A Spoonful of Research

Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. The town was founded by her father, Judge Michael Cochran. Elizabeth had fourteen siblings. Her father had ten children from his first marriage and five children from his second marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Jane Kennedy.

Michael Cochran’s rise from mill worker to mill owner to judge meant his family lived very comfortably. Unfortunately, he died when Elizabeth was only six years old and his fortune was divided among his many children, leaving Elizabeth’s mother and her children with a small fraction of the wealth they once enjoyed. Elizabeth’s mother soon remarried, but quickly divorced her second husband because of abuse, and relocated the family to Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth knew that she would need to support herself financially. At the age of 15, she enrolled in the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and an added an “e” to her last name to sound more distinguished. Her plan was to graduate and find a position as a teacher. However, after only a year and a half, Elizabeth ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition. She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boarding house.

In 1885, Elizabeth read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that argued a woman’s place was in the home, “to be a helpmate to a man.” She strongly disagreed with this opinion and sent an angry letter to the editor anonymously signed “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

The newspaper’s editor, George A. Madden, was so impressed with the letter that he published a note asking the “Lonely Orphan Girl” to reveal her name. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Shortly after her first article was published, Elizabeth changed her pseudonym from “Lonely Orphan Girl” to “Nellie Bly,” after a popular song.

Elizabeth positioned herself as an investigative reporter. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours. Her honest reporting about the horrors of workers’ lives attracted negative attention from local factory owners. Elizabeth’s boss did not want to anger Pittsburgh’s elite and quickly reassigned her as a society columnist.

To escape writing about women’s issues on the society page, Elizabeth volunteered to travel to Mexico. She lived there as an international correspondent for the Dispatch for six months. When she returned, she was again assigned to the society page and promptly quit in protest.

Elizabeth hoped the massive newspaper industry of New York City would be more open-minded to a female journalist and left Pittsburgh. Although several newspapers turned down her application because she was a woman, she was eventually given the opportunity to write for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

In her first act of “stunt” journalism for the World, Elizabeth pretended to be mentally ill and arranged to be a patient at New York’s insane asylum for the poor, Blackwell’s Island. For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients.

Elizabeth’s report about Blackwell’s Island earned her a permanent position as an investigative journalist for the World. She published her articles in a book titled 10 Days in A Mad House. In it, she explained that New York City invested more money into care for the mentally ill after her articles were published. She was satisfied to know that her work led to change.

Activist journalists like Elizabeth—commonly known as muckrakers—were an important part of reform movements. Elizabeth’s investigations brought attention to inequalities and often motivated others to take action. She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. She also interviewed influential and controversial figures, including Emma Goldman in 1893.

The most famous of Elizabeth’s stunts was her successful seventy-two-day trip around the world in 1889, for which she had two goals. First, she wanted to beat the record set in the popular fictional world tour from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Second, she wanted to prove that women were capable of traveling just as well as—if not better than—men. Elizabeth traveled light, taking only the dress she wore, a cape, and a small traveler’s bag. She challenged the stereotypical assumption that women could not travel without many suitcases, outfit changes, and vanity items. Her world tour made her a celebrity. After her return, she toured the country as a lecturer. Her image was used on everything from playing cards to board games. She recounted her adventures in her final book, Around the World in 72 Days.

In 1895, Elizabeth retired from writing and married Robert Livingston Seaman. Robert was a millionaire who owned the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company. When Robert died in 1904, Elizabeth briefly took over as president of his companies.

In 1911, she returned to journalism as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. She covered a number of national news stories, including the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth often referred to suffrage in her articles, arguing that women were as capable as men in all things. During World War I, she traveled to Europe as the first woman to report from the trenches on the front line.

Girl Groups of the 1960s

The Marvelettes

The Supremes

The Ronettes

Patti LaBelle and The Bluebells

The Angels

Martha and the Vandellas

The Dixie Cups

The Shangri-Las

The Ikettes

The Shirelles

The Raelettes

All my June Uprising related map posts (so far)

(Well at least all the ones based mainly on Les Mis)

General events and locations:

4.10: The 5th of June 1832 (part 1: agitation before the 5th)

4.10: The 5th of June 1832 (part 2: the funeral procession)

4.10: The 5th of June 1832 (part 3: the outbreak of the riot)

4.10.4. The Ebullitions of Former Days

The Morgue (a post I hijacked) 

Routes taken by various Les Mis characters:

4.11: The Atom Fraternizes With the Hurricane 

4.13. Marius Enters The Shadow

The Corinthe barricade:

The Barricade & Corinthe (maps)

The Barricades & Corinthe (illustrations)

The Barricades & Corinthe (the modern location)

Mapping the historical barricade site near the Saint-Merry church which served as inspiration for Les Misérables.

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Map Sources (links)

Source Maps: The Church

Source Maps: The Main Barricade Area

Part 3: Hôtel Jabacq, House no. 30, Café Leclercq

Part 4: Café Rossignol, Rue Maubuée

• Day dress.

