Female journalists before the second world war were few in number and dealt with 'soft' subjects, but those who became reporters were often as remarkable as the stories they covered
In 1898, four years before his first novel was published, Arnold Bennett wrote a handbook called Journalism for Women, which addressed the small but growing number of female writers and editors in British newspapers and journals.
"Of the dwellers in Fleet Street," he wrote, "there are, not two sexes, but two species – journalists and women-journalists – and . . . the one is about as far removed organically from the other as a dog from a cat."
Bennett outlined the chief faults of the female journalist: unreliability and a disregard for deadlines – "Journalism is not a game, and in journalism there are no excuses," he admonished; inattention to detail and a slipshod approach to spelling, grammar and punctuation; and a lack of restraint in her prose – "a shrillness, a certain quality of multiloquence . . . a garrulous, gesticulating inefficacy." This last weakness was shared by lady novelists, including George Eliot, who, "for all her spurious masculinity . . . [falls] back on insistence and loquacity. Exactly the same vehement spirit of pseudo-forcefulness characterises women's journalism today."
But Bennett, who had broken into journalism by winning a competition in the periodical Tit-Bits, and was at that time editor of Woman magazine (motto: "Forward but not too fast") did not think female writers were beyond redemption.
A little self-discipline, application to the study of grammar, and a rigorous pruning of prose should equip them for those areas of journalism "which women have always had, and probably will always have, to themselves: I mean the departments comprising fashion, cookery and domestic economy, furniture, the toilet and (less exclusively) weddings and what is called society news."
Within 20 years, when Bennett was an established bestselling novelist, a handful of intrepid women journalists turned their back on domestic matters and made their way to the brutal battlefields of the first world war; their presence alone merited several sensational news stories. By the end of the second world war, there were 127 accredited women war correspondents from America alone, and the number of female frontline journalists has been increasing rapidly ever since.
When I was researching a novel in which one of the characters, a woman, is a veteran war correspondent, I turned first to the work of mid-20th century journalists: Clare Hollingworth, who broke the story (to the British government as well as to her readers) of Germany's invasion of Poland, and reported for this paper and the Daily Telegraph from, among other war zones, Palestine, Algeria and China; Martha Gellhorn, whose many wars included Spain, the second world war, the Vietnam war and conflicts in Central America; and Virginia Cowles, who also covered Spain as well as the liberation of Paris and the Allied invasion of Germany. In addition to the physical perils they faced, they had to battle obstructive authorities and challenge sceptical male colleagues, whose prejudices would have been familiar to Arnold Bennett.
But these formidable figures, and their valiant predecessors in the first world war, were not the earliest pioneers of the profession; several exceptional women had reported from some of the harrowing battle zones of the 19th century, and their own stories were often as remarkable as any they covered. Fifty years before Journalism for Women was published, Margaret Fuller was commissioned by the New York Tribune to cover an area far outside Bennett's prescribed remit. As an experienced editor, she was used to enforcing deadlines as much as meeting them; as a classical scholar, her grammar was faultless, and her prose and intelligence, as well as her charm and wit, had earned the admiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edgar Allan Poe said the world comprised three sorts of people: "men, women, and Margaret Fuller".
The biographer Susan Cheever described her as "a Dorothy Parker woman in a Jane Austen world". Fuller was a radical feminist, author of the polemical work Woman in the Nineteenth Century, compared in scope and influence to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and she had more interest in philosophy, literature and politics than domesticity, fashion and social news. She wrote in her journal: "'Tis an evil lot to have a man's ambition and a woman's heart."
She became a literary critic and the first editor of Emerson's transcendentalist magazine, the Dial, which promoted the movement's philosophy of self-reliance, individual growth and moral perfectibility, and in 1848, when the Tribune sent her to Italy to cover the Roman revolution, she became the first accredited woman foreign correspondent.
