"I refuse to be a footnote" – the women who invented literary journalism (Julia Cooke)

Summary

Broad History – "I refuse to be a footnote": The Women Who Invented Literary Journalism

Host: Isabelle Roughol
Guest: Julia Cooke, author of Starry and Restless
Date: April 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the overlooked legacy of pioneering women in literary journalism—specifically Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily "Mickey" Hahn—discussed through the lens of Julia Cooke's new group biography, Starry and Restless. The conversation interrogates how and why these figures were so influential in their time, yet faded from journalistic canon, and why reclaiming and retelling women's history provides an essential roadmap for subsequent generations.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Challenging Historical Erasure: The episode confronts the lack of historical continuity for women, arguing that the absence of a visible legacy forces every generation of women to "start from scratch" ([02:00]).
• Rediscovering Female Journalistic Pioneers: Julia Cooke details her journey toward uncovering the lives of three journalists who shaped the genre well before the "New Journalism" associated with men.
• Re-imagining Women's Stories: Through the discussion, both host and guest reflect on how these women's complex, modern realities challenge the narrative that literary greatness or adventurous reporting is male by default.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Why Write a Group Biography?

Julia Cooke explains her choice ([04:18–09:43]):

• Motivated by a lack of models for a career blending ambition and domesticity.
• Practical: robust archival materials and significant, real-life connections between West, Gellhorn, and Hahn justified their grouping.
• Philosophical: She wanted to "make undeniable the notion that they were a cohort, and that there were many of them" ([09:09]).
• Group biographies highlight the structural shared challenges faced by women, avoiding the narrative trap of treating a woman as an isolated "exception."

Introducing the Cohort

Rebecca West ([09:50–11:49])

• Began as a teenage writer in British suffrage papers; famously witty and bold.
• Authored Black Lamb and Gray Falcon about Yugoslavia—"able to make historical figures feel urgent and immediate to a group of 19-year-olds in 2015" ([10:53], Cooke).
• Revolutionized trial reporting, bringing bureaucratic or political events down to a human scale.

Martha Gellhorn ([11:49–15:32])

• Known as Hemingway's ex, which infuriated her: "I refuse to be a footnote in someone else's story" ([12:17], Cooke).
• Changed war reporting by highlighting civilian impacts and everyday human consequences, not just troop movements.
• "She shifted the way that sourcing is considered... Sometimes it's a grandmother, sometimes it's a child" ([14:33], Cooke).
• Had a very long, dauntless career, reporting from every major conflict of her time.

Emily "Mickey" Hahn ([15:37–18:09])

• Prolific New Yorker writer for 60 years, chronicled the Japanese invasion of China, WWII's Pacific front, and wrote 52 books.
• Lived unconventionally, driven by curiosity and a determination to break boundaries ("She really did whatever the hell she wanted" [16:52], Cooke).
• Noted for her ability to convey emotional nuance, especially the intertwining of motherhood and international reporting.

The Modernity of Their Writing

([18:09–19:43])

• They wrote with a "modern," unapologetically complex sensibility, addressing subjects men covered while foregrounding distinctly female perspectives (e.g., ambition, care duties, domesticity).
• "They're just the women I know in a way that just didn't used to appear." – Isabelle ([18:56]).

Why Did They Disappear from the Canon?

([20:11–22:59])

• They were incredibly famous in their time—covers of Time, bestsellers, constant fan mail—but faded. Why?
  • They did not specialize or brand themselves with "mythic" personas like their male peers (e.g., Hunter S. Thompson).
  • Their subject matter—international affairs—was less accessible to the US-centric literary canon.
  • Crucially, "They were unwilling to completely reject their femininity in the name of their iconoclasm. So that made them really hard to metabolize." ([22:52], Cooke.)

Notable Quote:
"Here you have these women 30 years earlier doing the same thing and more. What the hell happened?" ([20:11], Isabelle).

The Problem of Lost Women's History

([24:06–24:53])

• The lack of continuity (“Virginia Woolf said, women have no history”) means each generation must 'reinvent the wheel.'
• The mere act of reconnecting to women of the past is empowering.
• "What I was considering and finding to be very urgent for me had been a consideration of these women whose work I admired so much. And none of it was new. And I find that so reassuring." ([25:22], Cooke).

Motherhood, Domesticity, and Having It All

([25:52–27:51])

• The subjects cared deeply for their children and homes, but resisted being "trapped" by them.
• The myth that adventurous women could not also be present mothers is disproved: "They weren't perfect mothers, but they were present and they cared." ([26:25], Isabelle).

Barriers in Writing Women's History: The Virginia Cowles Dilemma

([31:26–34:41])

• Virginia Cowles, a major figure in the cohort, is largely absent from the book due to lack of personal archives.
• Her conscious or practical decision not to leave personal papers highlights how the documentation void imposes narrative limits on women’s history.
• "All we have is her work. And your work doesn't speak for you. That's just not true." ([37:21], Isabelle, on Julia Morgan.)

Legacy and Roadmaps

([39:04–39:41])

• The lack of archives leaves future generations without "roadmaps" for how to balance ambition, career, and family.
• "How did she do it? More roadmaps are only ever a good thing." ([39:28], Cooke).

