This was at the same time fascinating and terrible to hear -- I must say this was my first time ever giving an audiobook a try. 
 Honestly, I had never heard of Nellie Bly before, until I came across a random article in the Internet (don't remember which one) about fascinating women in the 19th century, a topic on which a research from time to time for my own amusement. I remember the article was about adventurous women and explorers, and focused on Bly's 72 days trip around the world. But what caught my eye was a two line mention on how prior to that trip she denounced the conditions and treatment women locked in asylums had to bare. I did a little research on the topic, read about Bly's early life and ended up finding the compete audiobook (which was great because I recently had mouth surgery and I didn't feel like holding a book up as well as ice against my face). 
 So the premise for this story is; in 1887, Nellie Bly was asked by her editor in The New York World to write about the poor conditions in Blackwell's Island women's asylum for the insane. That meant that the young reporter had to play the role of an insane woman in order to get locked up in there and experience the life of an inmate during 10 days. Bly committed to her role. She spent a couple of days in a household for working women as Nellie Brown and convinced everyone that she was insane. After a visit from the police and being judged she was finally sent to Blackwell. Once she was in the asylum she dropped the act and behaved as she normally would which, she reported, only made the doctors more convinced of her insanity. There she suffered, and witness other women suffer bad treatment from the nurses, who would bully and hit some of the patients, poor feeding and clothing that lead many patients to get sick, and other there regular procedures as locking the patients in closets, being chocked and hit and forced to take cold baths in dirty water. Bly talks about the stories of many patients and remarks that some of them seemed to be perfectly sane to her, and stated that being locked in there would be what would drive them crazy. 
 It is said that Bly was a sensationalist journalist that wrote about these issues to stay in the public eye as at the time she was somewhat of a "celebrity journalist", and although that may be true, there's no denying that her essays about Blackwell's Island did create a conversation on the issue and forced institutions to make sure the conditions of their patients improved. So, whatever her reasons to do so, she fought for the right of these women to be well treated as well as she denounced prison conditions and corruption through her career. I admire her bravery for putting herself through that terrifying experience in order to denounce an injustice.