War, Women and the News by Catherine Gourley

Gourly, C. (2007). War, Women and the News: How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover World War I. (p. 198). Athenum Books for Young Readers.

ISBN: 0689877528

$21.99 hardcover


Reader's Annotation: This book describes how women journalists became war reporters and photojournalists on the front lines of World War II.


Summary: This book ends with a discussion of Christiane Amanpour, who has covered news in war zones for CNN for more than 20 years. She is following in the footsteps of women like Margaret Bourke White and Therese Bonney who struggled to be allowed to cover the news during World War II. Before the war began, women who wrote for newspapers were called "newshens" and their work was confined to the women's pages of newspapers. They wrote mostly society gossip and housekeeping tips. As the war began, however, a handful of brave women became the first female journalists to write and photograph from the front lines of battle. This book tells their stories.


Genre: nonfiction, war, career, women's history


Series : This book is not part of a series.


Evaluation: This book did a good job of describing how several women broke into the field of journalism during World War II, though it was occasionally difficult to keep track of who was who, or where in the War the story was. I still think it would be a great addition to any history lesson on WWII.

Why it belongs in a Tween Collection: The combination of photos, story, and clips from newspapers helped to keep what sometimes felt like a rather long book flowing. As an adult, I found it interesting to understand some of the backstory on photos I'd seen hundreds of times, but I'm not sure that same thrill would exist for tweens, but maybe it would. Also a good illustration for tweens about a time in history when women really had to struggle to break into a field dominated by men.

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Reviews:
From School Library Journal

Grade 6–8—Gourley's passion is sharper than her focus in this introduction to more than a dozen writers and journalists who "refused to be left behind." After opening with a glimpse of photographer Dickey Chapelle, who convinced a reluctant colonel that the lack of women's "facilities" in a war zone would be a solvable issue, the author launches into a lengthy but incidental account of how the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression opened the door a crack for female field investigators and "sob sisters," some of whom, though dismissively transformed into "paper dolls" or "newshens," courageously followed the GIs overseas in pursuit of the story. Darting from Europe to the Pacific and back (with a stop to record Dorothea Lange's long-suppressed coverage of the displacement of Japanese Americans on the West Coast), Gourley provides an overview of major events, but only fragmentary looks at what her subjects actually experienced or wrote. There are also frequent disconnects between the narrative and accompanying pictures; some pictures are tantalizingly described but not reproduced, others are irrelevant or details of shots shown later in full, and a quote inset into a view of German soldiers marching through Warsaw specifically refers to other-than-Polish refugees. Capped by massive resource lists, this is a worthy work, but more loosely organized and less likely to intrigue readers than Penny Colman's Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II (Crown, 2002).—John Peters, New York Public Library
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