Armed with a flask of scotch, a pen and notepad, Martha Gellhorn snuck on to a hospital ship headed for Omaha Beach, Normandy. At dawn on 6 June 1944, she became the first American correspondent to reach the battle. Colliers magazine honored her with a five-page spread. But as Brooke Kroeger writes in her sweeping history, Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism, Gellhorn’s name didn’t appear on the cover. Colliers bestowed that honor on her husband, Ernest Hemingway.
Soon after publication, the US military confiscated Gellhorn’s press credentials. Hemingway’s third wife had brazenly evaded rules barring female correspondents from the frontlines. Utterly undaunted, Gellhorn went on to chronicle every major conflict in the 20th century.
From Kroeger, we also learn of Newsweek’s “three Rhine Maidens” – Ann Stringer, Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson, “a redhead, a blonde and a brunette” – who dug their own foxholes and scooped male competitors. Scores of papers carried Stringer’s United Press story about the liberation of Buchenwald. When she crossed the Elbe in a rowboat ahead of Jack Thompson of the Chicago Tribune on 26 April 1945, Stringer was the first American woman Russian soldiers had ever seen. Convincing two American GIs to fly her to Paris on a military C-47, she filed hours ahead of Thompson. As Thompson would say, Stringer was “a damned fine newspaper man and a fierce competitor. She was a pistol! And a pretty pistol too!”
In a masterly work of broad research and elegant synthesis, Kroeger writes a lively, fast-paced account spanning 150 years in newspapers, magazines and television news. Cataloging a dizzying array of characters in complex and unconventional exploits, Kroeger conveys both the glory and the sexist humiliation and roadblocks these talented, driven women experienced.
Kroeger starts with Margaret Fuller, the 19th-century abolitionist who William Lloyd Garrison called the “first woman of the republic”. At a time when women never used their name in print except for birth, marriage or death announcements, she signed her articles with an “F” – or just an asterisk. A prolific essayist, social reform reporter and foreign correspondent, her career preceded the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that kicked off the 80-year campaign for suffrage.
Fuller set the stage for the muckrakers Ida B Wells, Ida Tarbell and Nellie Bly (the subject of Kroeger’s last book), who beat impossible odds to publish exposés on front pages. For New York’s the World, Bly committed herself to an insane asylum, worked in a sweatshop, “posed as a sinner to investigate a home for unfortunate women, joined a chorus line to learn what drew women to the stage, interviewed women prisoners at police court”. Her articles were reprinted all over the US and in Europe. Famous after beating the fictional Phileas Fogg, by circumnavigating the globe in 72 days not 80, Bly quit the World after her boss, Joseph Pulitzer, refused her a bonus. The pay gap endures.
Fast-forward to the 1960s, when the social fabric started to fray. The JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and RFK assassinations; civil rights and the overthrow of Jim Crow; the counterculture, Vietnam, the draft and student rebellion: all created a fertile environment for the women’s liberation movement.
Yet the few intrepid women who ventured to Vietnam faced discrimination. The AP reporter Peter Arnett recalls: “The women received sexist treatment from the men, including myself, who believed they should not be there.” They were dismissed by editors, disrespected and sexually harassed by colleagues. Correspondents like the towering Gloria Emerson “would refuse to respond when anyone asked her, as they often did, what it had been like to be a woman in Vietnam. ‘I don’t know,’ she once snapped at a radio reporter. ‘I’ve never been a man.’”
At home, the dam broke. New civil rights laws enabled women to launch discrimination lawsuits. At Newsweek, the “good girls revolt” of 1970 saw 45 researchers, factcheckers and mail room “girls” hire Eleanor Holmes Norton of the American Civil Liberties Union and take the owner Katharine Graham and the editor Oz Elliott by surprise. Women followed at Time, Life, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the television networks and the Associated Press. Women won seven Pulitzer prizes (out of hundreds) in the 1970s. In the previous 52 years, only five went to women.
Kroeger neglects to mention that by the 1970s, female readers and writers had formed their own subculture. When the former New York magazine writer Gloria Steinem launched Ms magazine in 1972, she revealed a thirst among female readers for journalism relevant to their lives. While Ms garnered 300,000 subscribers and 4 million readers, more than 145 underground feminist publications sprouted up, with names like Off Our Backs, Amazon Quarterly, Big Mama Rag and Black Maria. Kroeger also declines to mention the National Organization for Women’s decade-long legal battle to end daily papers’ lucrative “help-wanted-male” and “help-wanted-female” classified ads.
Understandably, Kroeger focuses on internal battles. She paints a disappointing portrait of an industry, supposedly founded on the principles of public service, incapable of seeing beyond its own prejudice.
Kroeger guides us through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, as women such as Carol Sutton, Margaret Sullivan, Ann Marie Lipinski and Kathleen Carroll fight their way to the top. The slow arc of progress culminates in Jill Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor of the New York Times. Kroeger’s tick-tock reads like a slow-motion car crash. The reasons for Abramson’s firing in 2014 are all too familiar. Her “abrasive”, “bitchy” management style is the same characterization male colleagues leveled at hundreds of women who, ever since Margaret Fuller’s articles landed on the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, dared to break the rules.
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism is published in the US by Knopf
Clara Bingham, a former Newsweek White House correspondent and author of Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul, is working on a book about the women’s liberation movement
