When journalist May Craig tried to cover the first atomic test at Bikini in the Pacific in 1946, she was blocked from boarding a Navy ship because there were no facilities for women. But when she earlier covered World War II, she overturned many rules designed to bar women from planes and ships.
Photojournalist Marvin Breckinridge Patterson became a broadcaster after having described a war scene so vividly over a London dinner with Edward R. Murrow and his wife that Murrow, her old college friend, asked her to broadcast weekly. She became the first woman to do so for CBS from Europe.
And Esther Bubley, a shy girl from Minnesota who worked as a photographic lab technician in Washington when she was in her 20s, spent her spare time taking pictures of Washington preparing for war. Her photographs caught the attention of the Office of War Information, and she was later hired to document the stateside civilian war effort.
"They followed very different paths, but they brought a fresh vision, fresh perception and fresh eyes to the whole business of documenting the war," said Dr. Billington at the opening of a new exhibition, "Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters During World War II," on view in the Madison Gallery.
In addition to their careers, another similarity among the eight people featured in the exhibition is that the Library holds their photographs, notes, reports, broadcast transcripts and personal letters. Beverly Brannan, Prints and Photographs Division curator of photographs, noticed the common thread and proposed the exhibition two years ago.
"Until the beginning of World War II, women journalists had a difficult time getting on the front pages of newspapers," said Ms. Brannan. "They were relegated to the society section until Eleanor Roosevelt offered women more opportunities" by allowing herself to be interviewed only by women when she was first lady. "By the time most male reporters were called off to the war, women were ready to take their places on the homefront, and some went overseas. By the end of the war, 127 women correspondents were accredited." Few did combat reporting.
Said Irene Burnham, chief of the Interpretive Programs Office: "Our hope is that this exhibition brings the women to the attention of researchers and that it will become a centerpiece of studies for women in journalism."
The exhibition, made possible by a gift from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, marks the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The September opening commemorated the 1919 founding of the Women's National Press Club by a group of Washington newswomen, one of whom was Craig, a former Southern suffragist.
"I think its safe to say none of these women were shrinking violets. They had chutzpah," said Kathi Ann Brown, a historian who worked as a consulting curator on the exhibition.
Besides Craig, Mrs. Patterson and Ms. Bubley, the other journalists in the exhibition are: Th‚rŠse Bonney, Clare Boothe Luce, Janet Flanner, Dorothea Lange and Toni Frissell.
Bonney (1894-1978) used her knowledge of photography and the publishing industry to produce graphic books and public exhibitions of wartime atrocities against civilians.
"It is hard, hard work -- bristling with risks -- lucky if you come out of it, but a magnificent chance to contribute your brains and talents to a great cause," Bonney said of her war coverage.
Luce (1903-1987) considered herself primarily a playwright, but reported on and photographed the war from ringside seats with her husband, Henry R. Luce, publisher of Time, Life and Fortune. "Because of her marriage to Henry Luce, she was a personal friend of a lot of wartime leaders," said Ms. Brown.
"Now I've stopped writing plays to play at being a war correspondent for a little while. ... why shouldn't I try my hand at interpreting the world crisis?" Luce asked.
Luce, who went on to become a congresswoman, was harrowed by the war. Her first experience of it was fodder for Europe in the Spring, which chronicled her four-month visit to "a world where men have decided to die together because they are unable to find a way to live together."
Flanner (1892-1978), famous for her "Letter from Paris" for the New Yorker, made weekly radio broadcasts from concentration camps and towns liberated in Europe by the Allies toward the end of the war, though she struggled with the short form and did not believe it to be her forte. "She wanted to prove she could do it," said Ms. Brown.
In the following passage, Flanner speculated on her reportage: "I haven't the wisdom to know the real truth about anything, and my half- minded, half-hearted sorties into the facts, and then my insolently sure- sounding reports on them, are beginning to terrify me. Who dares tell the truth, even the little he knows?"
Lange (1895-1965) noted the dignity of Japanese Americans as she portrayed their ordeal in U.S. government internment camps. Lange confronted civil rights and racial issues in her photographs by juxtaposing "signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration," said Martha Hopkins, exhibit director for the Interpretive Programs Office. "Lange quickly found herself at odds with her employer and her subjects' persecutors, the United States government. ... Many of Lange's photographs were censored."
Asked Lange at the time: "Everything is propaganda for what you believe in, isn't it? I don't see that it could be otherwise. The harder and more deeply you believe in anything, the more in a sense you're a propagandist."
