Battling for news: The rise of the woman reporter

by Anne Sebba

Anne Sebba presents a compelling history of the struggles of women to be admitted to professional journalism and so obtain the right to report from places where they were felt to have no place - most notably, war-zones. Sebba, herself a former Reuters reporter, recounts the evolution of the woman reporter, from Miss Wreford during the Risorgimento and Lady Florence Dixie at the Boer War, through pioneers such as Virginia Cowles and Martha Gellhorn, to the recent heroics of Marie Colvin, remembered in a new preface to this edition.'An important book because it contradicts the myths that is it harder for women to work in difficult situations; that women only report the hospitals and orphanages side of war; that it is easier to get hired in the first place.' Janine di Giovanni, Sunday Times'Admirable [and] well-rearched.' Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books'Sebba presents a coherent picture of women fighting not only for their own rights but for the rights of newspaper readers.' Roy Greenslade, Guardian

Genres: Journalism, Nonfiction

301 pages, Paperback

First published February 16, 1995

About the author

Anne Sebba began her writing career at the BBC world service, Arabic section, while still a student. After graduating from King’s College, London in Modern European History, she worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in London and Rome, the first woman Reuters accepted on their Graduate Trainee Scheme. In 1975 she moved to New York with her husband and first baby returning two years later with a second baby and first book. From then on she was launched into a freelance career as a journalist, biographer, cruise lecturer and occasional broadcaster and is now also an officially accredited Nadfas lecturer. She has worked for many writers’ organisations including PEN Writers in Prison Committee and the Society of Authors chairing its Management Committee from 2013- 2015 and followed her bestselling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, based on the discovery of 15 secret letters which Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest Simpson, with Les Parisiennes : How the Women of Paris lived, loved and died in the 1940s published in the UK and US in 2016.

Reviews

[Daisy May Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this in the darkest depths of a bookshop, and it took me a while to realise that I had read some of Sebba's work before. I'd enjoyed her excellent and gutwrenching Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation, and come to realise that Sebba is very good at telling the stories that maybe haven't been told before. This spotlight on 'herstory' appeals to me, and once I made the connection between the author, I picked up Battling For News with distinct interest. Here, Sebba turns to the tellers of the stories themselves; women reporters, and traces the history of them within media.

It's a remarkable book though one that took me a while to get into. Once I did, however, I was hooked. This is fascinating stuff and it's Sebba's eye for detail that makes it what it is. From Kate Adie having to take curling tongs with her (in.the.middle.of.a.warzone.) because viewers complained about her hair, through to Clare Hollingworth being sent on location and having to phone Harrods in the middle of the night for a new set of luggage, this book is full of eccentric and moving notes. Perhaps the most acute of these for me, was in the chapters considering the Gulf War. One reporter packs her bags, and spends several nights sleeping on the floor of her bedroom in order to re-acclimatise herself to the demands of wartime reporting. She is ready to go.

She is also eighty.

Clare Hollingworth is never sent to report on the Gulf War because she is "too old".

What remarkable women these were - and, indeed, are.

[Jenny McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Sebba’s Battling for News: Women Reporters from the Risorgimento to Tiananmen Square (1994) is a compendium of vignettes profiling dozens of female journalists over the past 150 years. An excellent addition to herstory, Sebba’s book covers all nature of journalist, notably the long tradition of the female war correspondent, beginning with Jessie White, who commenced her life-long career in 1860 embedded within the ranks of Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, and ending with BBC journalist Katie Adie’s coverage of the 1986 U.S. bombing of Tripoli and the 1989 student revolt in Tiananmen Square. In story after story of intrepid women risking all in pursuit of the news, Sebba describes the systematic prejudice they encountered and their heroic battles to overcome myriad barriers in order to do their job.

In 1898, novelist Arnold Bennett wrote in Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide: “Is there any sexual reason why a woman should be a less accomplished journalist than a man? I can find none...” Yet as Sebba shows in the years since Bennett’s statement, the issue of a woman’s suitability for the profession has been constantly debated: During a war, are women a distraction to the soldiers and therefore dangerous? Are women emotionally biased, less objective, more partisan? Are they oriented more towards people rather than facts and statistics?

See full column "Women Writing War" at Bookslut: http://www.bookslut.com/the_bombshell...