and spirit. Today, more than 1.3 million children and adults with intellectual disabilities participate in Special Olympics, which is active in more than 150 countries around the world.

Up until the time of her passing, Mrs. Shriver continued to be a member of the Special Olympics Board of Directors and continued to work to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, but was no longer involved in the day-to-day management of Special Olympics.

Mrs. Shriver was recognized throughout the world for her leadership on behalf of persons with intellectual disabilities, and received numerous honors and awards, including: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Legion of Honor, the Prix de la Couronne Francaise, the Mary Lasker Award, the Philip Murray-William Green Award (presented to Eunice and Sargent Shriver by the AFL-CIO), the Association of Art Museum Directors Humanitarian Award, the National Recreation and Park Association National Volunteer Service Award, the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame and the Order of the Smile of Polish Children.

Mrs. Shriver received the 2002 Theodore Roosevelt Award of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the highest honor bestowed on individuals by the Association.

Mrs. Shriver received honorary degrees from Yale University, the College of the Holy Cross, Princeton University, Regis College, Manhattanville College, Newton College, Brescia College in Ontario, Central Michigan University, the University of Vermont, Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut, and Cardinal Stritch University in Wisconsin.

In 1984, when President Ronald Reagan awarded Mrs. Shriver the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for her work on behalf of persons with intellectual disabilities, he said:

With enormous conviction and unrelenting effort, Eunice Kennedy Shriver has labored on behalf of America's least powerful people, those with mental retardation. Over the last two decades, she has been at the forefront of numerous initiatives on behalf of the mentally retarded, from creating day camps, to establishing research centers, to the founding of the Special Olympics program. Her decency and goodness have touched the lives of many, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver deserves America's praise, gratitude and love.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver died on August 11, 2009 at the age of 88.

Kishida Toshiko (January 14, 1863 – May 25, 1901)

Kishida Toshiko was a writer, activist, and one of the first women in Japan to speak publicly about women’s rights.

Kishida grew up during the Meiji-Taishō period, which lasted from 1868 through 1926. During this period reformers called for “new rights and freedoms”. The women of this reformist movement were known as “Japan’s first wave feminists”. Kishida was one of these feminists and the focus of her movement was to aid young Japanese girls, particularly those of the middle and upper classes. Kishida and Japan’s other first wave feminists mainly focused on improving the status of women. It was their belief that this improvement “was essential if other technologically advanced nationals were to accept them”. In order for Japan to compete with the world’s superpowers, reformists stressed that equality had to be given to all Japanese women. With the reforms that took place in Japan, Japanese women were given greater opportunities to gain new rights and freedoms. The women coined the term “good wife, wise mother” which meant that “in order to be a good citizen, women had to become educated and take part in public affairs”.

Under first wave feminism, Kishida Toshiko spoke out against the inequality of Japanese women. Kishida worked at the imperial court as a tutor serving the Empress; however, she felt that the imperial court was “far from the real world” and was a “symbol of the concubine system which was an outrage to women”. After her career changing decision, Kishida took on the reform movement full time and began speaking all across Japan on the issues she most believed in. One of Kishida’s most controversial speeches was her 1883 speech, “Daughters in Boxes”. After she delivered the speech, she was “arrested, tried, and fined for having made a political speech without a permit” which was necessary under Japanese law at the time.

The "Daughters in Boxes" speech discussed and criticized the family system in Japan and the problems it raised for young Japanese girls. Although the speech criticized the family system that was in place in Japan, it also acknowledged that the system was a cultural fixture and many parents did not understand the harm that they could have potentially been causing their daughters by restricting them. Kishida recognized that upper and middle class Japanese parents did not mean to restrict their daughters' freedom. This ignorance existed because the parents were blinded by their overwhelming need to teach certain values in order to fit into Japanese culture and society.