Designer/Maker: James Galanos (1924-2016)

Date: 1955-1959

Cosette’s wedding dress in the tv series:

In reality:

Something like this

Or this:

Fantine’s dress in the tv series:

In reality:

something like this

or this:

Or this

Fantine’s second dress in the tv series:

In reality:

Something like this:

Or this:

Cosette in the tv series:

In reality:

something like this:

or this

Or this

Cosette’s  dress in the tv series:

In reality:

something like this:

Or this:

Cosette in the tv series:

I don’t actually know how she should exactly look like, but I assume that she would have worn something black (instead of brown) and (I’m sure about this) cover your head girl! You are in the convent, you are not allowed to go bareheaded! (same thing is with all the women in this series: cover your head!) (Looking at you Fantine especially)

Enjolras in the BBC series:

In reality:

something like this

or this

Courfeyrac in the tv series:

In reality:

Something like this

or this

In honor of @newsies-girls-week​, I have finally gotten around to making a post about the Children’s Aid Society’s girl’s lodging house- The Elizabeth Home for Girls.

The Elizabeth Home for Girls was opened on December 13th, 1892 (the image above was taken in 1895), and was located at No. 307 East Twelfth Street in Manhattan. As previously stated, it was owned and operated by the Children’s Aid Society (the same group who owned and ran the Duane Street Manhattan Newsboy’s Lodging House). It was the place where a young newsgirl or orphan without any other family likely would have stayed- girls did not stay in the same lodging house as the boys under any circumstances.

The home was built to replace the previous girl’s lodging house, which had been established in 1863 and was located at No. 21 or 27 St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan. It had four floors, each with a specific layout (which we’ll get into in a moment) and had about 58 beds in all.

The girl’s home was a bit different than the boy’s lodging house in that the girls who lived there were young adults as well as children and teenagers. The 1900 census lists the lodgers as being mostly between the ages of 14 and 21, in contrast to the boy’s lodging house which prohibited boys over the age of 18 from living there. The girl’s home was also intended to teach the girl’s specific trades, such as laundry, sewing, dressmaking, or typing. As such, the home had facilities for the girls to learn each of these skills.

The cellar of the home contained the trunk room, storage room, and the hot-water heater and water pump to supply hot and cold running water throughout the home. The basement (one floor above the cellar) contained two dining rooms, the kitchen, the lavatory, two bathrooms, the laundry room for the girl’s clothes, and a large room for ironing, washing, and drying “custom work” (the girls who lived in the home took in sewing and dressmaking orders as well as laundry orders to make money).

The first floor contained the classrooms for typing and sewing machine classes and a fitting room for dressmaking, as well as the home’s main office, a reading room, and a waiting/reception room. The second floor contained the matron’s room, a sitting room for the girls, two dormitories, and two bathrooms. The third floor contained five smaller bedrooms, one larger dormitory, a lavatory, a bathroom, and a workroom for dressmaking. And, finally, the fourth floor contained five dormitories, two smaller bedrooms, and three single rooms.

Not all of the girls who lived at the Elizabeth Home were newsgirls or match girls, although some very well could have been. Almost all of them were orphans or children who had been abandoned by their families, however, and many of them eventually left the city on orphan trains to go west and be adopted by farm families there.

The building itself was expanded in 1901 by the CAS when they bought and annexed the building next door, and in 1930 the CAS sold the home. However, unlike with the Duane Street Lodging House which was eventually demolished, the building in which the Elizabeth Home for Girls was once located is still standing today! The inside was gutted in the 1980s and I believe it’s just a private residence now, but it was named a landmark in 2008 and the outside of the building remains largely unchanged.

I hope everyone enjoyed this post, and that you learned something new form it! You may go forward now fully equipped to write about the girl’s lodging house in Manhattan in 1899, and if you would like to learn more about the boy’s lodging house in 1899 you can find the post I wrote about it here.

Sources:

http://nineduane.queenitsy.com/eliz.html

HISTORY IN COLOR

Scheele’s Green

RGB: (71, 136, 0)

Closest Pantone match: 315-6340 TPG

Invented in 1775 by chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Scheele’s Green is an artificial pigment synthesized from sodium carbonate, arsenious oxide, and copper sulfate. It reached the peak of its popularity around the mid-19th century, when the discovery of various artificial dyes made bright colors in clothing and décor both desirable and available to a wider public. The durability and brilliancy of Scheele’s Green compared to the previously-used copper carbonate pigments made it a popular choice for tinting wallpaper, fabric, candles, children’s toys, and even sweets.

    However, due to its arsenic base, Scheele’s Green proved to be highly poisonous. Products dyed with it would release toxic acid, dust or gas when exposed to conditions such as heat, damp or mold. Direct contact with the dye would slowly poison those who worked with it, causing open sores, yellowed nails and a greenish tint to the skin. Among the last things nineteen-year-old false flower maker Matilda Scheurer could tell her doctor in a widely publicized account was that “everything she looked at was green”. Meanwhile, pre-Raphaelite artist and wallpaper designer William Morris insisted that miners suffering from arsenic poisoning were simply “bitten by witch fever”.

Robe à la française ca. 1785