"I refuse to be a footnote" – the women who invented literary journalism

Julia Cooke, author of Starry and Restless, joins me to bring back three women who were household names in their day — Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey Hahn — pioneering journalists who covered wars, crossed borders, and revolutionised literary nonfiction decades before the men usually credited with inventing it. We talk about why these women's fame didn't survive them, the challenges of resurrecting female legacy, and what it meant — then and now — to want both a roaming career and a life with people you love.

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Jump to:

• (00:00) - AUDIO 04 Julia Cooke (corrected)
• (00:08) - "Women have no history"
• (03:56) - On the value of understanding the whole arc of a woman's career
• (07:09) - They were exceptional but not an exception
• (09:43) - Meet Rebecca West
• (12:27) - Meet Martha Gellhorn
• (15:43) - Meet Emily Hahn
• (18:09) - Writing about war the way no man ever had
• (20:13) - Superstars in their lifetime, disappeared in journalism history
• (23:25) - Fame Without Legacy
• (24:06) - "Women have no history"
• (24:53) - Motherhood, domesticity and ambition
• (29:39) - Making a home abroad
• (31:26) - Virginia Cowles, Julia Morgan and women who leave no archives
• (39:45) - Why men should read women's historyw
• (42:36) - Closing Thoughts
• (43:13) - Outro

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Creators and Guests

Host

Isabelle Roughol

Journalist & public historian

Guest

Julia Cooke

Journalist and author, Starry and Restless

What is Broad History?

The history you think you know, with women in it this time

[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: 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 Roughol.

[00:00:08] "Women have no history"
---

[00:00:08] Isabelle Roughol: 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, and yes, you're calling him Jools Vern, and that's wrong.

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 romanticised. 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, Isabelle, 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 Cooke, mentions this famous quote by Virginia Woolf: "Women have no 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. Our 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, a 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 world world-roaming journalists to 10-year-old Isabelle's personal pantheon. Four really, if you count my wonderful guest, American writer and journalist Julia Cooke, the author of Starry and Restless, the joint biography of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey [00:03:00] Hahn.

As always, before we get started, 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 to 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 at broadhistory.com. The link is in the show notes as well.

You can also just sign up for the newsletter, which is free, 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. In weeks that the podcast isn't coming out, there's always a newsletter giving you something. So that's all at broadhistory.com.

Now let's jump in with Julia Cooke.

[00:03:56] On the value of understanding the whole arc of a woman's career
---

[00:03:56] Julia Cooke: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:03:58] Isabelle Roughol: My pleasure. So you actually slid into my dms on Instagram, a few weeks back.

Uh, 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 gonna be introducing in a minute. But first I wanna 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.

[00:04:18] Julia Cooke: 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 forties. I knew that the numbers were higher than what I had initially assumed, but I did not realise 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, it all came together so quickly. I learned about Mickey Hahn, Virginia Cowles, Dorothy Thompson, Jesse Redmond Faucet, so many other women. That sense of kind of being astounded by the sheer 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 how do I have career [00:06:00] 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 have children. So 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 Adrienne Nicole Le Blanc, who are all literary writers and journalists who I admire so much, but you know, they're in their fifties, sixties, 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.

[00:07:09] They were exceptional but not an exception
---

[00:07:09] Isabelle Roughol: And so you picked three and 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, it could have been more, rather than, picking just Martha Gellhorn or just Rebecca West or just Mickey Hahn.

[00:07:39] Julia Cooke: Yeah, so I pitched 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.

[00:08:03] Isabelle Roughol: 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. Yeah, I think 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 they're often isn't enough archives to do a full-length book.

[00:08:52] Julia Cooke: Exactly. Yes.

[00:08:53] Isabelle Roughol: 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 [00:09:00] and the fact that, when we present women's histories as singular biographies, we make them sound like they're exceptions or they're you know, exceptional individuals.

[00:09:09] Julia Cooke: 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. I. 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 did have a different angle on each of their lives. Yes. But, I was much more interested in the notion of a cohort.

[00:09:43] Meet Rebecca West
---

[00:09:43] Isabelle Roughol: So let's introduce this cohort then. Talk to us, briefly about each of these three women and who they are.

[00:09:49] Julia Cooke: Yeah, 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 an a remarkably young age. She was so young when she started really writing and taking on these kind of establishment ideas and figures.

How young are we talking?

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 and, went right for the jugular of these kind of establishment figures like Arnold Bennett and HG Wells, and some of the fluffier, 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 Grey Falcon, which is the, this giant book about Yugoslavia.

[00:10:42] Isabelle Roughol: 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 gonna love this. And then I saw the size of it and never opened it.

[00:10:50] Julia Cooke: I know. 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, 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 five days a week until I finished.

[00:11:45] Isabelle Roughol: Okay. that's my sign to pick it up then.

[00:11:47] Julia Cooke: There you go. 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 [00:12:00] traitors,

British traitors, to the Nazis, and, really revolutionised 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 could be happening in, in a kitchen.

