Women Journalists and the Vietnam War

Today, when visitors travel to the Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington D.C., the first thing they are likely to see is Maya Lin's critically renowned memorial wall. But standing about 300 feet to the south of the famous wall is a second memorial: a bronze sculpture depicting three women caring for a wounded male soldier. Dedicated in November 1993, the sculpture reminds visitors that, despite the longstanding association of men with the realm of war, the story of the Vietnam War was crucially a women's story too. The nurses in the sculpture symbolize the tens of thousands of women who tended to soldiers' wounds and bore witness to the war's carnage. Standing a short distance from the black granite wall that recites the names of the war dead, this smaller memorial inscribes women alongside men in the nation's collective memory of the most contentious military conflict in modern American history.

Joyce Hoffmann's On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam does something similar, this time with another group of women who have been historically overlooked: namely, women journalists. The book is a collective biography of a group of intrepid women who demanded access to the world of war reportage. Historically, male journalists had almost completely dominated the field of war correspondence. Although women writers had covered prior military conflicts going back to the mid-nineteenth century, their numbers were miniscule. Women reporters made inroads during World War II, but the trend was reversed during the gender-conservative postwar years. As a result, well into the 1960s and even into the 1970s, the "ranks of female war correspondents remained thin" (p. 5). This began to change, however, with the Vietnam War. More and more women freelance writers and staffers of major news organizations began demanding that they, too, be able to cover what they called their "generation's biggest story" (p. 1). In making this demand, women journalists were challenging deeply embedded institutional and cultural stigmas that had long presumed that women were inherently too delicate for the rigors of war. They also confronted head-on the stereotypes harbored by male bosses, who often dismissed them as "husband hunters, war groupies, or thrill seekers who created difficulty for 'real' male journalists who had a job to do" (p. 9). In the process, they helped transform the world of journalism, thus making it more egalitarian for future women writers.

That women writers played a prominent role in shaping public attitudes toward the Vietnam War is well known. Historians of the war are familiar with the influential writings of Frances Fitzgerald, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy, all of whom traveled to Vietnam and wrote arresting accounts of their experiences there. In 1972, Fitzgerald published her Pulitzer Prize-winning Fire in the Lake, in which she chronicled her travels through the country and condemned what she saw as the misguided nature of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Hoffmann looks at renowned figures like Fitzgerald, but she also turns her attention to somewhat lesser known but no less dynamic figures. Readers learn, for example, about Gloria Emerson, a journalist who began writing for the "women's news department" of The New York Times in the late 1950s. Later stationed in Paris, she was expected to cover the haute couture collection for the paper. Determined to do something other than the fashion beat, she went on to report stories of war and conflict from Central Africa and Northern Ireland. After years of pleading with her editors, she was finally sent to Vietnam to work for the paper's Saigon bureau in 1970, where she wrote about the war's impact on the everyday lives of the Vietnamese. Hoffmann writes compellingly about Emerson's transformation from a typical Westerner who initially harbored a somewhat paternalistic, romantic view of the Vietnamese into a fierce and outspoken opponent of the war.

Herself a journalist, Hoffmann writes with grace and...