“This Was No Place for a Woman”: Gender Judo, Gender Stereotypes, and World War II Correspondent Ruth Cowan

Abstract

In 1943, Ruth Cowan became one of the first two women with official US Army credentials to report on World War II. Applying the theory of “gender judo,” which demonstrates how women have used traditional gender roles to get themselves further into masculine roles, to Cowan's war reportage shows how her writing lulled reading audiences into accepting women in gender-bending roles. Cowan used a range of emotions, from humor to anger, to portray enlisted women as strong, fearless women who, nevertheless, found themselves enjoying traditionally feminine pursuits. Her reporting also showed men in the Army inhabiting women's roles in various ways. Cowan bent gender roles in her writing, even as she found herself faced with discrimination.

Notes

1 Biographic information on Rena Billingham is not readily available. According to Cowan's dispatch, Billingham was a New York newspaper reporter before joining Reuters during the war. After the war, she went on to work at the Venice office of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

2 Ruth Cowan, “Hot Beachhead Just No Place for Timid Lady: Spiders in the Foxholes and Awful Lot of Banging by Those Mighty Guns,” Evening Review, August 17, 1944, 13, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413796/the_evening_review (accessed March 10, 2014). Ruth Cowan's full name is Ruth Baldwin Cowan Nash. Nash is her married name and was not added until 1956. Therefore, this article uses Cowan because that is the name she used in her byline during World War II. The exception is in references to the oral history interview that she did for the Washington Press Club's Oral History Project in 1988. That interview uses her full name in its title, so her full name is used in those citations.

3 “Ruth Cowan,” No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII, http://nojobforawoman.com/reporters/ruth-cowan/ (accessed March 29, 2014).

4 Articles were gathered with a search for Cowan's byline, “Ruth Cowan,” limited to the years 1943–45 in the newspaper archive Newspapers.com. These search parameters returned more than 6,600 results. Because Cowan was a reporter for the Associated Press, many of the results were duplicate dispatches that had been picked up by several newspapers. To produce a cross-section of articles for analysis, the results were reviewed and ninety-seven unique clippings were selected either because they were exclusive articles or because the article had been run in significantly different versions in different papers. The articles were then grouped into categories. Those categories included Cowan writing about herself and others writing about Cowan; dispatches about nursing and medical care; articles about the WACs, nurses, and other women soldiers; reflections on wartime life on the ground; society articles including marriages and babies; and stories about the enlisted men.

5 Quoted in Linda Lumsden, “The Essentialist Agenda of the ‘Woman's Angle’ in Cold War Washington,” Journalism History 33, no. 1 (2007): 4.

6 “Battle Covered by 26 AP Men: Largest Staff Reporting Rhine Crossing,” Alton Evening Telegraph, March 24, 1945, 2, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2572969/print_87/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

7 “AP Completes Plans to Cover Allied Invasion,” Decatur Herald, April 23, 1944, 4, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2564495/print_58/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

8 Hoyt McAfee, “American War Correspondents True Unarmed Heroes of Fighting Front,” Evening Independent, May 26, 1943, 16, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2564420/print_51/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

9 “Campaign Ribbons Are Awarded to Civilian War Correspondents,” Freeport Journal-Standard, December 18, 1945, 7, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558739/print_28/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

10 Joseph P. Phillips, “Women War Reporters Prove Good Soldiers in N. Africa,” Cumberland Evening Times, March 1, 1943, 14, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558777/print_33/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

11 Joan C. Williams, “Women, Work, and the Art of Gender Judo,” Washington Post, January 24, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/women-work-and-the-art-of-gender-judo/2014/01/24/29e209b2-82b2-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html (accessed July 6, 2016). For a full explanation of women in the workplace, see Joan C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey, What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

12 Williams and Dempsey, What Works for Women, xxi.

13 Williams, “Women, Work.”

14 Shannon P. Hart, “Female Leadership and the ‘Cult of Domesticity’: The Contributions of Elizabeth Harrison and Rumah Crouse to the Chicago Kindergarten Movement,” American Educational History Journal 38, no. 1 (2011): 132.

15 Lumsden, “The Essentialist Agenda,” 7.

16 “Nash, Ruth Cowan, 1901–.”

17 Doris Weatherford, American Women and World War II (New York: Facts on File, 1990), ix.

18 “Ruth Cowan,” No Job for a Woman.

19 Bettie J. Morden's history of the WAC notes that while many people could accept women as auxiliary workers to the military, the real struggle for women surrounded their ability to achieve full military standing, with all of the benefits therein, including military rank and status and benefits. In 1943, congress finally voted to grant women full military status, which turned the WAAC into a full-fledged part of the Army, the WACs. For more information, see Bettie J. Morden, The Women's Army Corps: 1945–1978 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1990), 10–11. Some 350,000 to 400,000 women served in the various women's military branches during World War II, including the WAAC/WAC, the WAVES, the United States women's Coast Guard reserves (nicknamed the SPARS), the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), and the United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve, according to Hermann J. Trojanowski, “Women Step Up to Serve,” Tar Heel Junior Historian 47, no. 2 (2008): 15–17.

20 The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was formed by congressional order in May 1942. Its name was officially changed to the Women's Army Corps in September 1943.

21 “World War II: Women and the War,” Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, http://www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/History/wwii.html (accessed March 11, 2014).

22 Judith A. Bellfaire, The Women's Army Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service, US Army Center of Military History, February 17, 2005, http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/WAC/WAC.htm (accessed March 22, 2013).

23 Morden, The Women's Army Corps, 3–4.

24 Bellfaire, The Women's Army Corps.

25 Ibid.

26 Ruth Baldwin Cowan Nash, interview.

27 Ibid.

28 Carolyn M. Edy, The Woman War Correspondent, the US military, and the Press: 1846–1947 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 48.

