Women, War and Memoir:
Michele Weldon
JAWS
September 2011
The Civil War to Iraq and Beyond the Arab
Spring
Michele Weldon
JAWS September 2011
 http://vodpod.com/watch/557669-women-war-
journalists
Reason to write memoir:
Reason to read memoir:
1.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Juicy revelations
Inform others as
witness
Journal of historical
chronology
Healing and cathartic
Personal
transformation
2.
3.
4.
5.
Train wreck
Learn, discover
Fill in historical blanks
Empathy for writer
The personal becomes
universal
http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2011/07/28/yagodamemoir-truth-charts-delorenzo/
Is the war central
to the story?
Susie King Taylor: a
nurse to black
soldiers in Civil War
• “Topsy Turvy world” emancipated, liberated Victorian Era
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women
Worked outside the home for the first time
Red Cross nurses, munition workers, dispatch riders
Stories were about the absence of men, “No Man’s Land”
Emergence of lesbian and feminist literature: Gertrude
Stein
Defined by their remote reflections on war
Sexualization and freedom of women at home, later
reunited with disabled and disfigured partners
Contemporaries: Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, May Sinclair, Virginia Woolfe,
Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Mansfield
Martha Gelhorn, Dorothy Thompson, Lee Miller
, Margaret Bourke White, Claire Booth Luce,
Dickey Chappelle, Sigrid Schultz, Ann Stringer
What did the women journalists
bring to the stories?
 Women journalists approached the stories differently,
more featurized, more anecdotal, “softer,” more
humanistic
 Still so unusual for women to be in this role
 Still a war with familiar western civilization, language
but not extreme cultural barriers
JAWdesses Tad Bartimus, Edie Lederer: fighting
newsrooms for news
 Memoirs are not just
about the work, but also
encompass daily lives
and what is missed at
home
Deborah Copaken Kogan
 A clash of:
cultures, language, religion, customs, gender suppression and violence :
 Women are the enemy and are in danger
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 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/05/lara-logan-breaks-her-
silence-on-60-minutes-.html
• Compelling writing
• Original style
• Fresh outlook
• New information
• Personal transformation
• Timeless
• The author as heroine
• Characters we can know, empathize with or
despise
 Don’t tell everything, but tell enough.
 Be specific.
 Change the aperture.
 Make the reader feel as if he/she is there
 Create scenes
 Offer revelations
 The setting as a character
 Internal dialogue without rants
 A solid narrative arc
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Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War by Deborah Copaken
Kogan
Flirting with Danger: Confessions of a Reluctant War Reporter
by Siobhan Darrow
Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind The Lines by
Anne Nivat
The BangBang Club
Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels
Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in Combat Hospital by
Heidi Squier Kraft
Sister in the band of Brothers: Embedded with the 101st Airborne
in Iraq by Katherine Skiba
Ghosts by Daylight :Love, War and Redemption by Janine Di
Giovanni
• On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American
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Experience in VietNam by Joyce Hoffman
War Torn: Stories of War from Women Reporters by Tad
Bartimus
War, Women and the News by Catherine Gourley
The Women Who Wrote The War by Nancy Caldwell Sorel
The Face of War by Martha Gelhorn
Where The Action Was: Women War Correspondents by
Penny Coleman
Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years by Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz
 Stories from women in combat written BY women in
combat
 Now that more women war correspondents now
working independently and for MSM outlets, less of an
anomaly
 Honest accounts of what it is like and what it means in
the broader context
 Move past sensationalism into what is real