She got to know Giuseppe Mazzini, the politician and journalist who campaigned for the unification and independence of Italy. Fuller also championed the military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi in his fight to establish a separate democratic Roman republic, and reported unflinchingly on the French siege of the city. Her dispatches for the Tribune were vivid and passionately partisan.
"A marble nymph, with broken arm, looked sadly . . . from her sun-dried fountain, some roses were blooming still, some red oleanders amid the ruin. The sun was casting its last light on the mountains on the tranquil, sad Campagna . . . I then entered the French ground, all mapped and hollowed like a honey-comb. A pair of skeleton legs protruded from a bank of one barricade; lower, a dog had scratched away its light covering of earth from the body of a man, and discovered it lying face upward all dressed; the dog stood gazing on it with an air of stupid amazement . . . O men and women of America, spared these frightful sights, these sudden wrecks of every hope, what angel of Heaven do you suppose has time to listen to your tales of morbid woe? . . . I pray you do something . . ."
Fuller also worked in a hospital caring for wounded soldiers and, at 38, fell in love with one of the revolutionaries, Count Giovanni Ossoli, seven years her junior. She soon became pregnant, and once Rome was lost, the family retreated north, where they were befriended by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
"The American authoress, Miss Fuller . . . has taken us by surprise in Florence," wrote Barrett Browning, "retiring from the Roman field with a husband and a child above a year old. Nobody had even suspected a word of this underplot, and her American friends stood in mute astonishment before this apparition of them here. The husband is a Roman marquis, appearing amiable and gentlemanly, and having fought well, they say, at the siege, but with no pretension to cope with his wife on any ground appertaining to the intellect."
Though Fuller had escaped uninjured from the bombardment of the city, it was a peace-time tragedy that claimed her life when, in 1850, she sailed from Livorno for the United States with her husband and child. Bad weather had delayed the ship's departure and Robert Browning, who came to see the family off, advised Fuller not to go. The six week voyage was grim – the captain died of smallpox and was buried at sea and Fuller's baby fell sick with the same disease. Then on 18 July, near Fire Island, the ship hit a sandbar in a gale and sank within sight of New York Harbour. The bodies of Fuller and Ossoli were never recovered; their baby's corpse was washed ashore.
Ten years later, Jessie White, daughter of a Hampshire builder, went to Sicily to report on Garibaldi's renewed campaign. She filed news reports and appeals for medical supplies to the British press and tended the wounded – according to one account, she cradled a 12-year-old boy whose arm had to be amputated without anaesthesia, and wept more than the child himself. She made 14 trips from the hospital to the battlefield under fire and her bravery so impressed the Times correspondent, Henry Wreford, that he wrote about her in his own reports. She rejoined Garibaldi's forces in battles against the Austrians near Venice, north of Rome, and during the Franco-Prussian war, nursing the wounded when required while serving as an accredited war correspondent for papers including the Scotsman, the Tribune and the Nation.
But, as a woman journalist, let alone as a woman war correspondent, White was a rarity. By 1880, census records showed that of 12,308 journalists working in the US, only 288 were women, and most of them were reporting on soft furnishings rather than hard news. In 1897, Randolph Hearst's New York Journal announced that it had appointed Cora Stewart Taylor as "the first woman war correspondent" – a claim with which Fuller and White could have taken issue. Taylor was sent to cover the Greco-Turkish war with her common-law husband, the writer Stephen Crane, author of the civil war novel The Red Badge of Courage. She wrote: "I am a strange woman to whom fear of many kinds is unknown. I could dare, or do, some strange things without flinching if I were driven."
Taylor, from a wealthy Boston family, was formerly Lady Stewart, wife of an English baronet, and lived in grand style in England until her husband abandoned her on the grounds of her infidelity. She returned to America and set up a brothel, the Hotel de Dreme, in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where she first met Crane.
The war in Greece lasted a month and Taylor filed several vivid reports from the battlefield, despite the Greek authorities' objections to a woman's presence on the front.