Why Men Should Read These Stories

([39:41–42:35])

• Cooke hopes men will assimilate these women's achievements (not merely as 'women's writing'), shifting the canon to include them.
• Historically, men's stories are assumed to be universal; women's stories are "niche." Correcting this balance is vital for a more accurate history and richer human experience.
• "It's stories of people that all people should be reading." ([42:32], Isabelle).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Invisible Legacy:
  "Without history, there is no roadmap. You have to blaze a trail everywhere you go. And that's harder than it needs to be. And it's exhausting." — Isabelle ([02:00])

• On Gellhorn as Hemingway's 'Footnote':
  "She once said, I refuse to be a footnote in someone else's story." — Julia ([12:17])

• On Shifting War Reporting:
  "She would go to a war and focus on the consequences and the ramifications of the fighting, on everyday life and the people who lived in an area and were fighting it." — Julia on Martha Gellhorn ([14:33])

• On the Problem with Group Biographies:
  "Why don't women get the single monograph, the single book where they get to be the star that so many men get?" — Isabelle ([08:30])

• On the Canon:
  "Here you have these women 30 years earlier doing the same thing and more. What the hell happened?" — Isabelle ([20:11])

• On the Repeated Effort of Each Generation:
  "Every generation is fighting the same battles, and it doesn't build on top of this generation." — Isabelle ([24:39])

• On Domesticity:
  "There is so much truth to her understanding of the male psyche. Don't do the. Don't learn to do the things that they will take advantage of." — Julia on Mickey Hahn's advice ([29:16])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:00–03:00: Isabelle’s personal motivation and the purpose of Broad History
• 04:18–09:43: Julia explains her inspiration for the book and the challenges of historical erasure
• 09:49–18:09: Introduction and discussion of West, Gellhorn, and Hahn
• 20:11–22:59: Why these women disappeared from history
• 24:06–25:52: The necessity and empowerment of reconnecting women’s history
• 25:52–27:51: On motherhood and challenging the dichotomy of career vs. family
• 31:26–34:41: The archival gap, Virginia Cowles, and implications for women’s history
• 39:41–42:35: Why men must read women’s stories and reshaping the canon

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Tone and Style

The tone is intelligent, candid, and passionate, blending personal narrative with well-researched historical insight. Both host and guest discuss frustrations with humor and warmth, and engage deeply with the emotional reality of their subjects.

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Conclusion

This episode makes a compelling case for unearthing, preserving, and reading the histories of women who shaped literary journalism. It demonstrates how the absence of visible, documented female legacy is a systemic problem—one the host and guest hope to combat, not just for women, but for a richer, more honest human story.

Recommended Read:
Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke

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For books, archives, and further reading, visit broadhistory.com.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to Broad History, a podcast about the history we think we know with women in it. This time I'm your host, Isabelle Rogol. When I was a kid growing up and dreaming of becoming a journalist, which has been a constant since about the fall of the Soviet Union, my heroes were men. I wanted to travel the plains of Africa with Joseph Kessel. I wanted to cross the Yukon with Jack London. I pictured myself as the hero and the writer, both of Jules Verne novels.

[B]

And yes, you're calling him Jules Verne and that's wrong.

[A]

I don't think I ever consciously thought, oh, I won't be able to do that because I'll be a woman. I don't think that's how representation works. But I just didn't have a mental image for it because the culture didn't have an image for it. Women roaming the world for stories, they just weren't in my books, they weren't on my tv, they weren't romanticized. And so logically, I concluded again, probably not consciously, that they just hadn't existed yet. The best thing that well intentioned people could tell me was, yes, Isabel, you can do that, you can do anything and you'll be the first. How cool is that? And I think that gets to the crux of why we do women's history. Why a project like Broad History even exists. We get to this in the second half of my interview today, which I had so much joy recording, and I hope you listen to my guest Julia Cook mentions this famous quote by Virginia Woolf, Women don't have history. And here's how I understand it. Men are allowed progress, evolution, change. There is exploration and conquest, scientific discovery, political revolution and innovation. A young man who enters the world gets to iterate it. History is movement for women. The centuries are static. Her past is portrayed to us as some eternal and natural domesticity where only the hemlines and the appliances change. Women have one job, standing still. If we step out of that sphere because we're made to accept as our only sense of the past, our only foundation. National histories that barely include us in the march of the centuries. We don't get to build on previous generations work. Everything feels new, undone at first. The lives of women don't iterate. We start from scratch every time. Without history, there is no roadmap. You have to blaze a trail everywhere you go. And that's harder than it needs to be. And it's exhausting. And there's only so much you get to do in one lifetime before your daughters and granddaughters start from scratch themselves. And that's what keeps us down. That's why I feel so strongly about giving women back their history and why there's such an urgency to it right now. So today I'm adding three incredible worldwarming journalists to ten year old Isabel's personal pantheon. Four, really, if you count my wonderful guest, American writer and journalist Julia Cook, the author of Starry and Restless, the joint biography, author of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn and Mickey Han.

[B]

As always, before we get started, a

[A]

reminder that Broad history is a 100% reader and listener supported media, which means right now it's costing me a lot and I'm fitting it around the jobs that actually pay the bills. Thank you and welcome to new members who answered the call for my birthday last week. Jackie, Patrick, Janet and Naomi. You can join them, get the podcast early and support indie media, which needs it. @broadhistory.com the link is in the show notes as well. You can also just sign up for the newsletter, which is and which I really recommend because you'll actually get a lot more than what's here on the show. There's always links to every book, article or study that we mention, pictures of everyone when we have them, and more articles from me and recommendations to others on topics that aren't covered in the podcast.

