When Exclusion Sparked a Journalism Revolution

1922: Janet Flanner fled her Midwest life and husband for Paris, sharing a hotel toilet down the hall while writing colorful letters about French life to a friend back home. That friend happened to be launching a little magazine called The New Yorker. From this chance connection emerged not just a career, but a revolution in how stories get told.

Two new books about groundbreaking women journalists of the 1930s and '40s reveal something striking: when women were systematically excluded from journalism's boys' club, they didn't just find another way in—they invented an entirely different kind of reporting that would reshape the profession.

The Innovation of Exclusion

"Women were handed nothing," writes Julia Cooke in Starry and Restless. Want to cover a war? Tell editors you "happened to be going anyway" and ask if they'd like some articles. Banned from battlefields? Write about hospitals and home fronts instead.

This forced creativity produced something remarkable. While male reporters huddled in briefing rooms, taking "other men's word for it" (leading The New York Times to falsely predict Communism's collapse in the Soviet Union more than 90 times between 1917-1920), women like Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily Hahn were developing what would later be called "New Journalism"—30 years before Tom Wolfe got credit for inventing it.

They combined personal voice with historical reportage, found human stories within massive events, and wrote with a style that made readers feel present. Not because they chose to, but because they had to.

The Hitler Problem

Flanner's most controversial piece came in 1935 when she decided to profile Adolf Hitler for a magazine that, as E.B. White joked, had taken no political stance beyond opposing the relocation of Penn Station's information booth.

Her approach was characteristically unconventional: treat Hitler as a human subject, just like Queen Mary or Coco Chanel. She opened with an almost whimsical observation about how odd it was that a man who didn't drink, smoke, eat meat, or apparently sleep with women should be "dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies."

The reaction split predictably. Hitler reportedly liked the piece. American readers were horrified by her light tone and perceived minimization of Jewish persecution. Malcolm Cowley called her a "fascist." Hollywood's Jewish film executives told her the article "was not unfriendly enough."

Mark Braude uses this episode in The Typewriter and the Guillotine to illustrate Flanner's complexity—her courage to go and see, alongside her troubling blind spots. She wasn't straightforwardly heroic, but she was always evolving.

War as Journalism School

The numbers tell the story: American women in journalism nearly quadrupled from 1930 to 1960. During World War II, 180 women worked as foreign correspondents, comprising 11% of all U.S. overseas reporters.

Gellhorn found her voice covering the Spanish Civil War, writing about "the contrast of domesticity and war, sociability and war, safety and war." When Ernest Hemingway tried to claim Collier's magazine's single correspondent accreditation for himself, she went anyway—traveling on a Norwegian freighter, escaping a nurses' training camp, convincing an RAF pilot to fly her to Naples with a made-up story about a missing fiancé.

"I do not want to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead," Gellhorn once wrote. That infectious defiance characterized all these women.

Hahn arrived in Shanghai on a whim in 1935, stayed six years, and sent New Yorker pieces aimed at deepening American understanding of China beyond the "glib" reporting she saw from other Americans. During the Japanese invasion, trapped in Hong Kong, a poet proposed to her, saying "obviously somebody should take care of me." Her response: "I'm sort of a genius myself. I'm entitled to a nurse or mamma too."

Witness at Nuremberg

By 1945, both Flanner and West found themselves in the destroyed city of Nuremberg, covering history's first trial for crimes against humanity. 22 high-ranking Nazi officials stood in the dock, and both women would publish their impressions in The New Yorker.

Flanner "didn't flinch when describing the evidence of atrocities," including "a child who had been decapitated and several adult heads without bodies." This was a marked evolution from her days covering cocktail menus at the Ritz. What drove these women to that ruined place were the same forces that had always propelled them: the need to bear witness, and to do it their own way.

The Dangerous Season

Today's journalism faces its own crisis. Legendary newspapers gutted by careless owners, foreign correspondents fired while still in war zones, local papers shutting down entirely. The parallel isn't lost: when traditional structures fail, innovation often emerges from the margins.

These 1930s women journalists succeeded not despite their exclusion, but because of it. They couldn't rely on access, so they developed empathy. They couldn't join the boys' club, so they avoided its groupthink. They couldn't follow established formulas, so they created new ones.