Never Stay Silent: Development of Female Journalists in Vietnam War

Development of Female Journalists in the Vietnam War

Though women were among the journalism field before the Vietnam War and had previous experiences reporting wars, the Vietnam War was the first opportunity that they were given full access to reporting on a war. This meaning, they were never the lead reporters or left to do the top stories on their own for past wars. This changed as the Vietnam War began, but this did not come too easily.

The women reporters were forced to create the Women’s Movement and take part in the Civil Rights Movement of 1964 in order to reach this place of equal rights in reporting for the wars. At the start of them fighting to report for the Vietnam war, women were struggling to find corporations that would hire them to do stories. To get past this stigma of women reporting on the wars, they would use their own funds to fly to new destinations and prove their worth doing interviews and reports from the destinations other journals were doing in hopes their story was better than the “professional journalist” sent to do it. After this, the next step was for women to begin pressuring the journals and war organizations to give them this freedom to write and be published the way men were, which clearly paid off in the end as they were a key component for these reports and news. Women such as Elizabeth Becker, Frances Fitzgerald, Catherine Leroy, and so many others reported on the many different aspects of the Vietnam war, but like the other female journalists, they had a few different areas of the war that they preferred to focus on. Many felt that the male reporters focused mostly on the reports of only the direct war events (the physical fights and the soldiers) as opposed to the effects that the war was having on the Vietnamese people and society as a whole. This was important to them because these were the details they felt people would want to hear about. Were they okay? How were they handling it? What short term and long term effects was the Vietnam war having on individuals and families? People had so many questions about their society that the women knew this was a story that needed to be told and it could not get overlooked any longer by the men.

As the war continued on, the news organizations realized the talent of these female reporters and dispatched them more and more. They knew that if they were going to get the best story from off- base the women were the journalists that would get the most story- worthy news. There were many examples of stories these women were able to get fully immersed in and bring back to their organization with a bigger reaction than what could have been expected. Because of this, many women reporters received the highest honor awards at the time. This included but was not limited to the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Award and Overseas Press Club awards.

So though female journalists during the Vietnam War had to fight their hardest to be on top after years of neglect and doubt, that is exactly where they ended up and they continued to prove themselves as time went on.