"War seen through a woman's eyes" was the headline on one report, filed on April 26 1897, under her pen name Imogene Carter. She wrote of the wounded Greek volunteers, who were "hastily and clumsily bandaged, unwashed and wan with rolling eyes that expressed that vague desire of the human mind in pain for an impossible meadow wherein rest and sleep and peace come suddenly when one lies in the grass".
After the war, the couple moved to England and rented a country house in Surrey, where they entertained friends including HG Wells and Joseph Conrad. Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900 and Taylor returned to Jacksonville, where she built the Court, a 22-room brothel with a ballroom. She continued to write, under the name Cora Crane, for publications including Harper's Weekly.
The year after the Cranes' Greek adventure, in 1898 – the year Bennett published Journalism for Women – Anna N Benjamin, a 23-year-old reporter for the New York–based Leslie's Illustrated News, resolved to cover the invasion of Cuba by American troops in the Spanish-American war. She told a British fellow correspondent: "I know what you think. You think it ridiculous my being here, you are laughing at me wanting to go, that's the worst of being a woman. But just let me tell you, I'm going through to Cuba and not all the old generals in the army are going to stop me."
She got to the front, scooped her competitors, and the following year was sent to cover the Philippine insurrection, before travelling by Trans-Siberian railroad to report in Russia, Japan and China.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, a successful writer of mystery novels and later known as the "American Agatha Christie", was among the first American reporters to reach the Belgian front in the first world war. In an account filed for the Saturday Evening Post she wrote, in the vivid style familiar to readers of her novels: "The German lines are very close now. The barbed wire barrier tears my clothes . . . No man's land lies flooded but full of dead bodies . . . Here the stench begins . . . My heavy boots chafe my heel, and I limp. But I limp rapidly. I do not care to be shot in the back . . . I have done what no woman has done before, and I am alive."
Elizabeth Cochrane, better known to her readers in America as the "stunt reporter" Nellie Bly, also travelled to Europe to report from the war's eastern front. Cochrane had begun her career in journalism in 1885 when she was 18, after she sent a letter to her local paper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, protesting at an article, entitled "What Girls Are Good For", in which a male writer had argued that women should confine themselves to domestic chores and childcare. The paper's editor replied to Cochrane by asking what articles she would write if she were a journalist, and her response – that newspapers should be carrying more stories about ordinary people – earned her a job. She had built an international reputation as a campaigning journalist, specialising in undercover work which exposed injustice and changed policy on healthcare, housing and child labour. For her most celebrated story, she feigned madness and was admitted to a New York insane asylum for 10 days, later writing about the harshness of conditions, abusive staff, and the fact that many inmates were sane but had been falsely incarcerated by relatives who wanted them out of the way.
In one dispatch from the first world war for the New York Evening Journal, under the headline "Nellie Bly in the Firing Line", she described the last hours of a mortally wounded Russian soldier.
I shuddered. The clay-pallor of death. The ribs cutting the skin. Bones, bones, no flesh anywhere. The head turned. Great, hollow black eyes looked into mine . . . The lips parted, a moan, a groan of more than physical agony. He spoke. I could not understand. His words were a sound my ears shall never forget . . . "What does he say?" I cried, unable to stand it . . . "He is asking for his children," was the low reply. The hollow black eyes turned again to search mine. I could not endure their question. I had no answer to give. "Could Emperors and Czars and Kings look on this torturing slaughter and ever sleep again?" I asked the doctor.
"They do not look," he said gently.
By 1930, US records show that the number of women journalists had risen to 12,000 – 24% of the total number of journalists. But the average female reporter's beat was still the home front. In 1936, Ishbel Ross, a Scottish-born journalist who had earned a reputation as New York City's best female news reporter in the 1920s, wrote Ladies of the Press, a survey of early newspaperwomen. The foreword to her book was written by her former editor at the Herald Tribune, Stanley Walker, and it was not encouraging to any young woman thinking of a career in the papers.
