The Nine Muses Magazine’s highlight of female figures in journalism - Women’s History Month special
The history of journalism offers no shortage of boundaries, formal and otherwise, on who is allowed to cover what, where from, and under what terms. More often than not, women are tasked with reporting from the edges. In honor of Women’s History Month, we are highlighting a set of female journalists with a certain kind of audacity - anything milder than that for this occasion might send these subjects rolling in their own grave.
In 1887, journalist Nellie Bly took an extremely dangerous first assignment at New York World: faking insanity to check herself into a mental institution for an exposé.
Elizabeth Jane Cochran was born in 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. In January 1885, at 21 years old, she was scouted by the Pittsburgh Dispatch after writing a confronting response to the newspaper’s sexist column: ‘What Girls Are Good For’ under the pen name ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’ by which the editor, George Madden, was visibly impressed. During her time in the Dispatch, Bly handled topics that were still considered controversial at the time - the lives of working women, corruption, and divorce - and for that same reason, lost funding for her column. Not succumbing to demotion, Bly moved to New York, and soon after, got signed to Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, New York World.
It almost made sense how going inside the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island was going to be the first assignment the newspaper would give a journalist like Bly. In her 10 day stay in the asylum, Bly witnessed a series of unthinkable patient mistreatment. She reported patients being tied up for showers, ice-cold, not properly bathed by the staff, only scrubbed by one of the other patients, and afterwards clothed by merely a thin nightgown. Bly reported that there was never enough food, and the little portions they had were usually presented carelessly along a dirty, messy table. The food was devoid of seasoning, hungry women attempted to eat whatever they were given by adding mustard and vinegar, which didn’t help. There were occasions where the women had to consume fresh fish, only boiled in water.
The nature of the asylum was easily revealed by how they treated Bly’s admission, she reported, “From the moment I entered the insane ward on the island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in normal life. Yet, strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be by all except one physician, whose kindness and gentle ways I shall not soon forget.” Loud were the implications that many of the women committed might not even be ill in the first place, but rather sent to confinement by families, by husbands, people who wielded that much power. Bly called the place a ‘human rat-trap’, as in it’s easy to get into, and impossible to get out of.
Bly’s exposé was followed by a 1887 release of the series ‘Inside the Madhouse’, and was an instant hit. It resulted in the municipality committing $50,000 for asylum management, that only the seriously ill should be admitted. The asylum finally closed its door seven years after her exposé. Bly’s work would then popularize undercover journalists, creating the term ‘stunt girls’
With a different set of stakes, Journalist Martha Gellhorn, became one of the first female war correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, 1937.
Martha Gellhorn was born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri to a progressive couple. Her mother was a civic leader, a suffragist - a person in the 19th or early 20th century who advocated for extending voting rights for women; and her father was a physician who also teaches medicine at Washington University. Gellhorn had been active in protests ever since she was a kid.
During her time traveling all around Europe, Gellhorn contributed to several magazines, one including fashion coverages in Vogue. She mentioned witnessing the rise of fascism that started from Germany. It was around this time Gellhorn got more active in the pacifist movement. In 1934, Martha Gellhorn returned to the US and became the youngest member on the team of sixteen field investigators in the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Association (FERA) assigned to report on the Great Depression.
During a family vacation in Florida, 1936, Martha Gellhorn met writer Ernest Hemingway, he introduced her to the publishing house P.F. Collier & Son’s, who gave her the opportunity to cover the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn began reporting for Collier and the New Yorker, writing about the bombings of Barcelona and life inside the hospitals. Gellhorn and Hemingway got married in November 1940. The two travelled to China for the Second Sino-Japanese War, then back to London, for World War II. Hemingway, despite being both her collaborator and contemporary, started displaying hostile behavior to suppress her career out of professional jealousy, packaging it as a need for a traditional wife. In 1943, while reporting the French Army’s efforts against the Germans in Cassino, Italy, Hemingway wrote to her: “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?” This animosity hit a new low when on June 5th 1944, Hemingway stole Gellhorn’s credits from Collier’s to cover the Allied invasion on Normandy. She was denied entry on the flight, and it was then revealed that Hemingway shut down all her chances of getting press credentials to. Martha Gellhorn then boarded a hospital ship from the British coast by disguising herself as a stretcher bearer on the medical team, right until the ship sailed, she made sure to hide in the bathroom to avoid being seen. As they arrived on Omaha beach, Gellhorn unofficially became the first female reporter on ground.
Martha Gellhorn continued to be a war correspondent for over sixty years, covering the Vietnam war (1966), the Arab-Israel conflict (1967), even the US' invasion of Panama in 1989, at 81 years old. Gellhorn stayed prioritising the people who are excluded from the record; the impoverished, the displaced. She consistently condemns US foreign policies after World War II and remained an outspoken, bold pacifist until her death.
Also documenting the war, Lee Miller, surrealist photographer turned photojournalist, took pictures of the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and Dachau that remain some of its most memorable records.
Lee Miller was born in 1907, Poughkeepsie, New York. Discovered by Condé Nast after a near-accident on a Manhattan street, Miller was quickly installed as a Vogue model at the age of nineteen, her image circulating through the work of photographers like Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Arnold Genthe.
This endeavor was short-lived as Miller decided to move to Paris to learn from Man Ray, renowned fashion and portrait photographer. She admitted to approaching him in a bar, outright declaring, “My name is Lee Miller, and I’m your new student.” Around this time, Miller came out with a studio experimentation where she rediscovered the Sabattier effect, and with Man Ray, perfected it. They called it ‘Solarisation’. Miller leveled up her reputation the day she opened her own studio in City of Light, where she took portraits of literary and cultural figures. Some of which include Leonora Carrington, Jean Cocteau, and Pablo Picasso - who apparently produced more than 1,000 photos with Miller. She was also commissioned photographs by prominent fashion houses: Schiaparelli and Chanel. In 1934, Vanity Fair gave her a shoutout as one of the most ‘distinguished living photographers’. She met her husband, Roland Penrose, on a trip to Paris, the first of many after a period of three years living in Cairo, Egypt, photographing pyramids and dunes. By the late 1930s, she had relocated to London with Penrose whose position in the British avant-garde - as a collector, organiser, and later co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts - placed them amongst cultural circles. Their home was neatly fashioned into a spot of convergence for artists of all kinds of discipline.
It’s around this time that Miller began working for British Vogue, producing fashion, portrait, and documentary photography. Came along the famous defiant headline of the September 1940 issue of British Vogue, consisting of Lee Miller’s pictures of the Blitz bombing campaign titled: ‘There is Vogue in Spite of it All!’ The issue was initially rejected by the superiors due to paper rationing, but fought for by Miller after bombs struck down the Vogue sign. Audrey Withers, who was recently crowned editor that same September, greenlit the pictures. Miller’s pictures supported Withers’ efforts to reposition Vogue as part of the wartime effort, adding reportage, public service messaging, and documentation of attacks on civilians.
In 1944, Miller took the serious pivot to being a war correspondent for the US military. Lee Miller was moving around, capturing underground stations during the Blitz, camping out in the Allied field hospital in Normandy. She was one of the first war correspondents and photographers to enter the Dachau concentration camp after its liberation. “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE,” wrote Lee Miller in a message accompanying her photos of Dachau and Buchenwald to Vogue. The photos were later titled: ‘Believe It’. On April 30th, 1945, Lee Miller and longtime photography partner David E. Scherman entered the Munich apartment of one Adolf Hitler, only hours after Dachau. Scherman photographed her in the bath tub, with her boots - carrying the collective dirt of the camp - set deliberately on Hitler’s mat, staining it.