Motherhood and warfare: The rise of women reporters on the front-line
As Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford admits to the dilemmas of being a working mother, one woman reporter tells of how she juggles nappies and war zones...
In Jerusalem in the late 1980s during the first Palestinian uprising, the headquarters for the foreign correspondents was The American Colony Hotel in the East part of the city.
It was former Pashas palace with a courtyard surrounded by lemon trees where journalists sat waiting for another clash in the West Bank, and a wire machine spewing out minute by minute news (this was before satellite television and mobile phones).
It was heady and exotic, like something out of a Graham Greene novel.
War reporter Janine di Giovanni's prorities have changed since having a child
I arrived for the first time as a timid freelancer, in my early 20s and very nave, and watched the assortment of diplomats, intelligence officers, journalists and Palestinian activists gathered around tables drinking tea or gin and tonics.
What were visibly missing though, were women. Cut to 2011 and it couldnt be more different.
The recent conflict in Libya has been noted for many things, but one of them is the prominence of women reporting it.
The indefatigable Lindsey Hillsum from Channel Four, who has covered everything from Rwanda to the Balkans, has led the pack with her professionalism.
Skys Alex Crawford has done an exemplary job, as has CNNs Sara Sidner, who was plucked from obscurity in a regional office and has run circles around the usual male team.
So why are so many women taking themselves off to Libya? Its a golden career opportunity - t! o report from a front line offers instant kudos.
And television channels will always want women on screen because they look good and attract viewers.
However, although weve come a long way since reporting the Korea or Vietnam wars, for instance, were still not equal to men.
We are often given the softer side of war to report, the female angle so to speak, feeding into the stereotype that women are more caring war reporters than men.
In my experience this isnt always true - there are some incredibly tough female camerawomen, for instance, and many hardcore female journalists.
Tough choice: After more than a decade of reporting war and living in various fleapits around the world, Janine desperately wanted tobecome a mother
After my stint in Jerusalem, I went to Bosnia. Like everyone, I was frightened of Kate Adie, who was the BBCs huge star at the time. She had a penchant for hanging around with British troops and doing her live reports with soldiers in the background.
She had become Britains pin-up of sorts, since the first Gulf War when she dominated the television screens. She was intelligent, scrappy and very scary.
She ignored me most of the time, as did most of the other older women reporters who were there, but one day in Vitez, Central Bosnia, I saw her moving towards me. Oh Christ, I thought, what have I done? But no, the great Adie was smiling.
Do you have any nail varnish remover? she asked, waving her manicured, though chipped, fingernails. This bonding attempt completely softened me to her, even though I have never worn nail varnish and certainly did not have any remover in my bag.
Other heroic women who set the tone for the current round of female journalists were Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, who has worked consistently on every violent conflict despite losing an eye in Sri Lanka, and Anne Les! lie of t his paper who used to appear like a beautiful ghost during the Bosnian war in a full-length fur coat and scooped every one of her stories.
All of us were godmothered by the greats.
My inspiration was Martha Gellhorn, a wife of Ernest Hemingway, she was a beautiful, glamorous and tough creature who made her debut during the Spanish Civil War where she shared a room at the Hotel Florida along with Hemingway and ate tinned sardines and drank whiskey.
The marriage did not last the two were fiercely competitive to the point that he tried to steal her assignments during the D-Day invasion (she did a better job than him, though, reporting from a hospital gunship while he was marooned on land).
I loved Gellhorn, and modelled myself after her: her writing was compassionate, literary and human.
Mother Alex Crawford said while reporting conflicts she often feels scared
Over the years I have mentored many young female reporters, trying to advise them how to map their away in a dangerous world, so Im pleased to see so many great women journalists on the rise.
But when CBS (and former GMTV) reporter Lara Logan was brutally assaulted last spring during the Egyptian revolution, I was concerned not just for her, but for the fact that editors might send fewer women into the field - undoing everything that female war reporters had been fighting for for years.
The incredibly brave New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario had also recently been kidnapped in Libya and writing of her experience, had said that she feared being raped (she was not, but she and the others she was kidnapped with suffered huge trauma at the hands of Gaddafi's forces).
