Book Review: Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists, by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

Abstract

Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists. Kerrie Logan Hollihan. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2014. 256 pp. $19.95 pbk.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 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 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. …