#women in journalism

[coochiequeens]

"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville. She resorted to those measures because her husband, Ernest Hemingway, tried to take over her journalist career.

This Saturday, June 6, will be the 76th anniversary of D-Day, the battle that would come to represent the beginning of the end of World War II. 

There was just one woman, a war correspondent, on the beaches at Normandy that day the allied forces liberated Western Europe from Nazi Germany: the singular Martha Gellhorn. Author Janet Somerville traces Gellhorn’s extraordinary life in her book Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War.

"Since 1937, Martha had been a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine. She knew about the Allied invasion, that there was a plan to cover the Allied invasion of Normandy, and she was determined to cover that," Somerville said. 

The problem was, her very famous husband at the time, Ernest Hemingway, pulled the rug out from under her professionally.

"Hemingway had gone to New York, introduced himself to her editor at Collier’s and said ‘I’ll be your war correspondent.’ And he took her accreditation papers. Which was a bit of a problem," said Somerville.

Each publication could send just one correspondent. But Gellhorn was resourceful and clever. She found herself passage on a munitions ship from New York that would get her to Europe. She was the only woman and the only civilian aboard that ship, which landed in Liverpool. Then, she just needed to get to Normandy.

"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville.

Once on board the hospital ship, Gellhorn locked herself into a bathroom until they sailed. When the ship docked in Normandy, she waded ashore through waist-deep water with some of the medical officers.

"She became the only woman and the only war correspondent to be actually on the beaches at Normandy, evacuating the wounded."

Though she was there as a journalist to write about the event, she couldn’t help but tend to the wounded soldiers. She had an uncanny ability, Somerville says, to focus on what needed to be done. So when she saw that the wounded were hungry and thirsty, she set to work.

"She just took it in her stride and found somebody who could bring teapots to tip into their mouths,if they couldn't hold a glass. She just took charge and made sure that they got something," Somerville said.

She also managed to be one of many correspondents who wrote about D Day.

"The incredible thing about D-Day is that accredited correspondents produced 700,000 words of text, just about D-Day," Somerville said. "Martha was one of them. She had a piece called 'Over and Back' that Collier’s published."

Gellhorn went on to report into her old age, from all corners of the globe. She filed her last piece, about the murdered street children of Salvador, Brazil, more than 50 years after D-Day, when she was 87 years old.

Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War, 1930-1949 by Janet Somerville is available at the link above, or wherever you buy your books.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune receives the New York Newspaper Women's Club special citation as the outstanding woman reporter of the year, November 17, 1950. The citation commended Higgins for her reporting of the Korean conflict, for her courage under fire, and for her bravery in administering blood plasma to the wounded. Presenting it is Margaret Mara of the Brooklyn Eagle, president of the club, at the organization's Front Page Dinner Dance.

Photo: Marty Lederhandler for the AP

[loverockawaitsyou]

Hey everyone, I started a new (free) newsletter about music here in Seattle and beyond. I am writing about artists old and new, festivals, other live events, and have grunge retrospectives planned.

I am covering my first live event tomorrow! And there are some other exciting things on the horizon.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Hala Gorani

Hala Gorani was born in 1970 in Seattle, Washington. Gorani's work as a journalist has taken her to some of the most dangerous places in the world. She has covered the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, and the war in Ukraine. Gorani has won three Emmy Awards, and her reporting on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti contributed to CNN winning the Golden Nymph Award. She has interviewed Tony Blair, the Dalai Lama, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Nicolas Sarkozy. Gorani was the anchor of Hala Gorani Tonight on CNN International, and is now an international correspondent for NBC News. In 2024, she published a memoir, But You Don't Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging.

[venicepearl]

Helen Churchill Candee (October 5, 1858 – August 23, 1949) was an American author, journalist, interior decorator, feminist, and geographer. Today, she is best known as a survivor of the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912, and for her later work as a travel writer and explorer of southeast Asia.

[mysharona1987]

[cysticnotes]

I look at this one uh from time to time -

[laesposarica]

[notyourtoday]

Caption on post -

"On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The scale of the Israeli military's destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is deeply shocking."

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, on Thursday condemned the ongoing lsraeli violence in Gaza as death toll surpasses 40,000.

Turk said that the situation is"overwhelmingly due" to the lsraeli military's failure to "comply with the rules of war."

By @middleeasteye on Instagram.

Link to post.

[clubhoops]

A’ja Wilson and Angel Reese for WSJ's Innovators Issue

[justarandombrit]

The thing is Dipper would go insane if he lived in Hatchetfield, and Pete would just straight up get murdered if he lived in Gravity Falls.

[coochiequeens]

Journalism can be a deadly job to begin with.

By Britt Gronemeyer

Since the eruption of mass anti-government protests in mid-September 2022, the Islamic Republic has waged a war on women journalists in Iran. The targeting of journalists is not new. However, security forces have deliberately gone after women journalists and jailed them at a rapidly increasing rate. While the international community has spoken out in support of the Women, Life, Freedom revolution, they have done little to protect the women journalists at the heart of this movement. 

