Abstract
Beginning with her discussion of female war correspondents in the late 1880s, Kerrie Logan Hollihan set the groundwork for a series of profiles and a convincing argument. “Beyond one or two, you’ve probably never read their names, though several were celebrities in their day. Their stories are worth telling—and remembering,” she says. All 16 of the stories she tells are compelling, worth telling—and remembering.
For example, she tells the story of Peggy Hull reporting during World War I when women did not even have the right to vote yet savvy editors hired women to write ad copy and features from the “women’s angle.” Hull became the first American woman to “embed” with American forces. Along the Texas–Mexican border in the early 1900s, she went right along on the marches and never complained that her feet hurt.
Similarly, Helen Johns Kirtland reported from France during World War I. Whereas her husband, Lucian, had no trouble gaining credentials that gave him access to the front lines in France, for Helen, the same rules did not apply. Not one woman was credentialed as a war correspondent in the fall of 1917.
The social changes after World War I, including the right to vote, did not change their status on newspaper staffs. Nor did it change the magnitude of the achievement of female war correspondents. Irene Corbally Kuhn scooped the other news services, earning a $50 bonus, and made news of her own when she became the first person to make a radio broadcast across China in 1924.
Throughout the book, Hollihan discussed the talents and strengths of female journalists such as Sigrid Schultz who, like so many of the female war correspondents, was gifted with instincts that led her to solid information. She picked up the art and science of “hanging around,” building relationships with potential contacts and fruitful sources. Armed with such insights, Dorothy Thompson, in the early years of World War II (WWII), sized up Adolf Hitler as a “most unimpressive person” and shared her frank views, becoming the first reporter expelled by the Nazis. Time magazine named her the second most popular woman in the United States after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
The author also discussed how these pioneers in journalism were on the front lines of not only conflicts worldwide, but also of a changing profession. During WWII, Martha Gellhorn moved away from the flowery sentences commonly attributed to female journalists of the time to a more hard-hitting style of reporting. Gloria Emerson discovered that the best stories come from people doing their jobs. Similarly, Georgie Anne Geyer, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago, was a trendsetter in modern reporting style at the Chicago Daily News, a paper she described as unlike any paper today focusing on straight reporting. “It was also a hell of a lot of fun,” Geyer said.
Clearly, these 16 women could not sit at home. Like Marguerite Higgins, a reporter who got her start on a college paper, and Margaret Bourke-White, a photojournalist who documented German air attacks on Moscow in 1941, they carried their typewriters and cameras on to the battlefield even though they were not welcome in the back room. They were slotted in the women’s section of the newsroom in a remote office far from the male staffers who ran the newsroom. But that was not the only sacrifice. Sometimes the job meant giving up a traditional family life and leaving behind a spouse and children to cover conflicts. When covering conflicts in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, Janine di Giovanni said her work was equal to her responsibility at home.
Throughout the book, Hollihan emphasizes how each of the correspondents broke through barriers. She told how Robin Wright at the University of Michigan became the first female sports editor of a student newspaper in the United States, breaking barriers on a different kind of battlefield, that of covering male-dominated sports.
Hollihan continually reinforces a basic foundation of history, providing insightful historical context and a basic history lesson regarding each era she discusses, noting repeatedly that Americans simply do not have the basic knowledge of history and world affairs to put the work of these women in perspective. Similarly, Wright said she fears that American youth today do not know enough about the world, especially because globalization will define their lives. Third World youth, she says “do get it . . . they speak English and multiple languages. They probably know more about American geography than American kids.” And Martha Raddatz, an expert on all varying angles of Osama bin Laden, from the September 11 attacks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, took the time to tell the human dimension behind the men and women of the American military. Yet she said she is appalled at the gap in understanding between the lives of everyday Americans and the soldiers who fight in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hollihan successfully pulls all the history and the geography into an effective, entertaining, and personable set of stories about female journalists covering one of the toughest things to cover during the last 130 years—war.