The ‘awkward’ squad: British women foreign correspondents during the interwar years

Abstract

During the interwar years, gendered inequalities in newspaper newsrooms and social prejudice against 'mobile' women combined to force women who wanted to work as foreign correspondents to seek alternative routes to raising their voices on international affairs. Women's reportage can be found in a range of platforms from the mainstream press to early journals of humanitarian communication and literary magazines. When women reported for major newspapers they were often precariously freelance and the gendered nature of their treatment by newspaper hierarchies emphasised their, and all women's, outsider status when it came to international politics. Women's international journalism, often rooted in the humanitarian tradition, concentrated on telling the lives of minor characters and ordinary people, and offers insights into individual human suffering at a time of great international anxiety. Their writing, often anonymous or in overlooked niche publications, represents a missing actor on public opinion at this critical time.

'Ici et par toute la terre': Paris, British universities and the French study abroad in the inter-war

“…Articles pushing back at this narrative with positivity and excitement about the city and the Sorbonne began appearing in the British press. This new message penned by anonymous ‘correspondents’ – but quite possibly by women journalists, employed as freelancers abroad by British newspaper titles who wouldn't give them career jobs (Lonsdale, 2022: 391–393) – reached into the homes of young working class women, because they were syndicated by national titles and press agencies through the regional and the local press. Interestingly, the International Federation of University Women encouraged members to send pieces to ‘journals interested in the advancement of the position of women’ like Time and Tide and The Woman's Leader but also The Manchester Guardian which frequently carried articles promoting student life to women during the inter-war.…”

Mujeres Periodistas Españolas en la Cobertura de la Primavera Árabe: Desmontando los Estereotipos del Corresponsal de Guerra

“…a cobertura de los principales acontecimientos internacionales del siglo XX estuvo liderada por hombres, desde editores de periódicos hasta enviados especiales o corresponsales (Lonsdale, 2021). Ese acervo histórico, unido a la influencia del cine y los medios audiovisuales, ha contribuido a crear una figura estereotipada del corresponsal de guerra (García Mingo, 2020).…”