An Unladylike Profession

American Women War Correspondents in World War I

By: Chris Dubbs

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves - and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war.

Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith Wharton, Nellie Bly, and more than 30 other American women who worked as war reporters. As Dubbs shows, stories by these journalists brought in women from the periphery of war and made them active participants - fully engaged and equally heroic, if bearing different burdens and making different sacrifices. Women journalists traveled from belligerent capitals to the front lines to report on the conflict. But their experiences also brought them into contact with social transformations, political unrest, labor conditions, campaigns for women’s rights, and the rise of revolutionary socialism.

An eye-opening look at women’s war reporting, An Unladylike Profession is a portrait of a sisterhood from the guns of August to the corridors of Versailles.

©2020 by Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (P)2020 by Blackstone Publishing

"Danger, Danger, Mrs. Robinson..."

I came across this title quite accidentally, after having listened to the deeply personal "The Soul of Care," by Dr. Arthur Kleinman. I was ready for a completely new topic – so it caught my eye that Pulitizer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton was among a handful of curious and brave women who were compelled to do a deep dive into the front lines of WW1 – traveling, in some cases, from Paris to Siberia in 1914 just to get close to an important story about the conditions and hardships of the war. Women were not taken seriously (so what else is new?) in this journalistic endeavor - but their stories and buzz from the frontlines had large followings back in the United States. In the name of street cred and sheer chutzpah, they became nurses, disguised themselves as men to chase stories for the Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines that had large circulations of readers. If truth be told, I think the book might be better read than listened to. While the seasoned narrator has a pleasant voice, the story-telling, in this case, was monotonous in tone and I found I was tuning out when I wanted to listen - as I wanted to make the distinction between each of the women reporters, as their stories wove in and out, unfolded and doubled-back, chapter by chapter. They ended up blending together in clips and what felt like flat narration. I wanted to be able to remember a particular reporter/writer, to remember who stood out - and it continually made me wonder if it was the book, or if it was the narrator. Still, an interesting subject and worthy of learning about.

A good quick read, cool new history!

Lots of amazing women and their contributions to the profession of journalism, as well as the contemporary American understanding of WWI. It's a quick read and I would definitely recommend if you're interested in WWI and/or women's history. Bernadette Dunne is a great narrator!