We received the following episode correction from listener Bridget Visser:

In the episode, it is asserted that pioneering journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, aka Nellie Bly, married a millionaire and then used her marital wealth and connections to break into the journalism profession. While it is true that Cochran did eventually marry a millionaire, she did not meet him until well after she was already an established and internationally famous journalist.

Cochran started writing for the New York World in 1887. That same year she went undercover in a female mental institution for 10 days. The series of exposés she wrote about that experience were sensational and they made her a nationally famous household name in the US. Then, in 1889 she raced another female reporter around the world in 72 days (and won), which made her internationally famous. However, she did not even meet her husband, millionaire Robert Seaman, until years later in 1895 (she married him shortly thereafter). Also, after years of being paid significantly less than her male peers, she attempted to use this marriage to retire from journalism altogether. This, for various reasons, did not work in the long term and she did get back into journalism eventually. But, that is a long story.

While Cochran definitely did have privilege as a middle-class white woman, she certainly did not have the advantages of a millionaire’s wife when she was starting out in her career. She was almost entirely a self-made success and I think that is an important distinction. How she actually broke into journalism is another long story, but essentially much of it came down to persistence, charisma, stubbornness, fearlessness, cleverness and grit.

SOURCE: Nellie Bly: Daredevil. Reporter. Feminist  by Brooke Kroeger, Kindle Edition