In September 2022, Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi were imprisoned on alleged charges of espionage. They had attempted to report on the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini—a Kurdish-Iranian woman who had been killed by the so-called morality police for “violating” mandatory hijab. Hamedi wrote for the reformist newspaper Shargh and was the first journalist to report on the death of Amini, doing so from the hospital in Tehran where Amini had been on life support. Mohammadi had reported on the protests at Amini’s funeral in her hometown of Saqez in northwest Kurdistan province.

In January of this year, journalist Nazila Maroufian revealed that she had been jailed and sentenced to two years on alleged charges of “anti-government propaganda and spreading false news” after publishing an interview with Amini’s father, Amjad Amini.

These three women and their experiences do not exist in a vacuum. The targeting of female journalists has been a direct response to the rise of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran. More than seventy journalists have been imprisoned in Iran since the beginning of the protests, 44 percent of whom are women. This is an unprecedented number in Iranian history.

According to journalist and activist Yeganeh Rezaian, a senior researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Women, Life, Freedom uprising would not exist without female journalists.

“The Women, Life, Freedom movement was started by the unfortunate death of a woman, but also by women’s coverage of that terrible incident. So, if it was not for those first two female journalists who covered the death of Mahsa Amini, there would be no clarity about what had happened to her,” Rezaian explained to me.

What the constitution says

This phenomenon is not limited to Iranian journalists covering the ongoing protests. The Islamic Republic has a long history of jailing journalists as well as subjecting them to extreme censorship and political pressure. 

Under the Islamic Republic, the legal framework for freedom of the press is constituted by a combination of sharia law and Islamic cultural norms. While there are provisions within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran developed in 1979 that protect freedom of expression and address the freedom of the press, these provisions are often overlooked or subjected to severe restrictions.

Article 24 of the Constitution establishes the rights of the press to freedom of expression, yet they are subject to exceptions in favor of the principles of Islam and the rights of the public. Article 168 of the Constitution reinforces the restrictions on the freedom of expression by laying out the procedures relating to offenses by the press. The 1986 Iranian Press Law established the Mission of the Press, the Rights of the Press, and the Limits of the Press. The provision regarding the limitations placed upon the press would prove to be the most significant in justifying contemporary restrictions of the press.   

By adopting rhetoric pointing to national security concerns and the spread of propaganda, the Islamic Republic has abused its jurisdiction over national security. The Iranian state uses national security charges as an increasingly transparent façade for the wrongful detention of journalists in an effort to eliminate criticism of the regime and prevent the exposure of other human rights violations they have committed.

Waging war on women journalists

Rezaian claimed that the current targeting of female journalists is not shocking. She has commented that these efforts have become so prolific that they no longer attempt to hide the detention of journalists, noting that they are shameless in raiding these women’s homes without warrants and providing purpose for their imprisonment.

CPJ has declared the Islamic Republic the worst jailer of journalists in the world for 2022. The sheer number of detentions is worsened by the conditions in which these women journalists are being treated. Journalists in Iran are subjected to poor prison conditions, including being frequently kept in solitary confinement. Furthermore, female journalists are specifically targeted as victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. 

So, while the international community says that they stand with the women of Iran, they must step up in the face of a war against female journalists and ensure that they are given the freedom to continue to fight for the rights of their peers. 

Freedom of the press in the international community is addressed through numerous bodies of international law. UNESCO declares that access to information is a fundamental freedom as well as an integral component of freedom of expression. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Islamic Republic of Iran has ratified, holds that everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression. This includes the freedom to “seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” The blatant dismissal of these rights by the Islamic Republic must be recognized and condemned by the international community. 

There are other ways to hold the Islamic Republic accountable, including the use of targeted financial sanctions and travel bans against companies and individuals that are responsible for the unjust treatment of journalists. Additionally, European Union states could summon their ambassadors back to their countries in protest of the wrongful detentions and the harsh treatment of female journalists. Lastly, countries with universal jurisdiction laws can and should investigate the detentions of women journalists to bring the individuals responsible to justice.  

As women journalists risk their lives to share the realities of the Islamic Republic’s brutality with the world, the international community must support them with deliberate action.  

Britt Gronemeyer is a Young Global Professional at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs.

[atavist]

An ob-gyn in Virginia performed unnecessary surgeries on patients for decades. He took their reproductive organs, gave them false cancer diagnoses, and did other terrible harm. When his victims learned the truth, they fought back. Issue no. 146, DAMAGES, is now available: 

[Debra] requested her medical records and was stunned to find discrepancies with what Perwaiz had said to her during appointments. Most glaringly, she didn’t see any mention of precancerous cells on her cervix; the tests Perwaiz performed on her had come back normal. “If I was normal,” Debra said, “why did I have a surgery?”