In her speech, Kishida introduced the three “boxes” present in Japanese families. These boxes are not actual boxes but mental and emotional limitations. The boxes represented how Japanese daughters were locked into certain requirements. The first box is one in which parents hid their daughters, who not allowed to leave their room and any elements belonging to the outside world were blocked out. The second box demanded the obedience of the Japanese daughters. In this box, “parents refuse to recognize their responsibility to their daughters and teach her naught”. These daughters receive no love or affection and are expected to “obey their [parent’s] every word without complaint”. The final box presented by Kishida was one in which daughters were taught ancient knowledge. In this box, parents passed down an appreciation for knowledge to their daughters. Out of the three boxes, this final box was the one that Kishida valued the most. Because this box valued “the teaching of the wise and holy men of the past”, Kishida felt that its inclusion and focus on education empowered women.

Kishida also discussed her own version of a box. Her box would have no walls and be completely open and inspired by freedom. Kishida’s box “[allowed] its occupants to tread wherever their feet might lead and stretch their arms as wide as they wished". Unlike the other boxes Kishida described, her wall-less box, like the reformist movement hoped, would allow Japanese daughters to be educated and become active members of society. The speech also suggested that the boxes created for Japanese daughters should not be created in haste. She explained that if a box that was hastily constructed, the daughters would resent being placed in that box. Kishida not only warned about the construction of the boxes but recognized that the daughters trapped inside the boxes would run away because of their restrictive foundation. "Daughters in Boxes" analyzed and critiqued Japanese society and its treatment of Japanese girls. The absence of women’s rights in Japan sparked the feminist and reformist movement which Kishida Toshiko was a major part of. Kishida’s speech challenged the cultural norms of Japanese society in general. The speech also cemented the place of women and women’s movement in Japan’s history.

Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906)

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American social reformer and feminist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Abolitionist

After they moved to Rochester in 1845, members of the Anthony family were active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at their farm almost every Sunday, where they were sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Anthony's brothers Daniel and Merritt were anti-slavery activists in Kansas.

In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, arranging meetings, making speeches, putting up posters, and distributing leaflets. She encountered hostile mobs, armed threats, and things thrown at her. She was hung in effigy, and in Syracuse her image was dragged through the streets.

In 1863 Anthony and Stanton organized a Women's National Loyal League to support and petition for the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. They went on to campaign for full citizenship for women and people of any race, including the right to vote, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were bitterly disappointed and disillusioned when women were excluded. Anthony continued to campaign for equal rights for all American citizens, including people who had been enslaved, in her newspaper The Revolution, which she began publishing in Rochester in 1868. Anthony attacked lynchings and racial prejudice in the Rochester newspapers in the 1890s.

Educational Reformer

In 1846, at age 26, Susan B. Anthony took the position of head of the girls' department at Canajoharie Academy, her first paid position. She taught there for two years, earning $110 a year.

In 1853 at the state teachers' convention Anthony called for women to be admitted to the professions and for better pay for women teachers. She also asked for women to have a voice at the convention and to assume committee positions.

In 1859 Anthony spoke before the state teachers' convention at Troy, N.Y. and at the Massachusetts teachers' convention, arguing for coeducation (boys and girls together) and claiming there were no differences between the minds of men and women.

Anthony called for equal educational opportunities for all regardless of race, and for all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women and people who had been enslaved. She also campaigned for the right of children of people who had been enslaved to be able to attend public schools.

In the 1890s Anthony served on the board of trustees of Rochester's State Industrial School, campaigning for coeducation and equal treatment and opportunity for boys and girls.

In the 1890s Anthony raised $50,000 in pledges to ensure the admittance of women to the University of Rochester. In a last-minute effort to meet the deadline she put up the cash value of her life insurance policy. The University was forced to make good its promise and women were admitted for the first time in 1900.

Labor Activist

Susan B. Anthony's paper The Revolution, first published in 1868, advocated an eight-hour work day and equal pay for equal work. It promoted a policy of purchasing American-made goods and encouraging immigration to rebuild the South and settle the entire country. Publishing The Revolution in New York brought her in contact with women in the printing trades.

