Before you read this post here is a short film to remember all those pioneering women reporters:
I am in the happy position of seeing a book that I wrote twenty years ago republished this month. Most excitingly, the book has been reviewed – a great surprise in these days of such tight space for reviewing even new books. But then it wasn’t merely the old book in a new jacket. I had been allowed to add a whole new chapter, to update it – a rare treat as few writers get the chance to change an old book. It’s way too expensive and publishers aren’t keen on allowing anything more than dates and typos to be corrected; in other words nothing which requires resetting paragraphs or adding pages. I have quite a fat file of ‘Material that emerges after the book has been written,’ bulging with interesting information on all my other books. But what to do with it? Sadly, probably nothing. Yet often in the case of biography it is only after a book has been published that someone whose existence you may not even have known about approaches you with information they have been holding on to, not knowing what to do with it until your book appears. I have had some wonderful stories told to me (often in confidence) at an event when someone has approached me quietly, afterwards, and asked to share a story or a letter. It’s often a breathholding moment
But this time it was a history book that was republished –Battling for News is an account of how women reporters have fought over the centuries for the right to report, not only wars but sporting and political events, or other danger spots normally left to men. I finished writing this book, heavily pregnant with my last child, a daughter, and was correcting proofs in the middle of the night at the same time as soothing or feeding her. Her early months were very much tied up with my thoughts about women’s progress in the world of work. As I wished this book on its way, I whispered sweet nothings to her, reassuring her she could be whatever she wanted to be. I really believed that to be the case. For this was in many ways the most personal book I had ever written.In 1972, twenty years before her birth, I had been hired by Reuters, the first woman they had risked on their prestigious graduate trainee scheme. I was sent to Rome as a trainee and had hoped to report on many danger spots around the world. But then I became pregnant for the first time and Reuters was not keen on foreign correspondents who were also mothers…unreasonably as I thought at the time. By the time I came to write Battling for News, which includes a historical account of the first women to report wars – women like Jessie White Mario who had to tend the wounded on the battle field before writing up her reports about Garibaldi’s progress in unifying Italy – I believed that all the barriers against women reporting wars on equal footing with their male counterparts were now torn down, that women reporters had achieved equality with their male counterparts. And so they had in many ways. After all in World War 2 British women were refused accreditation to the front line, hence their need to resort to ruses like dressing up as a hospital orderly or stretcher bearer in order to report on D Day landings as Martha Gellhorn did.
But now, another twenty years on, I saw that in fact women reporters, especially those on TV, faced different difficulties. They were expected to be young and pretty as well as brave and fearless and, if they were putting themselves in harm’s way, not to be a mother as well, as Yvonne Ridley learned to her cost when she was kidnapped and very publicly criticised for abandoning her daughter. I saw too that if women are passionately engaged in a story perhaps it makes them better reporters because they never give up but ferret out the details in a determined effort ‘to bear witness’. But that also comes with a cost. Marie Colvin was determined never to give up and was tragically killed in Homs in February, 2012. Several women reporters I have written about after facing relentless dangers and witnessing the carnage of bombs and IEDs finally succumb to post traumatic stress disorder. Some, like Christiane Amanpour of CNN, and Janine di Giovanni, now freelance, are very successful and offer a powerful role model to myriad young girls emerging from media college who want to emulate them. But, as I was repeatedly told, achieving that success has not been an easy ride and what may seem like a glamorous and exciting lifestyle is behind the scenes, dangerous, demanding and dirty. It is made tolerable by the support of colleagues and a solid media organisation. But even that can go wrong as when Lara Logan was attacked and brutally raped in Tahrir Square and came within an inch of her life. And she was one of the most experienced women reporters in the field. I know that twenty years on it’s a more complicated world and any young woman, not just a reporter, will face a difficult time in myriad ways getting a job, staying employed in that job, staying sane and – if she wants it – having a family.
As for my daughter I still tell her she can have anything she wants if she is prepared to work for it. But she is clever enough to know that is only half true.