"A great many of the girls who have managed to get on newspaper payrolls have been slovenly, incompetent vixens, adept at office politics, show-offs of the worst sort, and inclined to take advantage of their male colleagues. They have protested that they wanted to do a man's work, to be treated as men, but soon [sic] or later some situation would arise in which all these high-minded declarations of purpose were revealed as so much nonsense . . . By and large, it seems to me that the men in newspaper work have been uniformly friendly, sometimes extremely helpful, to their women co-workers, even to the point of changing typewriter ribbons for them – a simple task at which the female ingenuity appears invariably to bog down."
Ross herself, described by Walker as an exception to the rule, outlined what she saw as the paradoxical nature of the woman reporter: "The girl who is most at home inside fire lines, checking up on casualties, is apt to spend her days off weeding her garden or reading Pater. She may worm her way into jail or sit without blinking as a jury condemns a man to death, but when she gets home she is likely to turn thoroughly feminine. She wants a quiet evening with her husband, an hour's play with her baby, a chance to mix a salad or knit a sweater."
Whether Martha Gellhorn had read Ishbel Ross's book, and Walker's curmudgeonly foreword, is not recorded, but what is certain is that in 1936, the year that Ross's book was published, Gellhorn's thoughts, even on her quieter evenings, did not often turn to salads or knitwear, or even the essays of Walter Pater, and she was unlikely to need any masculine input when it came to changing a typewriter ribbon.
Gellhorn had already made her name in her native America with her book, The Trouble I've Seen, about American lives blighted by the Depression. In London, Graham Greene had reviewed the book in the Spectator, praising it for its "amazingly unfeminine" style and the absence of the "female vices of unbalanced pity or factitious violence".
But Gellhorn, hungry for greater engagement, was convinced that Spain, where volunteer soldiers were flocking from around the world to join the fight again Franco's fascist forces, was the crucible in which the future would be forged. She wrote from her family home in St Louis to Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend of Gellhorn's mother, "I suffer horribly from living here out of everything. I want to be in Spain, desperately, because that's the Balkans in 1912. And if you're part of a big thing you feel safe; it's only waiting and looking on from the outside that makes one nervous and lost."
She arrived in Madrid in 1937, on assignment for Collier's magazine, to work alongside her future husband Ernest Hemingway, and used her powerful, pared-down prose to describe the impact of war on civilians as well as on the Republican soldiers. She had, despite Greene's assessment, no interest in what she later termed "the objectivity shit". She was there to bear witness to injustice and suffering, she declared, and felt no need to "balance" the story with a view from the other side.
In one dispatch, she described an old woman in a shawl running through a Madrid plaza holding the hand of a small, frightened boy, when a shell exploded.
A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, at the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: GET OUT OF MADRID."
Clare Hollingworth, by contrast, had a more traditional, some might say masculine, approach to war reporting; outlining battle strategy, recording troop movements, detailing armaments, analysing political context and striving for impartiality. The American journalist Virginia Cowles, one of Gellhorn's colleagues in Spain, also aimed for "balance" in her stories. Cowles had started out as a fashion journalist but her ambitions to work as a news reporter had been boosted by a chance interview with Mussolini. In Spain, where she picked her way through bombsites and trenches in exceptionally high heels, she herself became the subject of a news story when she was "kidnapped" by a Soviet divisional commander of the International Brigade. For three days, over countless glasses of champagne, he instructed her in Marxist theory before finally letting her go.
After the war, Gellhorn and Cowles wrote a theatrical comedy about their experiences as correspondents, based on their time at the press camp in Sessa Aurunca, during the Italian campaign. Love Goes to Press – a title they both loathed – was a critical success when it opened at the Embassy Theatre in Hampstead in June 1946 and it later transferred to the West End. On Broadway, however, critics panned it and the play closed after five performances. Rosamond Calder in Theatre Arts journal wrote that if this was the way Gellhorn and Cowles had conducted themselves at the front, "it would seem wise for the high command to banish all women journalists from the next war."