29 Sorrel, The Women Who Wrote the War, 50.

30 Nash, personal interview.

31 Sorrel, The Women Who Wrote the War, 188.

32 Quoted in Lumsden, “The Essentialist Agenda,” 4.

33 In her column, “Sharing between the Shears,” Mae Saunders documented a male war correspondent who told her that “he resented having to wait to file his story because a woman got there with her copy and was given preference by the British officer in charge”; see Saunders, “Sharing between the Shears,” Bakersfield Californian, March 7, 1945, 6, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2552527/the_bakersfield_californian/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

34 Maurine Beasley, “How Did the Restrictions on Women Reporters Affect Their Reporting?” No Job for a Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII, http://nojobforawoman.com/reporters/ruth-cowan/ (accessed March 12, 2014).

35 “Christiane Amanpour: Makers Moment: The Story behind the Story,” Makers, http://www.makers.com/christiane-amanpour/moments/story-behind-story (accessed March 12, 2014).

36 Beasley, “How Did Restrictions?” Beasley is referring to the legendary Martha Gellhorn, an American author who was well known for her war reportage from the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War and for her brief, tumultuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway.

37 Julia Edwards, Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 5.

38 Ruth Baldwin Cowan Nash, interview.

39 Ruth Cowan, “Boone County Army Officers Listed in Story from France,” Belvidere Daily Republican, June 27, 1944, 4, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2552342/belvidere_daily_republican/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

40 Ibid.

41 Cowan, “Hot Beachhead Just No Place for Timid Lady.”

42 Ruth Cowan, “Does One Wave Equal Two Men?” Big Spring Daily Herald, December 31, 1943, 1, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558498/print_9/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

43 Ruth Cowan, “WACs Take on Unusual Jobs in Great Britain,” Macon Chronicle-Herald, December 21, 1943, 5, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2573313/print_113/ and http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2573314/print_114_continue_of_wac_odd_jobs/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

44 Ruth Cowan, “More WACs Wanted Overseas,” Gaffney Ledger, March 2, 1944, 3, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2573380/print_120/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

45 Ruth Cowan, “Army Nurses Toughen Up in England: They Go through Hard Training,” Miami Daily News-Record, February 9, 1944, 4, http://www.newspapers.com/image/#12604200 (accessed March 10, 2014).

46 Ruth Cowan, “6,000 Polish Women Train for Invasion of Europe,” Miami Daily News-Record, February 9, 1944, 4, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413766/miami_daily_newsrecord (accessed March 10, 2014).

47 Cowan, “WACs Take on Unusual Jobs.”

48 Cowan, “More WACs Wanted Overseas.”

49 Ruth Cowan, “Waacs Doing Good Job in Africa Today,” Sandusky Register, February 6, 1943, 1, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558504/print_11/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

50 Ruth Cowan, “Press Not Giving Full Picture of War in Italy, Solons Assert,” Alton Evening Telegraph, December 18, 1944, 1, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558610/print_14/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

51 Ibid., 582–83.

52 Ruth Cowan, “A Woman Reporter Rips into Rumors Concerning WACs,” Kansas City Star, June 11, 1943, 12, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413792/the_kansas_city_star (accessed March 10, 2014).

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ruth Baldwin Cowan Nash, interview.

56 Ruth Cowan, “Fashions in France; WACs Trade Scanties for Long-john Undies,” San Bernadino County Sun, November 29, 1944, 14, http://www.newspapers.com/image/#50322895 (accessed March 12, 2014).

57 Ruth Cowan, “WACs and ATS Still Like Silly Hats and Folderols,” Valley Morning Star, September 26, 1943, 9, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/415378/valley_morning_star (accessed March 11, 2014).

58 Ruth Cowan, “War Reporter's Notes: Men Called upon to Shine up Kitchen of WAC Mess in London,” Ironwood Daily Globe, April 12, 1944, 3, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413776/ironwood_daily_glob (accessed March 10, 2014).

59 Ibid.

60 Ruth Cowan, “Scrupulous Care of Troop Transport Offers Men Housekeeping Task,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 1, 1943, 2, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413819/the_salt_lake_tribune/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

61 Ruth Cowan, “Soldiers Become Excellent Housewives of a Necessity,” Morning Herald, March 5, 1943, 10, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2558772/print_32/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

62 Ibid.

63 Ruth Cowan, “He Doesn't Care; He's Making Soup,” Nebraska State Journal, December 22, 1944, 5, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/2572982/print_89/ (accessed June 4, 2015).

64 Ruth Cowan, “Wild Boar Feast and Hunt Enjoyed by Yanks in Africa,” Statesville Record & Landmark, March 18, 1943, 12, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/413738/statesville_record_landmark/ (accessed March 29, 2014).

65 Ruth Cowan, “Mama Gets the Medals; Papa Gets the Meals,” Pampa Daily News, September 3, 1943, 5, http://www.newspapers.com/clip/415498/pampa_daily_news (accessed March 11, 2014).

66 Ibid.

67 Lucia Peters, “‘Gender Judo’: Helping Women Get ahead in the Workplace since 2014,” Bustle, January 27, 2014, http://www.bustle.com/articles/13789-gender-judo-helping-women-get-ahead-in-the-workplace-since-2014 (accessed July 6, 2016).

68 “Gender and Women's Mental Health: Gender Disparities and Mental Health: The Facts,” World Health Organization, 2017, http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/ (accessed July 24, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Candi S. Carter Olson

Candi S. Carter Olson is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University, 322 Ag Research Building, Logan, UT 84322, [email protected].