The Women Who Reinvented Journalism
This is a dangerous season for journalism. Legendary newspapers are being gutted by careless owners, foreign correspondents fired while still in war zones, local papers shut down entirely. Into the tumult come two new books that focus on some of the most pathbreaking journalists of the 1930s and ’40s. These reporters, all women, broke social norms to chronicle the seismic years they were living through. When read together, Mark Braude’s The Typewriter and the Guillotine and Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless prompt an obvious question: Why women? In other words, what is the value of looking at the history of journalism through this gendered prism? For starters: Women were handed nothing. In many cases, when they were interested in doing serious, international stories—say, reporting on a war—they had to tell editors that they happened to be going anyway, Cooke writes, and ask: Should they send some articles? These women’s lack of access led to a resourcefulness that animated their subjects as well as their style. They also avoided the insularity of the boys’ club from …