Like Lange's photographs, "Frissell's work usually involved creating images to support the publicity objectives of her subjects," Ms. Hopkins said. "Her photographs of WACs in training and under review by President Franklin Roosevelt fit into a media campaign devised to counter negative public perceptions of women in uniform."
Another photograph, of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen, was intended to show that black Americans had mastered tough military jobs, Ms. Hopkins said.
The two women featured in the exhibition who are still alive attended an opening reception, Sept. 27. Mrs. Patterson (born 1905) wore her CBS correspondent's bracelet to the reception. She explained that the stainless steel tag was for identifying people killed in German bombing raids. At the start of the war, she had produced the first pictures of a London air-raid shelter. Her image of the Savoy Hotel in 1939 shows people in their pajamas holding white boxes containing gas masks.
When she began working for CBS, she was one of the first correspondents in Europe to use a short-wave radio transmitter to broadcast from the field.
The exhibition includes one of her early scripts showing words marked out by Nazi censors in Berlin. During the reception, she recalled how one censor threw a script down on the desk and declared none of it could be broadcast, and how she got it through with 10 minutes to airtime. "As innocent as I could, I said, 'Well I just don't know what could be wrong with it,'" she recalled, putting her hand to her throat and lowering her eyelids. With the clock ticking down the moments to airtime, the censor marked out the offending words and handed it back to her. "If you departed from your script, he cut you off. I never got cut off. ... I didn't kiss him, but I did get the story," she said, describing how she learned to write "through" the censors and then, when on-air, "speak fast or slow to get different shades of meaning."
She broadcast from Europe 50 times in 1939-1940 before marrying an American diplomat in Berlin. Though she planned to continue as a photojournalist, the U.S. State Department blocked publication of her images, saying they would hamper the work of her husband, the late Jefferson Patterson. Mrs. Patterson is now an active member of the Madison Council. Among her other activities, she sponsors the Junior Fellows Program, which since 1991 has brought about 20 young people to the Library each year.
The other living exhibition subject, Ms. Bubley (b.1921), worked in Washington as a photographic technician for the National Archives, but was unhappy, she said. "I didn't like turning the pages of books without being able to read them," she said of the routine copy work. In her spare time, she shot scenes of Washington mobilizing for war. Her work caught the attention of Roy Stryker, the head of the documentary photography project of the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, and he later recruited her when he joined the Office of War Information.
Under his mentorship, Ms. Bubley became a documentary photographer, taking at least one bus trip across the United States. Said Ms. Hopkins: "She produced hundreds of images of a country in transition from the doldrums of the Great Depression to the fevered pace of war," choosing always to focus on the human angle.
"I like to do pictures of people," said Ms. Bubley, who tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. She shot so many frames on the bus trip that "she wore the skin off her finger," said Sally Forbes, a friend of Ms. Bubley for 50 years. Mrs. Bubley lives in New York City and still shoots photographs. One of her favorite subjects is people in Central Park.
Craig (1889-1975) was a Southerner who wrote a weekly column, "Inside in Washington," for a group of Maine newspapers. She was known in the Washington press corps as a plucky reporter who often surprised political figures with pointed questions. During the war, she covered bombing raids in London, the Normandy campaign and the liberation of Paris.
Toward the end of her career, May Craig quoted Queen Mary: "Bloody Mary of England once said that when she died they would find 'Calais' graved on her heart," in reference to an important French outpost lost during her rule. "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 exhibition stands as a tribute to eight women who dared to brook obstacles to cover the war.
"Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers and Broadcasters During World War II" is on view through Dec. 8 Monday - Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Madison Gallery of the Madison Building. A panel discussion by women journalists who worked during World War II will be held Nov. 9 at 5 p.m. in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor of the Madison Building.
After it closes, the exhibition is tentatively scheduled to travel to: Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Mich., Jan. 2 - Feb. 19, 1996; St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., March 12 - May 7, 1996; Elmhurst Historical Society, Elmhurst, Ill., Aug. 19 - Oct. 18, 1996; and Duluth Public Library, Duluth, Minn., Nov. 9, 1996 - Jan. 3, 1997. It also will travel to the Wichita- Sedgwick County Historical Museum, Wichita, Kan., February - April, 1997; Florida Center for the Book, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., July 21 - Sept. 22, 1997; and East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville, Tenn., Oct. 8 - Dec. 8, 1997.