Four years later, with the outbreak of the Korean war, the US high command did just that. Marguerite Higgins, fearless, clever and strikingly competitive, was Tokyo bureau chief of the Herald Tribune when the war broke out in 1950 and she was one of the first reporters on the spot. Frank Gibney of Time magazine tried to dissuade her from going, telling her Korea was "no place for a woman". Another male colleague countered: "But it's all right for Maggie Higgins."
Army authorities warned her that there was a lack of lavatory facilities for women in the field, to which she replied that she was happy to use either side of the road. But in the midst of the bloody battle for Taejon, she was ordered out of Korea by Lieutenant General Walton W Walker, Eighth Army Commander, who said: "This is just not the type of war where women ought to be running around the front lines." Eventually, after a personal appeal to General MacArthur, she returned to the front and went on to win a Pulitzer prize for her coverage of the war.
Higgins had previously reported from Germany, where she witnessed the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald and covered the blockade of Berlin. She had travelled to Europe with other correspondents on a troopship from New York and Janet Flanner, the New Yorker Paris correspondent, recalled the stir Higgins created on board when she arrived, theatrically late, after the ship had already set sail. The correspondents and soldiers were entranced as a ladder was lowered down the side of the ship to a small tug boat, and a slender blue-eyed 24-year-old in full army uniform stepped on the deck and her helmet slipped back to reveal a cloud of blonde hair.
"It was my first encounter with Marguerite Higgins," said Flanner. "She looked so sweet and innocent. I immediately thought of Goldilocks and wanted to protect her. If I'd known then what I know now I'd have thrown her overboard."
Higgins was known for her beauty as well as her ravenous appetite for a scoop and it was ungenerously suggested that she was not afraid to use the former in pursuit of the latter. But whatever the speculation about her private life, the accusations of professional ruthlessness, and criticisms of a perceived rightwing bias in her later coverage of the Vietnam war, there was never any doubt about Higgins's courage and commitment to her work. She wrote of the "human closeness and magnificence of character that danger sometimes provokes". Bennett's recommended areas of journalist endeavour – "fashion, cookery and domestic economy . . ." – would never have drawn her. "I have known since childhood that if there was to be a war I wanted to know for myself what force cuts so deep into the hearts of men. Now I do know a little of it. I have witnessed the awesomeness of man tried beyond endurance and enduring."
It is, of course, easy to mock the past for failing to anticipate the future. When Bennett was writing at the end of the 19th century, British women were 30 years away from winning the right to vote. Who could have predicted then that so many women journalists would work at the forefront of news coverage today? To take a recent example, Anna Politkovskaya's fearless coverage of the war in Chechnya demonstrated, if proof were needed, that clear-sighted courage is not a male prerogative. She faced death several times but said "I am absolutely sure that risk is [a] usual part of my job . . . and I cannot stop because it's my duty. I think the duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer to sing. The duty of [the] journalist [is] to write what this journalist sees . . . It's only one duty." In 2006, she was felled outside her Moscow apartment by an assassin's bullet – the cruellest endorsement of the potency of her work. The recent travails of Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent, who was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Egypt's Tahrir Square, and of the New York Times photographer, Lynsey Addario, who also suffered sexual violence when she was held for six days in Libya by Gadaffi's forces, are further reminders of the hazards faced by women covering conflict.
According to a survey by the European Federation of Journalists, the average number of women journalists in European news media in 2006 was almost equal to that of men: 47.7%. And significant numbers of those women were reporting from the heart of military conflicts. Before 1970, less than 6% of newspaperwomen were foreign correspondents; today, there are almost as many women's bylines as men's attached to reports from some of the world's toughest assignments, and in television news, the flak-jacketed correspondent shouting over a son et lumiere of missiles is just as likely to be female as male, and knows, more keenly than Bennett ever could, that "Journalism is not a game, and in journalism there are no excuses."
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