The ‘awkward’ squad: British women foreign correspondents during the interwar years

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the interwar years, gendered inequalities in newspaper newsrooms and social prejudice against ‘mobile’ women combined to force women who wanted to work as foreign correspondents to seek alternative routes to raising their voices on international affairs. Women’s reportage can be found in a range of platforms from the mainstream press to early journals of humanitarian communication and literary magazines. When women reported for major newspapers they were often precariously freelance and the gendered nature of their treatment by newspaper hierarchies emphasised their, and all women’s, outsider status when it came to international politics. Women's international journalism, often rooted in the humanitarian tradition, concentrated on telling the lives of minor characters and ordinary people, and offers insights into individual human suffering at a time of great international anxiety. Their writing, often anonymous or in overlooked niche publications, represents a missing actor on public opinion at this critical time.