[B]

In weeks that the podcast isn't coming

[A]

out, there's always a newsletter giving you something. So that's [e-mail] now let's jump in with Julia Cook.

[C]

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[B]

My pleasure. So you actually slid into my DMs on Instagram a few weeks back. I don't know how you found me, but I'm grateful. And you told me about your book. It's about three wonderful pioneering women that we're going to be introducing in a minute, but first I want to talk about you. We say we all have a book in us. It's not your first book. I think it's your third. But I'm curious why this was your book.

[C]

There are kind of two stories, two answers to that question. The first, the more formal answer, is that it was born of a book review that I wrote. I was assigned to write about a novel, a novelized version of Martha Gellhorn's life. I wrote about that book in conversation with Michelle Dean's Sharp, which included Rebecca west. And those two books first put west and Gellhorn in a room together in my mind. And as I was thinking about them, I wondered how many other women there were like them out, determined to get out into the world to cover it. In the 1930s and 40s, I knew that the numbers were higher than what I had initially assumed, but I did not realize exactly how high and how many women were really setting out with a real intention to tell the people back home about the world. And once I understood that it all came together so quickly, I learned about Mickey Hahn, Virginia Coles, Dorothy Thompson, Jesse Redmond Fawcett, so many other women. And that sense of kind of being astounded by the she breadth and depth and numbers, the variety of different writing that they were doing, it was fascinating to me and it made me really wonder, wait, how is this new to me? I went to graduate school for creative nonfiction. I've read about all of the men who came later. How did I not know about these women? So that then sent me into a. Why did their legacies get subsumed underneath the waves of men that came after them and claimed to have innovated in literary journalism? So that's a kind of like more professional story. And the more personal story is that I did that piece when I was. I had just gotten married a couple of years earlier and I was. I really. I've always wanted to have children. I was lucky to that that wasn't a question for me, but the question was more how do I have a career and children? I was very aware that the kind of immersive long form journalism that I had done before, where I would spend weeks and months at a time, honestly, I lived in Cuba for a year to research my first book. That that kind of writing would not really be as accessible to me if I wanted to. To what would a career look like? I really didn't know. And so my intention in coming to understand these women's lives was a lot more personal than that. I really wanted to understand what a roadmap for an entire career might look like for a woman literary journalist who had led a full life that also contained years of domesticity. And I was floored to understand that I could look at the lives of all of these women and see the entire arc, right? Not like looking at Catherine Boo or Liza Griswold or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who are all literary writers and journalists who I admire so much. But you know, they're in their 50s, 60s if that. I'm not exactly sure of their ages, but they have not, you know, we're not talking about the entire arc of a career. They're living and they're very much still contributing. So the Idea of being able to look at just the. Over the decades was really appealing to me.

[B]

And so you picked three, and so you wrote this group biography. And I'm also curious about the format of the group biography, which, as a woman who studies women's history, I have very ambivalent feelings about. I love them and I resent them equally. And so I'm curious why that choice of the group biography of these three you mentioned many other names could have been more, rather than picking just Martha Gellhorn or just Rebecca west or just Mickey Hahn.

[C]

Yeah. So I picked those three women because of their relationships with each other and also because I just. I really liked all of their writing the most. Dorothy Thompson, I think, is really remarkable, but I don't adore her writing, frankly. And she and west were friends on some level. I could have included her in the cohort of the book. But I really wanted women whose writing I just really enjoyed, I personally admired, because I know that my writing is so much better when I actually like what I'm writing about and I'm not trying to force it. And then, you know, there was the formal constraint that I wanted there to be really good, robust archives and letters written among the three women that really helped bring the women together, because I agree. I also have the same kind of sense of group biographies that if there's not a coherent reason to write about, like, there aren't relationships undergirding the format of a group biography. It just feels a little forced and a little bit scattered. I was lucky that these women did actually, in life come together.

[B]

Yeah. My hesitation with them is that on the one hand, I'm like, why don't women get the single monograph, the single book where they get to be the star that so many men get? So many male biographies are. And women are much more often treated as a group. And there are many actually practical reasons why. One of them is that there often isn't enough archives to do a full. A full length book. And at the same time, there's so many women to write about that. And I like the way that it shows the structural aspects of it and the fact that when we present women's histories as singular biographies, we make them sound like they're exceptions or they're exceptional individuals.

[C]

You're hitting on. Exactly. Yes. I wanted to prove a cohort. I wanted to make undeniable the notion that they were a cohort and that there were many of them. And so the idea that they were not like, of course they were exceptional. They were remarkable women. But they weren't exceptions. They were supported by other women around them and they were in turn supporting other women. And then there's also the fact that there are really good biographies of both Gellhorn and West already. And I. I did have a different angle on each of their lives. Yes. But I was much more interested in the notion of a cohort.

[B]

So let's introduce this cohort, then. Talk to us briefly about each of

[A]

these three women and. And who they are.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So there's Rebecca West. She's the eldest of the bunch. She was born in 1892, British, and she really got her start in the suffrage papers in London at a remarkably young age. She was so young when she started really writing and taking on these kind of establishment ideas and figures.