There were other inconsistencies. One form from an appointment described Debra complaining of back and pelvic pain, which she told me she never did. Another document dated the day before her surgery stated that she “insisted on having those ovaries removed through the abdominal wall incision and not vaginally,” and that the “consent obtained after entirely counseling the patient [was] for abdominal hysterectomy.” In fact, she had requested the opposite surgical approach, and she recalled no such conversation with Perwaiz; the only time she’d spoken with him in the lead-up to her procedure was in passing in the hospital hallway.

Debra was sure she had a malpractice case. She went to several lawyers, but none of them would take her on as a client. “So many men—man after man saying, ‘You had a decent amount of care, and that’s all you’re afforded,’ ” she said. Frustrated, she came up with a new plan: “I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to learn how to sue this bastard myself.’ ”

[onceuponatown]

Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. The town was founded by her father, Judge Michael Cochran. Elizabeth had fourteen siblings. Her father had ten children from his first marriage and five children from his second marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Jane Kennedy.

Michael Cochran’s rise from mill worker to mill owner to judge meant his family lived very comfortably. Unfortunately, he died when Elizabeth was only six years old and his fortune was divided among his many children, leaving Elizabeth’s mother and her children with a small fraction of the wealth they once enjoyed. Elizabeth’s mother soon remarried, but quickly divorced her second husband because of abuse, and relocated the family to Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth knew that she would need to support herself financially. At the age of 15, she enrolled in the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and an added an “e” to her last name to sound more distinguished. Her plan was to graduate and find a position as a teacher. However, after only a year and a half, Elizabeth ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition. She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boarding house.

In 1885, Elizabeth read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that argued a woman’s place was in the home, “to be a helpmate to a man.” She strongly disagreed with this opinion and sent an angry letter to the editor anonymously signed “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

The newspaper’s editor, George A. Madden, was so impressed with the letter that he published a note asking the “Lonely Orphan Girl” to reveal her name. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Shortly after her first article was published, Elizabeth changed her pseudonym from “Lonely Orphan Girl” to “Nellie Bly,” after a popular song.

Elizabeth positioned herself as an investigative reporter. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours. Her honest reporting about the horrors of workers’ lives attracted negative attention from local factory owners. Elizabeth’s boss did not want to anger Pittsburgh’s elite and quickly reassigned her as a society columnist.

To escape writing about women’s issues on the society page, Elizabeth volunteered to travel to Mexico. She lived there as an international correspondent for the Dispatch for six months. When she returned, she was again assigned to the society page and promptly quit in protest.

Elizabeth hoped the massive newspaper industry of New York City would be more open-minded to a female journalist and left Pittsburgh. Although several newspapers turned down her application because she was a woman, she was eventually given the opportunity to write for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

In her first act of “stunt” journalism for the World, Elizabeth pretended to be mentally ill and arranged to be a patient at New York’s insane asylum for the poor, Blackwell’s Island. For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients.

Elizabeth’s report about Blackwell’s Island earned her a permanent position as an investigative journalist for the World. She published her articles in a book titled 10 Days in A Mad House. In it, she explained that New York City invested more money into care for the mentally ill after her articles were published. She was satisfied to know that her work led to change.

Activist journalists like Elizabeth—commonly known as muckrakers—were an important part of reform movements. Elizabeth’s investigations brought attention to inequalities and often motivated others to take action. She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. She also interviewed influential and controversial figures, including Emma Goldman in 1893.

The most famous of Elizabeth’s stunts was her successful seventy-two-day trip around the world in 1889, for which she had two goals. First, she wanted to beat the record set in the popular fictional world tour from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Second, she wanted to prove that women were capable of traveling just as well as—if not better than—men. Elizabeth traveled light, taking only the dress she wore, a cape, and a small traveler’s bag. She challenged the stereotypical assumption that women could not travel without many suitcases, outfit changes, and vanity items. Her world tour made her a celebrity. After her return, she toured the country as a lecturer. Her image was used on everything from playing cards to board games. She recounted her adventures in her final book, Around the World in 72 Days.

In 1895, Elizabeth retired from writing and married Robert Livingston Seaman. Robert was a millionaire who owned the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company. When Robert died in 1904, Elizabeth briefly took over as president of his companies.

In 1911, she returned to journalism as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. She covered a number of national news stories, including the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth often referred to suffrage in her articles, arguing that women were as capable as men in all things. During World War I, she traveled to Europe as the first woman to report from the trenches on the front line.

Although Elizabeth never regained the level of stardom she experienced after her trip around the world, she continued to use her writing to shed light on issues of the day. She died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922.

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Gail Collins

Gail Collins was born in 1945 in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1995, Collins joined The New York Times, and in 2001, she became the first woman to serve as the editor of the paper's editorial page. She held the position until 2007. Collins is the author of multiple books, and served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

[venicepearl]

Caroline Rémy de Guebhard (27 April 1855 – 24 April 1929) was a French journalist with anarchist, socialist, communist and feminist views, best known under the pen name Séverine.