Battles of the First World War Podcast · Mike Cunha

"An Unladylike Profession" by Chris Dubbs - American Women War Correspondents in WW1

·47 min·1 clip

Women had been largely forgotten. The host starts there, with the women who covered the Great War after being told, in all the usual ways, that war journalism belonged to men. Chris Dubbs' book gives the episode its path, and Kristen Stelfox follows it with a good eye for the practical barriers: gender expectations, official limits, and the habits of a profession that trusted men's voices first. Edith Wharton sits close to the middle of the conversation. She arrived as more than a curiosity near the war. She was a known American writer, and that fame gave her access. Her American neutrality helped too, especially when aid and money still had to move. That is where the episode gets more interesting. It does not turn these women into mascots. It asks what they could see because they were there. Stelfox returns to Wharton's image of the wounded arriving after the flags, and the host lets that detail carry some weight. The point is consequence, not pageantry. Sister Gabrielle brings the Argonne down to a human scale, a person instead of a broad battlefield blur. By the end, the conversation has kept several threads alive: names, books, access, American identity, women's history, and the odd work of restoring people to the record. Stelfox also connects it to her work on slavery in the Atlantic and women's history curriculum, so the episode lands on memory as something people still have to teach on purpose.

As heard by us

Women war correspondents are treated here as a real force in wartime reporting, not a footnote.

This episode treats women war correspondents as central to World War I journalism, not a side note. Chris Dubbs's An Unladylike Profession gives it structure, and the focus stays on how American women pushed into a field that was still largely closed to them, even with official…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want Great War history told through the women who forced their way into war reporting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Battles of the First World War Podcast