Thankfully, both womens attacks did not affect editors choices. I was happy to see that Addario was back on her way to Libya this week.
As for Logan, she suffered two assaults. First the horrific attack in which a crowd of 200 men ripped off her clothes and assaulted her. Then the press who wondered why a mother of two would put herself in such a position pillared her.
She was doing her job, I thought. Men who are kidnapped or assaulted are never criticsed because they are fathers.
Being a mother myself I am constantly aware that I am scrutinised too.
In2003, shortly after I married, the Academy Award winning director Barbara Kopple gathered a few of us Marie Colvin, myself, Mary Rogers (a camerawoman for CNN) and Molly Bingham, a photographer who had been jailed during the time of Saddam, and followed us around for a year to make a documentary about the challenges women war reporters faced, in life and work.
It wasa tough time for me because, after more than a decade of reporting war and living in various fleapits around the world, I desperately wanted tobecome a mother.
My life was changing just as the war in Iraq was heating up, and I was missing it. I was not in a good mood, even though I was ecstatic to be pregnant at 40 but at the same time my fiercely competitive edge told meI was missing out on big stories.
CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, in Tahrir Square shortly before she was assaulted in Cairo, Egypt
I watched TV half relieved not to be there, but also envious of my colleagues who were. Kopple shot me enormously pregnant in the Gaza strip and finally three months later at home with a newborn grappling and in tears over how to change a nappy.
I had an important role, but the other women in the film were doing re! al journ alistic work: Marie was investigating mass graves, Mary was frantically running around Iraq filming suicide bombers, and Molly was shooting a documentary about the insurgents.
And I was home breast-feeding.
This is the biggest conflict for women reporters, and the reason that you may sometimes see someone as a rising star and then not the pull between motherhood and work.
Unlike other professions where you can ease back into the work place, there is an ethical question here: do you put yourself in danger once you have a child?
My son, seeing me leave for Libya a few months ago turned and looked at me with huge eyes: Mama, cant you go somewhere less dangerous? It nearly ripped my heart out. But I still went.
There is a part of me that still believes in the importance of bearing witness to an important story and giving a voice to the voiceless - which is why I started all those yearsago. Its this that drives me to go back to conflict zones.
Its a risk that was brought into sharp relief last week when I got the telephone call I have been dreading for the past 15 years.
Or rather, an email from New York asking me to call my husbands office (we are separated but remain very close and share the upbringing of our son), France 2, the TV channel.
Shaking, I dialled the number and learned that he had been shot in front of Gadaffis compound.
The sniper that aimed at him had missed his brain and hit him in the jaw, fracturing it. He was going to be evacuated, and was fine.
'There is a part of me that still believes in the importance of bearing witness to an important story and giving a voice to the voiceless - which is why I started all those yearsago. Its this that drives me to go back to conflict zones'
When he finally called me later, he could not understand my tears: Youre crying because I didnt die? he said.
I tried to explain the fact that he could have died, and I was half furio! us that he had put himself in such a position to start with he has a seven-year-old son.
Then my sons godfather reminded me that just last month he had chided me for trying to get into Misrata - the town at the heart of the troubles in Libya. Do you really need to do this stuff anymore? he had said.
The answer is yes but I work in a different way now. When Bruno leaves Libya, I will try to go, but I cant go for weeks and weeks on end I miss my son too much.
I also am now afraid of death, something I never felt before in all the years I reported from jungles and trekked across mountains.
Motherhood brings out new emotions, which Lara Logan bravely talked about after her attack: she said she was tortured by how she had let her own two children down, how she could have given up on them so easily. I sympathise.
Gellhorn never bore children, but continued to report into her 80s.
Gloria Emerson, another great female war reporter for the New York Times, was also childless. Both women ended their days alone, and reportedly committed suicide.
I knew having a child would mean I would miss lots of stories and would never again be the first one inside a city under siege or get the first interview with a dictator.
But I would have pages and pages of diaries filled with memories of Lukas first tooth and witness the first moment he walked.
And no scoop is more satisfying than that.
Janine di Giovannis GHOSTS BY DAYLIGHT: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND WAR is published by Bloomsbury.
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