Creative Endeavors Symposium often a roadmap for personal growth

Because of her pen name, and perhaps her most famous accomplishment being based on a fantastical novel, many assume Nellie Bly was a fictional character. But Elizabeth Jane Cochran was a real person who was often described as larger than life.

“I’ve always been interested in her,” said Paige Beckwith, a Purdue University Fort Wayne senior majoring in history. “I like her story and how she was able to overcome barriers life threw her way. She was able to go on and be successful during a time when most women journalists were just stuck writing for their paper’s women’s page.”

With dreams of pursuing a master’s degree in library science, Beckwith made Bly’s life the focus of her presentation for last spring’s Student Research and Creative Endeavor Symposium. Preparation for this spring’s 28th symposium at PFW starts Nov. 20 and 21 with information sessions from 11 a.m. to noon in the Honors Program lounge on Helmke Library’s second floor. The symposium will be held March 21, and registration is open until Feb. 3

Beckwith focused on how Bly was decades ahead of her time in pushing for respect and opportunities for females, such as the ability to work outside the home and support their families. In response to a column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch—a leading newspaper operated from 1846 to 1923—that said girls were principally good for birthing babies and keeping house, Bly started her journalistic career in 1885. Writing as “Lonely Orphan Girl,” Bly’s feedback impressed the editor who asked her to join the staff.

Determined to defy limitations, Bly took on the Mexican political leadership as a correspondent, wrote a series about the treatment of patients in a women’s lunatic asylum, and most famously traveled around the world in 72 days to beat the time of 80 days made famous by Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s fictional classic, “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

After her uncle gifted her a biography about Bly, Beckwith was hooked and began developing a research project studying Bly’s late-1800s work.

“She was a woman in a male-dominated field at the time when women were being kept from working on the main page of their newspapers,” Beckwith said. “Then she managed to be like, `No, I will not work for the women’s page, I want to work for the main page just like the men,’ and she was able to make that happen.”

Asked what she has learned about herself from studying Bly, Beckwith said, “I learned that I was capable of doing something similar if I wanted. Her story has become very inspiring for me to go for it if I have a particular goal in mind. There was so much that happened in her life that it almost sounds made up, but it’s true.”

Bly’s book detailing her trip around the world sold 10,000 copies in the first month. Bly later became a novelist, inventor, and one of the country’s leading female industrialists. She also championed women’s right to vote and wrote stories from the front line during World War I before she died from pneumonia in 1922 at age 57.

For more information about the 2025 symposium, contact Rachel Gibson, assistant director of the Honors Program, at [email protected].