[B]

How young are we talking?

[C]

I think she was, like 19 when she was really publishing these big, meaty, critical book reviews. And snarky, too. Like, she was so witty and funny, went right for the jugular of these kind of establishments, figures like Arnold Bennett and H.G. wells and some of the floofier female novelists of this kind of romantic domesticity. And she would just go right after them. And so she very quickly made a name for herself and took off pretty immediately. Her most famous work is Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, which is the. This giant book about Yugoslavia.

[B]

It's been sitting on my shelf for years. A friend of mine got it for me and he was like, it's so good. You're going to love this. And then I saw the size of it and I know I opened it.

[C]

It's really tough. My best recommendation, and frankly, the way that I got through it, I find it so easy to get into, but then hard to pick back up because of the size. You get intimidated by it. But I once assigned it. I was teaching a travel writing course at the New School where I used to teach, and I assigned a chunk of it to a group of 19 year olds and they adored it. They absolutely loved it. They were so impressed with the way that she was really able to make historical figures in particular, just feel so close to them. Like, she would take on these moments of history and make them feel urgent and immediate and really accessible to a group of 19 year olds in. What was it, 2015. The way that I read it was I would just set aside 40 minutes a day and just sit down. And that was my Rebecca west reading time. And it didn't matter how far or not far I would get. I just did that like five days a week until I finished.

[B]

Okay, that's my sign to pick it up, then there you go.

[C]

It's really good. But she also wrote very famously about trials both in the US and about the Nuremberg trials and the trials of some famous World War II traitors, British traitor to the Nazis. And really revolutionized the way that Americans in particular conceive of what trial reporting can and can't do. Again, like her sense of immediacy and her sense for people and just compressing the distance between a reader and whoever you're reading about, making these kind of bureaucratic scenes feel like they. They could be happening in a kitchen. It's very accessible in that way. So that's Rebecca West. Then there's Martha Gellhorn, who a lot of people know of because she was once married to Ernest Hemingway. She was his third wife. And that pissed her off for her whole life, the fact that people would remember her for that. She once said, I refuse to be a footnote in someone else's story. Amen. And I know. Well, and it's also. I did a talk a couple of weeks ago for this book, and an older gentleman really wanted to ask me about Marri between writers and if I thought they could work or did not work. And first of all, who am I to say to possibly answer that question? But second of all, he really wanted to focus on Gellhorn and Hemingway, and he was really insistent about it. And finally I had to cut him off and I just said, wouldn't it piss you off if after a long and interesting career and life that you lived on your own terms, someone wanted to talk to you about your ex.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Who you divorced like 30 years earlier? Would that not just piss you off on a very human level?

[B]

I think all that relationship tells us is that married to Hemingway is impossible.

[C]

Yeah. And it's so funny. There are specific places where she humanizes him in her writing and in her letters. And so I understand on some level what drew them together, but he just sounds pretty impossible to be with. And I think she was like the easiest partner either. It just is he's, well, so domineering and.

[B]

And a blocker to her career. Right. And a jealous and stealing her commissions and her opportunities and hoping she would just stay home and let him be the wr. Which maybe don't marry a writer.

[C]

That's exactly. Oh, and it's kind of tragic because you can see him really, like, admiring, like, he's so. At the beginning of their relationship, he was so proud of her and so excited to be with someone as interesting as she is. And then it just curdled. And there's this remarkable moment where he's writing a letter to, of all people, her mother complaining about how the critics liked one of her recent novels better than his. And he was just so mad. So mad. Anyway, we're talking about. Let's talk about her. Exactly.

[B]

This is the last that we will be talking about. Hemingway. We just mentioned him.

[C]

Her greatest contribution to the world of literary journalism is the way that she truly changed war reporting. She would go to a war and focus on the consequences and the ramifications of the fighting, on everyday life and the people who lived in an area and were fighting it. She was able to capture what people were fighting for, culturally and physically, the sense of home that people cared about. And part of that was because she had a really keen sense of, for lack of a better term, domesticity. She really loved making having a home a nest from which to fly, in a way. And that really attuned her to entirely different aspects of war reporting than had really been focused on before. She shifted the way that sourcing is considered in terms of who is a valid source for war, peace, who do you interview? Who's a man on the street? Sometimes it's a woman, sometimes it's a grandmother, sometimes it's a child. And so she reported from every war, every major conflict in her lifetime, forever. She was just dauntless until the day she died.

[B]

Yeah, that was a long life and a 20th century that was full of conflict.

[C]

Full of conflict. And she went everywhere. Her courage is really remarkable. And then there's Emily Hahn, who a lot of people don't know of, even though a lot of people have actually read her writing without realizing it. She wrote for the New York New Yorker for 60 some years, from the 20s through the 80s. She was the New Yorker's China coast correspondent from 1937, I believe, on 36. 37. And she wrote about the Japanese invasion of China, the Pacific front of World War II. She wrote 52 books in her lifetime and of enormously varying quality. Nonfiction novels, books for young readers, cookbooks, biographies, just everything. She was really a compulsive writer. She was an instinctive contrarian. She often did things because someone told her she couldn't or shouldn't. She was married to the head of British Intelligence in Hong Kong during World War II. They had two children together. She was also, for a time, married to a very notorious Chinese poet and playboy, Xiao Xin Mei, and made enormous waves with both relationships. Both were very controversial at the time, which I did not care at all about. She was like that. She really did whatever the hell she wanted.

