Women and the Media - Kate Adie Top War Correspondent

Sep 4, 2011
Sylvia Kent

Kate Adie pictured in 2010 - Sylvia Kent Associates

For more than a century, the world of media has grown rapidly. Although women played their vital part, they have rarely reached the heights enjoyed by men.

Any woman who works in television, newspapers or broadcasting is aware that she is still one of a minority. Her path to success is still much more difficult than that of a man. Yet many remarkable women have contributed to the shaping of our media.

The World of Media, Entertainment and Mass Culture

The media as we know it today has evolved and developed since the end of the nineteenth century as technological developments made it possible to begin to establish a "mass" culture. The new technologies of photography and printing began to be used in the last quarter of the 19th century, to create new forms of communication and entertainment. From the early 1900s, newspapers could be cheaply produced and the cinema was established as an industry. Photographic equipment became much simpler to use than in previous times.

Back Room Jobs for the Girls

From the start, women have been active in many media areas, but mainly in the back room. Rarely were they in managerial levels. They were more welcome as performers than as directors, writers or technicians. Singers and actresses, though, are part of a long provenance of popular entertainment in which women have often been expected to perform primarily for a male audience.

Women's Magazines

From the middle Victorian period, there were magazines and journals specifically aimed at females, but rarely was their work published in the daily nationals. From the English Woman's Journal in the 1850s to Spare Rib founded in the 1970s, women have published their own magazines as part of the Women's Movement. Entertainment periodicals for upper-class women have an even longer history, going back to the 1690s, but it was the English Woman's Domestic Magazine, launched in 1852, that was really the first of the popular women's magazines as we recognise them today.

Newspaper Women

Determined, respected women journalists had begun working on newspapers and magazines, both in the US and Britain, despite the discrimination against them. In the nineteenth century, most male journalists served apprenticeships as reporters on provincial papers. This route, however, was closed to females. But conditions changed in the ensuing years, with Emilie Marshall and E M Tait paving the way for female editors. Martha Gellhorn writing for the Guardian, Mary Howarth of the Daily Mirror, and Rebecca West of the Scotsman were just some of the women who made their names in major newspapers and in Fleet Street in the early years. However, by the 1970s and ‘80s there were dozens of well-known female women writing for newspapers and major magazines.

Kate Adie - Probably the Most Successful Woman War Journalist

Despite enormous problems in making her mark in the mainly male world of reportage, Kate Adie's work in reporting from war zones has been exemplary. Her life has been explored in her best-selling autobiography published in 2002, with her second book Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War, published the following year. Adie was awarded an OBE in 1993 and received the Richard Dimbleby Award in 1990.. With ten honorary degrees from British universities including the Nottingham Trent University, Adie is at the pinnacle of her career in the media In her work, Adie celebrates the remarkable and unacknowledged heroism of women whose range of roles - form nursing to land girl to fighter pilot - has been paramount to civilian and military life through two World Wars and beyond. Dressed in camouflage, this Chief News Correspondent for the BBC has often wrestled with the practical problems of being a woman in the theatre of war.

The Society of Women Writers and Journalists

Oddly, it took a man, Joseph Snell Wood, the editor of a couple of London daily newspapers, to found a society specifically to assist women writers. It was launched on May 1, 1894, as the Society of Women Journalists (later the SWWJ), and as soon as the news reached the London dailies, more than 200 women applied for membership. Its first president was the American-born novelist and playwright, Mrs Pearl Craigie, who, during the following 117 years, was followed by some of the most famous names in literature and newspapers, like the Right Honourable Baroness Williams of Crosby (Shirley Williams) whose mother, Vera Brittain, was also a notable president.

Film, Radio and Television

Although women have succeeded to a certain degree in film, radio and television over the last half century, there is still a long way to go to achieve equality with men.