May Craig: “Tough as a Lobster”
May Craig (1889-1975) spent most of her career as the Washington correspondent for the Maine-based Gannet newspaper chain. She provided her Maine readers with a keen-eyed and sharp-tongued look at the nation’s capital in her “Inside Washington” column for some forty years.
She was the first woman to attend Franklin Roosevelt’s press briefings, an original member of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Press Circle, a weekly press conference that was only open to women journalists,* and a regular at presidential press briefings from Truman to Johnson. A colleague once described her as “the Washington press gallery nemesis of all evasive politicians." She was a frequent panelist on Meet the Press. She always wore a hat and gloves on the program. She said it was so that people would remember who she was, as if her pointed and relentless questioning wasn’t enough to make her memorable
As a war correspondent during WWII, she reported on V-bomb raids in London, the Battle of Normandy, and the liberation of Paris, but her primary focus was the experience of Maine’s G.I’s in the European theater.
Throughout her career, she fought to open doors for women reporters, including getting a women’s bathroom installed outside the congressional press galley. Her most important accomplishment for women’s rights was the “May Craig Amendment”, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex, which became federal law as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Reminiscing late in her career, she said that “Bloody Mary of England once said that when she died they would find `Calais' graven on her heart.** When I die, there will be the word `facilities,' so often it has been used to prevent me from doing what men reporters could do.”***
*The press circle gave women journalists access to news and helped save many of their jobs at a time when newspapers were cutting reporters: if newspapers wanted to cover Eleanor they had to hire women reporters. According to Eleanor, the intention was that the conferences would cover subjects of special interest to women and would avoid what she described as “my husband’s side of the news.” They also gave her an unprecedented national platform.
**A reference to the loss of Calais, England’s last continental possession, during Mary Tudor’s reign. The city had been under England’s control since 1347 and was the main port through which English wool was exported.
***In World War II, the United States military did not allow women journalists to travel closer to the front than women service members, which effectively meant field hospitals with nursing detachments. The military justified the policy in terms of the difficulty of providing housing and latrine facilities. (A similar concern fueled regulations against allowing women in combat.)
And lest you think the question of facilities was limited to the battlefield, I offer you this blog post by author Nancy B. Kennedy on the facilities problems suffered by women members of Congress: “Democracy Demands a Pair of Pants.”
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A different path to being a war correspondent aka the woman on the spot
The Great War provided new opportunities for women journalists.*
No women received official press accreditation with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during World War I, but a number of female journalists reached the front as “visiting correspondents.” Soon after the war began, the Saturday Evening Post, which had the largest circulation of any American magazine at the time, sent popular novelists Cora Harris and Mary Roberts Rinehart to Europe as reporters. (Rinehart was the first journalist to visit the frontline trenches.) Freelancers, veteran newspaperwomen, reporters for women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping and Ladies’ Home Journal, and journalists with assignments from general interest magazines, like Scribner’s and Collier’s, followed in their footsteps.
At the same time, two women who were already reporting from Europe, May Birkhead of the New York Herald and Carolyn Wilson of the Chicago Tribune, added war correspondent to their job description. Both wrote society and fashion news from Paris before the war.**
Birkhead, a seamstress who stumbled into a thirty-year career as a journalist with a firsthand account of the sinking of the Titanic, wrote feature stories about the war and later reported on the Versailles peace conference. She earned a commendation from General John Pershing for her work.
Wilson, who continued to write her illustrated fashion column throughout the war, filed thoughtful political analyses, human interest stories about American soldiers in the trenches, and reported pieces from both sides of the front. The Tribune described her war reporting as “the news of the battle front as a woman sees it.” She became the subject of the news rather than a reporter in 1915, when she was briefly imprisoned in Berlin on suspicion of espionage.
(To my surprise, another Chicago Tribune reporter followed Carolyn Wilson’s path in World War II, though with somewhat less verve. Anne Bruyere, like Birkhead and Wilson, was a fashion reporter in Paris when the war broke out. While she did not make it to the front, she reported on conditions in occupied Paris and later on the experiences of American soldiers, WACS, and Red Cross volunteers in liberated Paris—all the while reporting on French fashion.)
*If you want to dive more deeply into this topic, I highly recommend Chris Dubbs’ An Unladylike Profession: American Women War Correspondents in World War I
**This type of writing is a type of foreign correspondence in its own right though it is seldom treated as such, precisely because it was aimed at women and therefore not to be taken seriously
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Anne O’Hare McCormick: “Freedom Reporter”
Like Sigrid Schultz, Anne O’Hara McCormick (1880-1954) became a foreign correspondent because she was in the right place at the right time.
She already had experience as a journalist before she became a foreign correspondent. After her graduation from a private Catholic high school in 1898, she went to work for the Catholic Universe Bulletin in Cleveland, Ohio, , where she rose to the position of assistant editor.
In 1910, at the age of thirty, she married Francis J McCormick. Francis was a wealthy engineer who imported large equipment based in Dayton Ohio who traveled extensively in Europe for his job. Anne went with him.*
Like other working women of the period, Anne left her job when she got married,** but she continued to write occasional pieces on a freelance basis which appeared in magazines like Catholic World, Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1921, after a piece of hers titled “New Italy of the Italians” ran in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, Anne, wrote to Carl Van Anda, managing editor of the Times, asking if she could write news stories for him from Europe. His answer: Try it.
Try it she did. Her first regular by-lined article appeared in the Times in February 1921: a piece about Sinn Fein titled “Ireland’s ‘Black and Tans’.” Anne soon became a regular freelance correspondent for the Times. (The paper’s publisher, Adolph Ochs, refused to hire women as staff correspondents.) Her lack of a staff position proved to be a blessing of sorts, Unlike staff foreign correspondents, who were assigned to a specific location, Anne was free to travel as dictated by her interests, or Francis’s business assignments.
Small, matronly, soft spoken and charming, Anne used her networking skills get interviews with any one who mattered, including Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt—even without the credentials of a staff correspondent. She occasionally covered a breaking news item, but for the most part she wrote in-depth think pieces for the Times' magazine that ranged in subject from political analysis—she was one of the first to predict Mussolini’s rise to power—to a comparison of street lighting in different European cities and what the differences said about them. She wrote stories about developments in the United States as well as in Europe, most notably pieces on the Florida real estate boom in 1925 and the “New South” in 1930.
In 1936, after Ochs’ death, his successor made her a full-time salaried “freedom reporter.” Her assignment was to travel the world and write three world affairs columns each week, reporting on conditions in places where she believed freedom was threatened. He also made her a member of the Times’ editorial board, a position she held until her death in 1954.
In 1937, she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for her dispatches and feature articles from Europe.***
She continued to report from abroad after the United States entered World War II. When the war ended, she served as a UNESCO delegate in 1946 and 1948.
*I spend a lot of time considering whether or not to call the subjects of my work by their first name. In the case of Sigrid Schultz, I chose to use her last name once she was an adult because I was uncomfortable first-naming her while I called her male colleagues by their last names. Since there are two McCormicks here, I have opted for Anne and, to the extent that he appears, Francis.
**Often they didn’t have a choice. Many employers refused to allow married women to remain on the job. (As I have pointed out before, this did not apply to women working as household servants or other working class jobs. It is all too easy to view the history of women at work through the lens of the middle and upper class experience.)
***She was not, however, the first woman to win a Pulitzer. That honor belongs to two sisters, Laura Elizabeth Richards and Maude Howe Elliott, who collaborated on a biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe. They were awarded the very first Pulitzer in biography in 1917.
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