In 1868 Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Workingwomen's Associations. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress in 1868 Anthony persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work, although the men at the conference deleted the reference to the vote.

In 1870 Anthony formed and was elected president of the Workingwomen's Central Association. The Association drew up reports on working conditions and provided educational opportunities for working women. Anthony encouraged a cooperative workshop founded by the Sewing Machine Operators Union and boosted the newly-formed women typesetters' union in The Revolution. Anthony tried to establish trade schools for women printers. When printers in New York went on strike, she urged employers to hire women instead, believing this would show that they could do the job as well as men, and therefore prove that they deserved equal pay. At the 1869 National Labor Union Congress, the men's Typographical Union accused her of strike- breaking and running a non-union shop at The Revolution, and called her an enemy of labor.

In the 1890s, while president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Anthony emphasized the importance of gaining the support of organized labor. She encouraged Florence Kelley and Jane Addams in their work in Chicago, and Gail Laughlin in her goal to seek protection for working women through trade unions.

Temperance Worker

Susan B. Anthony was brought up a Quaker. Her family believed drinking liquor was sinful. While Anthony was working as head of the girls' department of Canajoharie Academy she joined the Daughters of Temperance, a group of women who drew attention to the effects of drunkenness on families and campaigned for stronger liquor laws. She made her first public speech in 1848 at a Daughters of Temperance supper.

When Anthony returned to Rochester in 1849 she was elected president of the Rochester branch of the Daughters of Temperance and raised money for the cause. In 1853 Anthony was refused the right to speak at the state convention of the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She left the meeting and called her own. In 1853 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Society with the goal of petitioning the State legislature to pass a law limiting the sale of liquor. The State Legislature rejected the petition because most of the 28,000 signatures were from women and children. Anthony decided that women needed the vote so that politicians would listen to them. She and Stanton were criticized for talking too much about women's rights and resigned from the Women's State Temperance Society.

In the 1860s Anthony and Stanton drew attention to the case of Abby McFarland whose drunken and abusive husband, Daniel, shot and killed the man she had divorced him to marry. They protested when Daniel was acquitted of murder on a plea of temporary insanity and given custody of their son.

In the 1870s Anthony supported the Rochester women organizers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, although she told them that women would need to get the vote to reach their goal. She refused to support Prohibition because she believed it detracted attention from the cause of woman suffrage.

Suffragist

Susan B. Anthony was convinced by her work for temperance that women needed the vote if they were to influence public affairs. She was introduced by Amelia Bloomer to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the women's rights movement, in 1851, and attended her first women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852.

Anthony and Stanton believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. They were bitterly disappointed when this did not happen.

In 1866 Anthony and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association and in 1868 they started publishing the newspaper The Revolution in Rochester, with the masthead "Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less," and the aim of establishing "justice for all."

In 1869 the suffrage movement split, with Anthony and Stanton's National Association continuing to campaign for a constitutional amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association adopting a strategy of getting the vote for women on a state-by-state basis. Wyoming became the first territory to give women the vote in 1869.

In the 1870s Anthony campaigned vigorously for women's suffrage on speaking tours in the West. Anthony, three of her sisters, and other women were arrested in Rochester in 1872 for voting. Anthony refused to pay her streetcar fare to the police station because she was "traveling under protest at the government's expense." She was arraigned with other women and the election inspectors who had allowed her to vote in Rochester Common Council chambers. She refused to pay bail and applied for habeas corpus, but her lawyer paid the bail, keeping the case from the Supreme Court. She was indicted in Albany, and the Rochester District Attorney asked for a change of venue because a jury might be prejudiced in her favor. At her trial in Canandaigua in 1873, the judge instructed the jury to find her guilty without discussion. (The jury didn't get to discuss the verdict!) He fined her $100 and made her pay courtroom fees, but did not imprison her when she refused to pay, therefore denying her the chance to appeal.

