WAR WOMEN AND THE NEWS

The newsroom in the 1920s and ’30s was a man’s world. Women were seen as too fragile to cover anything but childcare, fashion, beauty and health. But with the Great Depression came a role for women field investigators such as Dorothea Lange and Martha Gellhorn. By WWII, female reporters were risking their lives to report the war. Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Kirkpatrick, Dickey Chapelle and Dorothy Thompson, among others, covered the war and became famous in their own right. Given the subject of the volume, it’s a wonder that photographs are not used more often to break up the frequent double-page spreads of dense print. Also, the subtitle is misleading, since much space is devoted to the decades before and after the war, and the featured photographers sometimes seem lost in the background information. Still, this is an interesting general work that can lead readers to such recent biographies as Elizabeth Partridge’s Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998), Susan Goldman Rubin’s Margaret Bourke-White (1999) and George Sullivan’s Berenice Abbott, Photographer (2006) (websites, notes, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)