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A review by luftschlosseule
An Unladylike Profession: American Women War Correspondents in World War I by Chris Dubbs
trigger warning
misogyny, gore, trauma, rape, slavery, antisemitism, deportation
In this book, author Chris Dubbs explores women journalists who covered WWI, illustrating how they created such a field and focused on aspects their male counterparts most often ignored.
Most of these names were completely new to me, the exceptions being Edith Wharton and Nelly Bly.
Two things bothered me about this book, with only one being a problem:
- there are no footnotes, you have to gather what you're looking for from the bibliography
- I learned more from this book about WWI than I did in school.
The latter, of course, is neither a thing the book can do anything about nor something that reflects in any way upon it. The German school administration just avoids this topic, going from the assassination of a person whose name I am constantly forgetting because I coulnd't care less to the traity of Versailles, as if no time passed between those two.
And the first is kind of funny when you consider that the sources to the pictures are listed sometimes right down to their Library of Congress signature.
The main focus of this book is on the obstacles the journalists had to face, the strategies they employed to gain access to the front lines, and the stories they told.
Getting approved as a war correspondend proved to be a challenge in itself, but if people thought you frail and suspectible to strange outbursts of emotions - a.k.a. a woman - you had two ways to go:
Either you were so popular that your connections could get you where you wanted to be, or you took a job with a charity, doing some medical training or just helping with providing food. I have great admiration for those who chose the latter way, because it meant not only working your fingers to the bones for the main job, but collecting your thoughts in a coherent way after hours to cobble something worth publishing together when you already spent the energy you had available for that day.
Those women who reported from Europe's trenches told stories of "the women angle", meaning how civilians percieved the war efforts and what they did to do their part, being nurses, ambulance drivers, factory workers - how women stopped caring only for their own household and were able to get "real" jobs, paid jobs, jobs that brought public acknowledgement.
What interested me more were the women who worked at the front lines, because it turns out that women were everywhere. While only one or two allusions to prostitution are made, you see that women were everywhere, trying to built where the men destroyed - this gets very clear in the recounting of the Women's conference, which decided that imminent peace is needed.
I think that if I were to further my knowledge on anything mentioned in this book, actively seeking out more information, it would concern said conference.
I think what this book did best is to illustrate the differences and similarities shared by the different (white) women who either happened to be in Europe when war broke out or specifically traveled there - here - to report on what they saw.
There is no one type of female war correspondent.
I recieved a copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.
In this book, author Chris Dubbs explores women journalists who covered WWI, illustrating how they created such a field and focused on aspects their male counterparts most often ignored.
Most of these names were completely new to me, the exceptions being Edith Wharton and Nelly Bly.
Two things bothered me about this book, with only one being a problem:
- there are no footnotes, you have to gather what you're looking for from the bibliography
- I learned more from this book about WWI than I did in school.
The latter, of course, is neither a thing the book can do anything about nor something that reflects in any way upon it. The German school administration just avoids this topic, going from the assassination of a person whose name I am constantly forgetting because I coulnd't care less to the traity of Versailles, as if no time passed between those two.
And the first is kind of funny when you consider that the sources to the pictures are listed sometimes right down to their Library of Congress signature.
The main focus of this book is on the obstacles the journalists had to face, the strategies they employed to gain access to the front lines, and the stories they told.
Getting approved as a war correspondend proved to be a challenge in itself, but if people thought you frail and suspectible to strange outbursts of emotions - a.k.a. a woman - you had two ways to go:
Either you were so popular that your connections could get you where you wanted to be, or you took a job with a charity, doing some medical training or just helping with providing food. I have great admiration for those who chose the latter way, because it meant not only working your fingers to the bones for the main job, but collecting your thoughts in a coherent way after hours to cobble something worth publishing together when you already spent the energy you had available for that day.
Those women who reported from Europe's trenches told stories of "the women angle", meaning how civilians percieved the war efforts and what they did to do their part, being nurses, ambulance drivers, factory workers - how women stopped caring only for their own household and were able to get "real" jobs, paid jobs, jobs that brought public acknowledgement.
What interested me more were the women who worked at the front lines, because it turns out that women were everywhere. While only one or two allusions to prostitution are made, you see that women were everywhere, trying to built where the men destroyed - this gets very clear in the recounting of the Women's conference, which decided that imminent peace is needed.
I think that if I were to further my knowledge on anything mentioned in this book, actively seeking out more information, it would concern said conference.
I think what this book did best is to illustrate the differences and similarities shared by the different (white) women who either happened to be in Europe when war broke out or specifically traveled there - here - to report on what they saw.
There is no one type of female war correspondent.
I recieved a copy of this book in exchange for a honest review.