[B]

Yeah. She's a very vivid character in your book. And I think some of the most gripping pages for me, where I really felt like I was there, was her life in occupied China with her not yet husband, but father of her baby in prison and her trying to survive and get by.

[A]

A part of World War II that

[B]

we don't, at least in. In the west we don't read about a lot. But it is really harrowing.

[C]

It is. And it was really, it was fascinating for me to do that research into the Pacific front of World War II and the consequences therein. It was fascinating. But I think what Mickey does that I think is remarkable on a writing level is that she's really able to capture the emotional nuances of different kinds of relationships within really consequential scenes. Right. So she wrote so vividly about having an infant in October, occupied Hong Kong, and what that felt like for her, while also focusing on what the colony was experiencing. So that kind of duality I find really incredible when it comes to her writing. And that continued. She wrote beautifully in England, to me, about life in post war England with the rationing and all of the relational consequences therein. It was. It's really interesting.

[B]

That's what I find really interesting and modern and pioneering about their work, is that that they're taking on the hard subjects that men normally cover, you know, or geopolitics, et cetera, but they're not writing. They're not writing like men, which is the sort of backhanded compliment that people try to give them. They're writing about the reality of being women, which is not the stuff you find in the ladies pages. It is the reality of being a woman with ambition, but also with love for her family and with care duties and with also experiences of war and with an interest in geopolitics and economics. And they were just. They're just the women I know in a way that just didn't used to appear so.

[C]

Modern is exactly the right word. Their sensibility was so incredibly complex and unapologetically so. They were attuned to all of these different things at the same time and unwilling to shunt one to the side.

[B]

And the writing that, I mean, the way that you described the way that Martha Gellhorn writes about war and the impact on civilian populations and the why we're fighting and all that, rather than the troop movements and all that, which was more the old school reporting of war, that is incredibly modern. Right. That's how we hear about Ukraine today. That's how we hear about Iran. And I'm just struck that, sure, we kind of hear about Martha Gellhorn, but not at all about Mickey Han. And how come these women just who were somewhat famous in their time, haven't remained in the canon, haven't had the lasting fame that some of their male peers have. And I went to journalism school, and my God, did I hear about Tom Wolf and Hunter Thompson and who supposedly invented this new journalism. And here you have these women 30 years earlier doing the same thing and more.

[C]

What?

[B]

What the hell?

[C]

What happened? First of all, I think we should establish just how famous they actually were. Like they were enormously famous in their day. We're talking Rebecca west on the COVID of Time magazine, given an OBE and a dbe. President Truman called her that, the world's best reporter, when he gave her an award. Okay, so that's Rebecca West. Mickey Han's memoir of China sold upwards of 600,000 copies when it came out. She was in Life magazine. Her romance with Charles Boxer was called the best publicized romance of World War II for Americans. She was a household name. She got fan mail at the New Yorker constantly. Martha Gellhorn, similarly enormously famous. The paparazzi tracked her when she was with Hemingway and afterwards. And as I said before, critics once called one of her novels better than her very famous husband's. So, you know, these women were not hiding by any stretch of the imagination. And I found it really tragic to think about the way that their legacies sank beneath those of exactly as you're saying, Tom Wolfe, gay tales, Joan Didion, and I think there are so many. There are a number of different answers to that question. Number one, they did not specialize. They wrote about tons of different subjects. They were constantly. They were driven by their curiosity and their commitment to roaming. Which leads us to the second reason, which is that they were writing about foreign countries for an American audience, largely. And Americans are not great about being terribly interested about the rest of the world. That, of course, Joe Mitchell writing about the Lower east side is going to stick around in the consciousness a little more than Rebecca west or Mickey Han writing about China. It was just less accessible on some level to the American layman. And then this is really important. I think that the next answer is that they were not terribly self mythologizing. There's a really wonderful article by Michael J. Arlin in the Atlantic about the new journalists. And he really astutely pointed out, while completely missing the fact that these Women existed. He pointed out that the new journalists really understood their mandate to be only partly about writing. The other part was about being an impresario of him or herself. So they really created these, like, personal brands for themselves and lived in the public eye in a way that felt coherent. So Hunter S. Thompson, we all know who he. And anyone who studied journalism understands, like, kind of what. What Hunter S. Thompson would have been like. And that was not the case for these women. And then, of course, there's the fact that they were women and they were not doing. They weren't. They were refusing to be either. Purely iconoclastic. No, they weren't. All of them were pretty feminine. They liked their clothes to some extent. They were very pretty. They were unwilling to completely reject their femininity in the name of their iconoclasm. So that made them really hard to metabolize.

[B]

I just did an episode about George sand with Fiona Sampson, who just wrote a biography of George sand, and it was just a very similar thing. She was so ridiculously famous in her day. She was one of the bestselling authors of the entire 19th century. Her peers, like, were just, like, heaping praise on her writing. And then she died, and then she just kind of disappeared. And now the only thing that people know, we don't read George sand anymore. So I'm a French woman, but even in France, we don't read George sand. And we. We know her because of personal scandal and reputation and supposedly this queer and bisexual woman who dressed in men's clothes. And it's really not that scandalous when you actually look at the real stories. But that's the image that she's got. And her work is just disappeared, even though it was quite modern work and even though we still read Flaubert, whose work is just as outdated in many ways, actually more outdated, I think, than. So, yeah, there's something about female fame that doesn't translate into legacy and staying power in history that is quite frustrating. Yeah.

[C]

And I think a lot of it has to do with this notion that we're constantly being put in a position to feel like we're reinventing the wheel. Virginia Woolf said, women have no history. Rebecca west pointed out the fact that no one is creating these links among the generations of women that have been doing the same thing. As far as fighting for general autonomy and respect, women are going to have to do it themselves.

[B]

Yeah. That's a big reason I'm doing this project, is that the more I learn about women's history, the more I learned, I realized oh, no, we've done this before.

[C]

We've done it.

[A]

We've done it.

[B]

We just forgot because it's just not really being written down and really passed on. So it feels like we're constantly. Every generation is fighting the same battles, and it doesn't build on top of this generation totally.

[C]

And for me, it was enormously empowering to understand that these women had considered so much of what I thought was new for me to be considering, especially when I had children. I had three children. I have three children. I gave birth to three babies in a very short period of time. And it was so refreshing and beautiful for me to really understand the depth with which these women had considered notions of identity and domestic demands and maternal love and adoration and all of these different things and demands and pressures working against each other and sometimes together. And I found it really reassuring to sink into that notion of history that what I was considering and finding to be very urgent for me had been a consideration of these women whose work I admired so much. And none of it was new. And I find that so reassuring.

[B]

I think it's the part of the book that surprised me most, their relationship to motherhood, to domesticity. Because I was sort of expecting, as you were, that to have those careers, especially in that era, they had to decide that was their life and they weren't gonna do the other part of life or if they were gonna do it, they were gonna do it poorly. You know, the kids were gonna be in boarding school and they would barely see them and whatever. And that's not it. They weren't perfect mothers, but they were present and they cared. They cared for at least two of

[C]

are moms as well.

[B]

So there was deep. There weren't islands. There was deep relationships there.

[C]

And that. That was my intention. That's one of the things that surprised me the most. I mentioned the personal impetus for this book. And part of that personal impetus was that before I had children, I really assumed that in order to have the kind of connected, community, driven life that I wanted, like I said, I always knew that I wanted to have children. I've always been very close with my own sister, and I love my mother very much. And I don't at all want to. To push off the care of my aging parents to someone else. I'd like to be involved in that to some extent. And I think I always thought that in order to have this kind of more swashbuckling international life and career, I would ha.

[B]

I.

[C]

You had to choose one or the other. There was no Bringing them together, that was purely impossible. If you wanted to travel a lot or if you wanted to do an interesting career, you would have to choose solitude to some extent. And I think that's really still very present, that notion that we talk all the time about having it all. And that argument is not of terrible interest to me. But I do think that there's something really beautiful to looking back at history and understanding that, no, these things are so much more nuanced than that. And these women in particular, they did not have to choose between one thing forever and the other thing forever. An international life or a life of following these stories that they all loved to cover did not necessarily imply solitude.

[B]

And yet they also have a very conflicted relationship to domesticity and to the trappings of. I really identify with Martha Gellhorn a lot because she loves to nest. And she looks like. I mean, I bought my house a year and a half ago, and it's just been a long DIY project ever since. I'm obsessed with design and with nesting, but at the same time, she makes a house and then she leaves. She likes the process of creating, but she's afraid of it trapping her. And I feel that's so relatable. And I think it's Rebecca west who says, don't do your housework. Never do your own housework, which is such a privileged British woman thing to say, I'm sorry, but never do your own housework or never learn to drive.

[A]

Never.

[B]

And that's.

[C]

That was Mickey, which is.

[B]

Mickey never learned to drive. Yeah.

[C]

To me, like the game of telephone that that advice took, which is Rebecca west saying to Mickey Han, never do your own housework or you'll never write another word in your life is profoundly privileged. And also, I don't know, there are days when I do like doing my own housework. I. I get enormous satisfaction out of it. I can find it meditative. There are also many days when I would really like to not do it, but. Cheers. The point is that then Mickey Han translated that advice to her own daughter to be. Don't learn to cook or drive, or the men in your life will take advantage of it, which is so depressing and canny at the same time.

[B]

There is such. There is such. There is so much truth to her understanding of the male psyche. Don't do the. Don't learn to do the things that they will take advantage of. Every woman has experienced. It feels very real.

[C]

Yeah. Martha Gellhorn and her nests. When I was in my 20s and I lived in Mexico, City. I also was putting together a home in Mexico City, and I found the act of looking for housewares and furnishings and figuring out how to run a house to be such an incredible reporting, like pre work, it connects you with a community that is new to you in a totally different way. And I recognize that in Martha Gellhorn's work, that was like her kind of way of, like, setting up, being her own fixer, shall we say, to use the journalism terminology, she was figuring out the lay of the land before the reporting was really starting. And I just. I love that.

[B]

Yeah, a hundred percent. I made a home for myself in Cambodia and I made a home for myself in Australia, and both of those. I only stayed for 18 months or less than that. But there was something about it. Not feeling transient in a foreign country and actually experiencing it, the way that people who live there experience it, that transforms your understanding of it. You're not a tourist.

[C]

Totally. Yes. When I lived in Mexico City, I had the lilies, you know, because I had gone and purchased a vase for my flowers. I bought lilies. The act of buying the lilies then had me talking to the vendors and becoming a regular, and they would set them aside, and then we would ask after each other's whatever. It was just. It was lovely. It was such a wonderful way to start to feel rooted in a place that then totally inflects the reporting. It inflects your ability to humanize the people that are around you and that you're reporting on. It's so much a part of their writing process.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But this sense of wanting to feel rooted while fearing the cage.

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

That just feels like an incredibly universal, or at least for women, experience. It's just something that felt extremely relatable.

[A]

I do want to talk about the

[B]

woman who's missing from the book. Virginia. Virginia Cowles.

[C]

Cowles. I think it's pronounced Coles.

[B]

Coleslaw.

[C]

I'm never sure.

[B]

I never know with English language. But I think it's really interesting. The fact that she's mostly missing from the book, I think, tells us a lot about the experience of writing women's history and why there are so many gaps. So I wonder if you could tell us a bit about.

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

Why it is that she's not more present in the book.

[C]

Yeah. The fact that she's kind of a ghostly presence is a bit of a heartbreak for me as a writer. I really had wanted to include her more, and in fact, there's a draft of Starry and Restless that has her much more present in it. But that draft feels awkward because she did not leave an archive. She made a distinct choice not to. Not that she. She traced out what that choice was due to or what her thinking was as far as not leaving an archive. It's a bit of a mystery, even to her children, her daughter. I interviewed her daughter on a research trip to London and by phone numerous times, because I was trying to track down these diaries that she kept that her husband quoted from. Her husband was Aidan Crawley. He was an MP in England. He then went on to work in broadcasting. And so he's a pretty well known public figure. He has his own autobiography that he wrote. It's called look before youe Leap. And in it there are these vast chunks of quoting from her diary. And, you know, her diaries are really incredible to read. She's connecting the dots between mothering and being this very present mother. Of the four women in the book, she was by far the most present parent. She really was with her children a lot. She gave up foreign reporting and shifted to writing about biographies. She never stopped making a paycheck, never stopped. Stopped having assignments and books that she was working on. But she didn't travel quite as much after she had children for a period of time, and then she got right back out there. So in her diaries, she has this way of looking at her children and then also the consequences of the Marshall Plan, or like the way that taxi drivers in Paris are talking about the post war period. And it's really interesting. And so I called her daughter and said, where the hell she. I have no idea. It's a total mystery. Written to Howard Gottlieb, who started the 20th century archive in Boston, which is where Martha Gellhorn's archives are. Coles and Gellhorn were very close friends for a large period of time. They lived right next to each other in London in the post war era. They had reported together during World War II. And Gottlieb wrote to both of them and said, I'd like your archives. And Gellhorn said, great, and started pulling her stuff together. And that's where her archive now lives. And Coles never responded or didn't record her response. But there's no archive. So in that draft of Starry and Restless that contains more of her, it just felt stilted because I couldn't really give her the interiority that I was able to give the other three women. I couldn't really animate any of her, the causality, why she was making the decisions that she was making or what she was thinking or said she was feeling at any given moment in time. I was just from the outside looking in. And on a narrative level, the book is pretty long as is, and I didn't want to make it longer, so she wound up receding. And it's tragic. It's so sad. And I find it so typical on some level.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Let that be a lesson for women to document your thinking.

[C]

I feel so much empathy for her because there are all of these different people that we have to be. Right. And I think that she was so much of a mother for her children, and she was so much of a working writer. And I have to imagine that it would have been hard to also be someone considering her own legacy. Right. Those are two really big roles to play. If you're really fully inhabiting both of those roles, that's a lot. It's a lot to consider for yourself. And then to also apply that retrospective view to your own past while you're doing it just. I can't imagine that it would feel. It just must be terrible with all

[B]

the social trappings and the weights of shame and modesty and all of that. That is based on women.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Can I tell you a story, actually? Because that reminded me of. But I sort of got into women's history. I've. I've always, my whole life, been interested in history and specifically in women's history. But I really started thinking about it as something that I should be writing about when I, a few years ago, went to visit Hearst Castle and at Hearst Castle in California, which is for people who don't know, the very grandiose, ridiculous home of William Randolph Hearst in California, sort of around Santa Barbara. And I found out there about Julia Morgan, who I'd never heard about. She was the architect who worked kind of her whole life with Hearst on making his crazy vision a reality. And after the visit, I went down to the bookshop looking for a biography of this woman who sounds it incredible, fascinating. And I found nothing. And There was like 10 biographies of Hearst there, and it wasn't a single book about Julia Morgan. And I was like, well, damn, I guess I should write it. And I tried. And I went to UC Santa Barbara, where they keep her archives. But this darn woman who has left more than 700 buildings, she was one of the most prolific architect of her time, of the 20th century period. She built California. She decided that, quote, my work will speak for myself. And she left nothing. In fact, she instructed people to burn her documents when she died. And so all we have Left are a handful, a handful of letters from her youth, but there's really nothing to understand her interiority as a person, which makes it impossible. There's a couple books about her, and they're really more like architecture reviews than biographies. But there isn't a narrative biography of her because you just can't write it.

[A]

There's just. There's just nothing.

