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Oct. 15th, 2022 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAges ago gramarye1971 handed me a copy of An Unladylike Profession: Women War Correspondents in World War I, because at the time I was planning to perform a great deal of research around women journalists in the turn-of-the-century (an admittedly evergreen interest) for a future writing project.
By the time I actually got around to reading the book this month that writing project had been pushed back in the queue, but fortunately one of the things that's pushed it back involves a miserable war, so An Unladylike Profession remained deeply research relevant! As well as just generally interesting -- this is the kind of text that's broad rather than deep, which is great for sparking off a wide range of ideas although not so great at actually allowing me to remember the names of any of the people that it follows.
The author of An Unladylike Profession moves chronologically through the course of the war via a series of women journalists who found different ways to cover the conflict; each woman's war tour and particular experience gets four or five pages before he moves onto the next one. If a particular woman covered two different important areas of the war, she sometimes gets two separate 4-5 page sections in different parts of the book -- for example, one correspondent went from covering the Russian Revolution to covering American Involvement, so she shows up in both chapters -- but if those times were far apart I will admit I did not always remember what a reporter did earlier when she appeared later on, because there were simply so many of them.
I, a character-centric reader, would I think have preferred to organize the information thematically by reporter/types of reporting rather than chronologically, but I understand the choice and it did provide a really thorough portrait of the war itself as well as the ways that reporters interacted with it. Some parts that were particularly interesting to me:
- the number of Bestselling Popular American Authors who abruptly decided they were going to become war correspondents in 1914 -- most striking to me was Mary Roberts Rinehart, famous mystery/romance author, which feels a bit like if Nora Roberts abruptly decided to take up war reporting and went off to Ukraine tomorrow, and was immediately wildly successful at it because everyone recognized her as Grand Dame Nora Roberts. Edith Wharton also gets a shout-out but that felt less surprising to me because she was writing about Being In Paris during war and she was already in Paris, it's not like she had to deliberately travel and get letters of introduction and so on to get to the battlefields
- the extensive descriptions of press war tours where a whole bunch of reporters would be escorted by an officer to see particularly scenic or iconic bits of the war -- of course it makes perfect sense that generals would package wars for the press the same way anybody does anything, but one does imagine That One Heroic Nursing Nun Who Formed A Symbolic Stop On All The Tours got a bit tired of it
- the Women's Peace Conference that happened in 1915! in The Hague! with over a thousand international delegates! in the MIDDLE of the war! I'd never heard of this and I'm fascinated by it; it only makes it into the book by virtue of the fact that Jane Addams (President of the US delegation) wrote some articles about it which the author decides to define as war reporting but I'm so glad it's there. Another example of the breadth of scope which is the strength of the book as well as its weakness
gramarye1971 handed me a copy of An Unladylike Profession: Women War Correspondents in World War I, because at the time I was planning to perform a great deal of research around women journalists in the turn-of-the-century (an admittedly evergreen interest) for a future writing project. By the time I actually got around to reading the book this month that writing project had been pushed back in the queue, but fortunately one of the things that's pushed it back involves a miserable war, so An Unladylike Profession remained deeply research relevant! As well as just generally interesting -- this is the kind of text that's broad rather than deep, which is great for sparking off a wide range of ideas although not so great at actually allowing me to remember the names of any of the people that it follows.
The author of An Unladylike Profession moves chronologically through the course of the war via a series of women journalists who found different ways to cover the conflict; each woman's war tour and particular experience gets four or five pages before he moves onto the next one. If a particular woman covered two different important areas of the war, she sometimes gets two separate 4-5 page sections in different parts of the book -- for example, one correspondent went from covering the Russian Revolution to covering American Involvement, so she shows up in both chapters -- but if those times were far apart I will admit I did not always remember what a reporter did earlier when she appeared later on, because there were simply so many of them.
I, a character-centric reader, would I think have preferred to organize the information thematically by reporter/types of reporting rather than chronologically, but I understand the choice and it did provide a really thorough portrait of the war itself as well as the ways that reporters interacted with it. Some parts that were particularly interesting to me:
- the number of Bestselling Popular American Authors who abruptly decided they were going to become war correspondents in 1914 -- most striking to me was Mary Roberts Rinehart, famous mystery/romance author, which feels a bit like if Nora Roberts abruptly decided to take up war reporting and went off to Ukraine tomorrow, and was immediately wildly successful at it because everyone recognized her as Grand Dame Nora Roberts. Edith Wharton also gets a shout-out but that felt less surprising to me because she was writing about Being In Paris during war and she was already in Paris, it's not like she had to deliberately travel and get letters of introduction and so on to get to the battlefields
- the extensive descriptions of press war tours where a whole bunch of reporters would be escorted by an officer to see particularly scenic or iconic bits of the war -- of course it makes perfect sense that generals would package wars for the press the same way anybody does anything, but one does imagine That One Heroic Nursing Nun Who Formed A Symbolic Stop On All The Tours got a bit tired of it
- the Women's Peace Conference that happened in 1915! in The Hague! with over a thousand international delegates! in the MIDDLE of the war! I'd never heard of this and I'm fascinated by it; it only makes it into the book by virtue of the fact that Jane Addams (President of the US delegation) wrote some articles about it which the author decides to define as war reporting but I'm so glad it's there. Another example of the breadth of scope which is the strength of the book as well as its weakness
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Date: 2022-10-15 05:56 pm (UTC)Having read a bunch of Mary Roberts Rinehart: whoa.
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Date: 2022-10-15 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 10:35 pm (UTC)The Wall (1938) is probably the most complex of her novels which I have read, although I enjoyed both Miss Pinkerton (1932) and The Haunted Lady (1942); there are several other books starring Hilda Adams, but I have not read them. K. (1915) is a honking block of melodrama which I ran across by accident last year and I really like it.
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Date: 2022-10-16 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-16 12:50 am (UTC)You're welcome! She is ludicrously prolific and I should really see one of the movies based on her work sometime.
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Date: 2022-10-16 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-15 07:15 pm (UTC)if Nora Roberts abruptly decided to take up war reporting and went off to Ukraine tomorrow
Wow, you know I would totally read it if she did too, so hopefully it worked out for Rinehart?
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Date: 2022-10-15 09:19 pm (UTC)The press war tours also sound fascinating. Do any of the correspondents ever get tired of their package tours and break free to find some other nursing nun, perhaps slightly less heroic?
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Date: 2022-10-16 06:26 am (UTC)of course it makes perfect sense that generals would package wars for the press the same way anybody does anything
There is a fascinating book I read a few years ago, Hotel Warriors, which is a case study in the how the military packages war for the press (in the case, the 1991 Gulf War) in an effort to obtain desired public perceptions. I appreciated how An Unladylike Profession showed a similarly interesting set of press junket examples, particularly in how the women attempted to subvert them!