American Women Reporting from the Front

Dubbs, the author of follows his 2017 book The AEF in Print, which used actual clippings to give us an account of American war correspondents during the Great War with a more focused look at the nearly three dozen American women who reported on the conflict, whom he rather neglected in his earlier work.

Few of these women are likely to be familiar today, except novelist Edith Wharton, certainly, and perhaps then-world famous famous “girl” reporter Nellie Bly and radical journalist Louise Bryant. But at the time the others were also rather well known, even quite famous, such as the popular mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, or “Southern” novelist and journalist Corra Mae Harris, both of whom worked for the Saturday Evening Post.

These women covered the war from virtually every theatre, often having to battle male prejudices to get to the front lines, one of the many obstacles these women had to face to get the story of the war. But they did get the story, often at considerable personal risk; Irish-American social reformer and veteran foreign correspondent Mary Boyle O’Reilly broke the story of German atrocities in Belgium, and as a result was briefly detained by the Kaiser’s minions.

An Unladylike Profession is an excellent read not only for those interested in women as war correspondents, but because of how those journalists brought unique perspectives to the reporting of the war.

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Note: An Unladylike Profession is also available in audio- and e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium