When my daughter was a junior at Saint Ursula Academy in Cincinnati, someone wrote a lovely quote on a poster during pep week. It was from Judy Garland, a film star and singer who first captured Americans’ hearts as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz back in 1939. It said: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”
I think that’s excellent advice, and Garland’s words came to me as I was putting the finishing touches on this book. In looking over the profiles I’d researched and written over nearly a year, I was struck by how each of these women is (or was) so much her authentic self. Of course, times have changed, as they always do, and the “girl reporter” like Peggy Hull, who was ordered to write a womanly slant on war stories, has been replaced by the likes of Martha Raddatz, who has jumped from a helicopter when her job demanded it.
As individuals, these women were as different as could be. Some of them were better at digging out information than at writing it; others were or are gifted writers. Some were fiercely left-wing, some kept to the middle, and others wore their conservatism proudly. Some treasured their privacy, while others were quite flamboyant. Beyond one or two, you’ve probably never read their names, though several were celebrities in their day. Their stories are worth telling—and remembering—though most of these women have come and gone since the first were born in the 1880s.
There is so much truth in these women’s stories, and it’s not just the truth they told in the articles they wrote and the photographs they took. To read their letters, their books and memoirs, and their reporting is to share in their personal journeys of truth and self-discovery. In the process of putting their stories on paper, I discovered that, like a first love, there was a “first war” for each, a time for truth-telling both inside and out. For the most part, I’ve focused on that piece of their lives.