Beyond the 'woman's angle': Australian women war reporters during World War II

© 2013 Dr. Jeannine Ann BakerThis thesis is the first comprehensive account of the groundbreaking Australian women journalists who reported World War II from Australia, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Since the first Australian woman covered the Boer War in 1900, Australian women journalists have been tenacious in their determination to report from close to the battlefield, and from beyond the ‘woman’s angle’. This thesis argues that Australian women war reporters were more numerous, productive and significant than the prior historiography has indicated. Through analysis of official military and government documents from the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the journalism and the recollections of American, British and Australian journalists, it interrogates the ways that the military perceived, defined and controlled women war reporters. In revealing the diversity and breadth of Australian women’s war reportage this study also examines Australian press culture and attitudes towards women journalists, and reveals the various ways women reporters manipulated or rejected gendered assumptions about their role in journalism. The thesis will demonstrate that the resistance to the presence of women war reporters in operational areas during World War II was particularly strong within the Australian and British military establishment, but government authorities, newspaper editors and male journalists all opposed granting women reporters equality with their male colleagues. Australian and British women reporters faced more challenges in gaining accreditation as war correspondents than American women. Attitudes to women reporters – as expressed in official policy or voiced by individual male editors, military officers and journalists – were shaped by ingrained cultural beliefs about the nature of sexual difference, and by gendered understandings of both journalism and war. The military’s suspicion of women journalists was influenced by the perceived triviality of women’s journalism, and the belief that their visible difference from the troops could undermine military operations. Not until late 1942 in Australia, and mid–1944 in Europe, were British and Australian women permitted to become accredited war correspondents. Both the British and Australian military believed the primary role of women war reporters was to publicise the work of the women’s auxiliary services on the home front. The military’s definition of ‘war correspondent’ as a male reporter of frontline conflict resulted in the construction of the subsidiary gendered category of ‘woman war correspondent’ as a reporter of non-combat war news for an imagined female audience. These definitions forced the formulation of policies and procedures aimed at preventing the incursion of women reporters into the combat zone. The military’s conviction that women did not belong at the front was fortified by arguments about women’s physical vulnerability, their lack of affinity with technology, and their inability to understand or cope with war conditions. Even when British and Australian women war correspondents were finally permitted to report from military theatres in the South-West Pacific and Europe - following the intervention of the more progressive American military commanders - they were expected to be temporary observers, confined to the periphery of operational areas, and limited to writing about non-combat subjects. Despite all these visible and invisible barriers, a small group of remarkable Australian women war reporters successfully reported the war, and its aftermath, from beyond the ‘woman’s angle’