No Job for a Woman the Film
Dickey Chapelle + Ruth Cowan + Martha Gaellhorn
Dickey Chapelle + Ruth Cowan + Martha Gaellhorn

uring World War II, most Americans considered war reporting “No Job for a Woman.” Women were banned from the frontlines, prevented from reporting front page stories about generals and battlefield maneuvers and assigned instead to “woman’s angle” stories about nurses and female military personnel. Fighting these restrictions, 140 women correspondents defied journalistic conventions and forever changed America’s understanding of war.

By war’s end, women reporters brought home a new kind of war story – more personal and all-encompassing, reaching beyond the battlefield and deep into human lives.  The film will tell this story through the lives of three of these pioneering women: magazine writer Martha Gellhorn, wire service reporter Ruth Cowan, and photographer Dickey Chapelle.

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For more information, contact:
Hurry Up Sister Productions, LLC
P.O. Box 1025
Old Chelsea Station, NY, NY 10011-9998
T: 212-255-1336
nojobforawoman@gmail.com
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Dickey Chapelle DICKEY CHAPELLE wanted to be so close to the action she’d feel bullets whizzing by her head. Instead, she was assigned to the sidelines – photographing training exercises in the Panamanian jungles and, later, blood transfusions from the confines of a hospital ship. The ship’s destination: Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Her photos of a dying soldier restored to glowing health spurred the Red Cross blood drive for years. And at last, bullets did whiz by her head: she jumped ship, followed the blood story to field hospitals, and came under fire on the frontlines.
Ruth Cowan RUTH COWAN wanted to report the first draft of history. Instead, her editors sent her to cover the work of the Woman’s Army Corps (WACS) in North Africa to keep her audience—women on the homefront—interested in the war.  Despite a bureau chief who refused to speak to her and denied her access to Jeeps, press briefings and the mess hall, Cowan emerged as an intimate reporter of nurses’ stories—much as her colleague Ernie Pyle wrote the soldiers’ story, from the “grunts’-eye view.”
Martha Gellhorn MARTHA GELLHORN wanted not only to report, but to change the course of history. As a young woman covering the Spanish Civil War, she presciently forecast World War II.  In Spain, she wrote heartbreakingly about the ordinary lives of people under siege, and in World War II, she fiercely refused to be restricted to the “woman’s angle.” Nevertheless, her greatest contribution was her reporting from the edges of the war zone—stories of orphans, widows, civilians and refugees-- which illuminated a whole new world of people affected by war.