In 1877, she gathered petitions from 26 states with 10,000 signatures, but Congress laughed at them. She appeared before every congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for passage of a suffrage amendment. Between 1881 and 1885 Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslin Gage collaborated on and published the History of Woman Suffrage. The last volume, edited by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, was published in 1902.

In 1887 the two women's suffrage organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton as president and Anthony as vice-president. Anthony became president in 1892 when Stanton retired. Anthony campaigned in the West in the 1890s to make sure that territories where women had the vote were not blocked from admission to the Union. She attended the International Council of Women at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

In 1900, aged 80, Anthony retired as President of NAWSA. In 1904 Anthony presided over the International Council of Women in Berlin and became honorary president of Carrie Chapman Catt's International Woman Suffrage Alliance.

Susan B. Anthony died in 1906 at her home on Madison Street in Rochester. All American adult women finally got the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, in 1920.

Women's Rights Campaigner

Susan B. Anthony advocated dress reform for women. She cut her hair and wore the bloomer costume for a year before ridicule convinced her that this radical dress detracted from the other causes she supported.

In 1853 Anthony began to campaign for women's property rights in New York state, speaking at meetings, collecting signatures for petitions, and lobbying the state legislature. In 1860, largely as the result of her efforts, the New York State Married Women's Property Bill became law, allowing married women to own property, keep their own wages, and have custody of their children. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for more liberal divorce laws in New York.

In 1869 Anthony persuaded the Workingwomen's Association in New York to investigate the case of Hester Vaughn, a poor working woman accused of murdering her illegitimate child. Vaughn was pardoned, and Anthony used the case to point out the different moral standards expected of men and women and the need for women jurors to ensure a fair trial.

In 1875 she attacked the "social evil" of prostitution in a speech in Chicago, calling for equality in marriage, in the workplace, and at the ballot box to eliminate the need for women to go on the streets.

Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922)

Nellie Bly was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

She was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in "Cochran Mills", today part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, was a modest laborer and mill worker who married Mary Jane. Cochran taught his young children a cogent lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a young girl Elizabeth was often called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane. She attended boarding school for one term, but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.

In 1880, Cochrane and her family moved to Pittsburgh. An aggressively misogynistic column titled "What Girls Are Good For" in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor George Madden was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". After her first article for the Dispatch, titled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. Female newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochrane the editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. She originally intended for her pseudonym to be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck.

As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the so-called "women's pages" to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches were later published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Asylum exposé

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a working-class boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged.

She was then examined by several doctors, who all declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one, "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her." The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her "undoubtedly insane". The case of the "pretty crazy girl" attracted media attention: "Who Is This Insane Girl?" asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes", and her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions firsthand. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was. On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:

"What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.

…My teeth chattered and my limbs were …numb with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of ice-cold water…one in my eyes, nose and mouth."

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill actually went to the asylum.

Around the world

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice,[13] she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey.

She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency)[15] in a bag tied around her neck.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of (only) a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip

On her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks.

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and she bought a monkey in Singapore.

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, and she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m.

"Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure" Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe almost unchaperoned. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than 36 days.

Later years

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904, her husband died. In the same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Although there have been claims that Nellie Bly invented the barrel, the inventor is believed to have been Henry Wehrhahn, who likely assigned his invention to her. (US Patents 808,327 and 808,413). Nellie Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right, receiving US patent 697,553 for a novel milk can and US patent 703,711 for a stacking garbage can, both under her married name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. For a time she was one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees led her into bankruptcy. Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I and notably covered the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Her headline for the Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors” but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.

In 1916 Nellie was given a baby boy whose mother requested Bly to look after him and see that he become adopted. The child was illegitimate and difficult to place since he was half-Japanese. He spent the next six years in an orphanage run by the Church For All Nations in Manhattan.

As Bly became ill towards the end of her life she requested that her niece, Beatrice Brown, look after the boy and several other babies in whom she had become interested. Her interest in orphanages may have been part of her ongoing efforts to improve the social organizations of the day.

She died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922, at age 57. She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.