[B]

It was extremely private. She was never married. She didn't have children, so we know nothing of her personal life. It's just really hard to scale a whole person. All we have is her work. And your work doesn't speak for you. That's just not true. And it's really frustrating because she finally, a few years ago, got the gold medal from the association of American Architects, whatever it's called. But only two women have ever got it out of dozens, hundreds. And so she. She was extremely important to her field, and pretty much no one knows about her. It's really frustrating. She was one of the first class of women accepted to the Beaux Arts in Paris. Men were violently protesting outside the. Because women could get in. I mean, there was so much to her life. It's really fun and it's.

[C]

It. Look, it's a level of vulnerability that I think is really hard to digest. And I concluded, via Virginia Coles Life and Lack of Archive, that it's that. That you can only be so vulnerable in so many ways at the same time. And I think that's the real challenge. If you are actively pursuing your career and working really hard at that, that is a vulnerable place to be, and so is family life in a lot of ways. And especially if you are pursuing your career, you're opening yourself up to levels of critique. You know, Virginia Coles was hard at work in the 50s at an era in which she was living in England, married to an Englishman. The numbers of women working outside the home were very small. And so she was opening herself up to a level of critique on the domestic realm that other women were not. And so that the idea of another layer of vulnerability probably just felt like too much. And her daughter says that it's because she. She was such a private person, which I'm sure is also the case, but to me, it's a much more emotional choice than that.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's terribly sad because it leaves all of us no roadmap. On the current draft of my book, a friend of mine who has children and is a working writer literally just wrote in the margins. What is her secret? How did she do it? That's how I felt too, like I would love to know the choices that got her from, you know, 8:00am till 6:00pm every day. What were the tiny things that she did to. To bring this life of tremendous presence, both domestically and this interesting career together? How did she do it? More roadmaps are only ever a good thing. And so, yeah, it's tragic.

[B]

Yeah, that will remain our frustration. I saw you in an interview say that the audience you wished most for this book was men. And so. So, yeah, because we've talked a lot about what women's history means to us. I'm curious, why is it that you want particularly men to be reading this?

[C]

I think that the women in its pages are undeniably excellent at what they do. And so I think that does a service, I think, for men to really be assimilating the canonicity of these women into what they perceive as the backwards glance of journalism, what journalism can do that to me is really important. When I wrote the book review that kind of launched this book, I spoke with the director of a journalism program, and I asked him why. I asked him, first of all, if any of these women were on any of the syllabi that he had generated or created. He did syllabi about 20th century literary journalism. And he said no. And I said, why? And he said, you know, syllabi. And I really respect his own vulnerability in this moment, to be honest. He said, you know, making a syllabus is an incredibly personal thing. You include the piece of pieces that. That speak to you so often. And my positionality is such that I. The pieces that really spoke to me, especially when I was younger and not examining all of this, not interrogating it. It was certain logical writers writing about things that. There's not a huge amount of surprise there. He was a man making syllabi that prioritized men's writing because that's what spoke to him on a personal level. And so to me, moving these women into the mainstream will be a factor of not convincing men, but bringing men into the fold, the. Into the fan clubs. So there's that, and then there's also the fact that these women are so much their own people and so much so able to marry these different impulses and desires. And I think that's really important for men to understand also. And I should clarify, of course, I want women to read my book too.

[A]

Of course.

[C]

No, but it's easier sell there.

[B]

Yeah, that's. That is an easier sell. And I think it's really important because I was literally just talking about. About that earlier today with a reader of Broad history, and we were talking about our shared love of the Bend of Brothers series, which I have rewatched so, so many times. And I feel like women are often usually called upon to consume men's stories because that's what's out there and we appreciate them and we love them. And I love Band of Brothers, even though there's a single female character in all 10 episodes. But that's fine because the men are wonderful and complex and interesting. But. But it is very rarely that men are called upon to have the same level of appreciation for complex women's stories. And women's history or women's fiction is pitched as just that, you know, for a female audience.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

And it's actually. No, it's stories of people that all people should be reading.

[C]

Yeah. And I think it's interesting, like, you know, the idea of these creating this cushioned world for young women to dream big. And that's wonderful. That's important. But at the same time, when those dreams push up against the patriarchy, that's when one. That's the friction that is much more important to me to be tackling.

[B]

That's a good place to end, I think. Thank you so much, Julia. I really, really enjoyed our conversation. And so I can recommend everyone to read and be inspired by Starry and Restless until your next book, which I'm going to be curious about.

[C]

Thank you so much. Thanks so much for this.

[A]

Okay, the podcast is done, but hold on, don't close it just yet. Grab your phone, open the podcast app that you're using right now, and somewhere on the show page for Broad History, you should see some stars. It's at the bottom of the page on Apple, on Spotify, you have to tap the three dots menu. And then you hit Rate Podcast. Go ahead and tap those five stars. Add a few nice words in the review if you're enjoying this. And you must be because you're listening to the end, my friend. It really helps people find the show

[B]

and it helps me. And also honestly is great for the ego. Thank you to the few people who've

[A]

already put some very generous word there. And if you're feel generous, you can still sign up for membership or just donate any amount that you'd [e-mail] membership. You can also, if you'd like to

[B]

learn more about the women we talked

[A]

about today or any of the other women who have appeared on the show,

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

How cool is that?

[A]

The link again will be in the

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

this was broad history.

[A]

I'm your host, Isabelle Rogol, and I will talk to you very soon.