The Women Who Wrote the War

The Riveting Saga of World War II's Daredevil Women Correspondents

By: Nancy Caldwell Sorel

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

The compelling tale of a hundred brave American women who after leaving their families joined combat-zone fighting during World War II to chronicle and report faithfully back to the States.

Nancy Sorel’s portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility. Their experience was at once wide-ranging and intimate, devastating at one moment, heartwarming the next.

In this important and timely book, Nancy Sorel eloquently demonstrates the role they played in bringing the war to the folks back home. In their ranks we encounter world-famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only western photographer to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR and among the first to photograph Buchenwald; Martha Gellhhorn, writer and wife of Ernest Hemingway, who reported the menace of fascism from the beginning; Lee Miller, legendary photographer, famously snapped taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub in 1945; the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, recording in her "Letter from Paris" the bleak realities of life in post-liberation France; and Marguerite Higgins, who dared enter the concentration camp at Dachau just ahead of the American army. These brave reporters and dozens more formed the crucial link in the long chain of women’s struggle for full equality in a profession hitherto dominated by men.

In her graphic, seamless narrative, Nancy Sorel weaves together the lives and times of these gutsy, incomparable women, assuring them their rightful place in this century’s history.

©1999, 2011 Nancy Caldwell Sorel (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Nonfiction Account of WW2 Female News Reporters

This book is a non-fiction account of various women war correspondents prior to, during, and immediately following World War 2. There experiences were amazing and inspiring. They struggled to fight their way into jobs that were normally filled by men only. I learned that it was no easy task to get an assignment to cover any part of the war because of their gender. I also learned a great deal about the time period and both the European and Pacific fronts of the war. The fact that the author was able to interview these women about their experience is absolutely priceless. The things these courageous women saw and the stories they were able to write about and photograph must have been etched into their memories for the rest of their lives. In many cases they risked their lives to get the story to the folks back home.
I was sad to see the book end and would love to know more about each woman and what followed after the war because their lives were so altered.
As always, Tavia Gilbert delivers a fabulous performancs as narrator.

Worth every minute

I've learned so much. I hope to find some of the Life and Vogue magazines to see their photography. These women ... had been called and protected by a higher power; reporting and documenting not only on the inhumane condition of war and the unspeakable cruelty humans are capable of. A glimpse into their life's and success ... what these woman had been capable of reporting on/living through ...

Hemingway

Read like a Romance Novel. Of course you don’t want to leave out the details, but, despite a great story of Female Reporters in World War II, the romantic escapades of “journalists, especially with an obsession with Hemingway, made it more like a romance novel.

Wonderful insight into women and WWII

I’m always fascinated to learn more about the role of women in all facets of history. There are many brave women who either knowingly or unknowingly changed history by being there. The women in this book took risks professionally, and life threatening to get the story and report the war and its atrocities. I’m going to have to find biographies on some of these individual women.

Good read

Well written and an interesting perspective on the war , worth the read time