It's very accessible in that way. So that's Rebecca West.

[00:12:27] Meet Martha Gellhorn
---

[00:12:28] Julia Cooke: 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. Um. And, 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 marriages 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 who you divorced like 30 years earlier? Would that not just piss you off on a very human level?

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

Yeah, and it's so funny, there are specific places where she humanises 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 not that she was like the easiest partner either, it, it just is.

he's well, so domineering and

[00:13:46] Isabelle Roughol: And a blocker to her career, right? And jealous and stealing her commissions and her opportunities and, hoping she would just stay home and let him be the writer, which maybe don't marry a writer if that's the goal?

[00:13:59] Julia Cooke: No, and, and it, it's, it's kind of tragic because you can see him really like admiring, like he's so... at the beginning of the 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 we're talking about him.

[00:14:27] Isabelle Roughol: So let's talk about her.

[00:14:28] Julia Cooke: Exactly.

[00:14:28] Isabelle Roughol: the last, this is the last that we will be talking about Hemingway. We just mention him.

[00:14:33] Julia Cooke: 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 [00:15:00] term, domesticity. She really loved making, having a home and 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 a war piece. 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.

[00:15:33] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, and that was a long life in a 20th century

[00:15:34] Julia Cooke: It was a long,

[00:15:36] Isabelle Roughol: that was full of conflict.

[00:15:37] Julia Cooke: Full of conflict. And she went everywhere. Her courage is really remarkable.

[00:15:43] Meet Emily Hahn
---

[00:15:43] Julia Cooke: 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 realising it.

She wrote for the New Yorker for 60 some years, from the twenties through the eighties. She was the New Yorker's China Coast correspondent from 1937, I believe, on 36 or seven. And, she wrote about, the Japanese invasion of China, the Pacific brunt of World War ii. She wrote 52 books in her lifetime.

[00:16:11] Isabelle Roughol: 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, shao Xunmei and made enormous waves with both relationships. Both were very controversial at the time, which she did not care at all about. She was like that. She really did whatever the hell she wanted. 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 part of World War II that we don't, at least in, in the west, we don't read about a lot. but it's really hard.

[00:17:20] Julia Cooke: 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 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 [00:18:00] life in post-war England with the rationing and,all of the relational consequences therein. it was, it's really interesting.

[00:18:09] Writing about war the way no man ever had
---

[00:18:09] Isabelle Roughol: That's what I find really interesting and, and modern and pioneering about their work is that, they're taking on the, hard subjects that men normally cover, war, geopolitics, et cetera, but they're not writing, they're not writing like men, which is, the sort of backended compliment that people try to 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, that just, uh, didn't used to appear,

[00:18:56] Julia Cooke: So 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, to shunt one to the side.

[00:19:13] Isabelle Roughol: 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 Hahn 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, you know, um, who supposedly invented this new journalism. And here you have these women, 30 years earlier doing the same thing and more, um. What? What the hell?

[00:20:13] Superstars in their lifetime, disappeared in journalism history
---

[00:20:13] Julia Cooke: 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 cover of Time Magazine, given an OBE and a DBE. President Truman called her 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 Publicised 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 [00:21:00] famous husband's. So, you know, these, 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 what you're saying, Tom Wolf, Gaye Talese, Joan Didion. And I think there are so many, there are a number of different answers to that question.

Number one, they did not specialise. They wrote about tonnes 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 Hahn 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 Arlen 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 Hunters Thompson would've 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, 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 metabolise.

[00:22:59] Isabelle Roughol: 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 were just 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.

[00:23:25] Fame Without Legacy
---

[00:23:26] Isabelle Roughol: So I'm a French woman, but even in France, we don't read George Sand. And we, we know her only because of personal scandal and reputation, and she's 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, 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 George Sand

So yeah, there's something about female fame [00:24:00] that doesn't translate into legacy and staying power in history, that is quite frustrating.

[00:24:06] "Women have no history"
---

[00:24:06] Julia Cooke: Yeah, 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 Wolf 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 gonna have to do it themselves.

[00:24:31] Isabelle Roughol: That's a big reason I'm doing this project. the more I learn about women's history, the more I learn, I realised, oh no, we've done this before.

[00:24:38] Julia Cooke: We've done it! it

[00:24:39] Isabelle Roughol: 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, the previous generation.

[00:24:53] Julia Cooke: Totally.

[00:24:53] Motherhood, domesticity and ambition
---

[00:24:54] Julia Cooke: 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, 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.

[00:25:52] Isabelle Roughol: 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, 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 them, for their moms as well. so there was deep, there weren't islands, there was deep relationships there.

[00:26:30] Julia Cooke: 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 push off the care of my ageing parents to someone else. I'd like to be involved in that to some extent.

[00:27:00] and I think, I always thought that in order to have this kind of more swashbuckling, international life and career, 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.

[00:27:51] Isabelle Roughol: 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'm, I mean, I bought my house a year and a half ago and I'm, I'm I, it's just been a long DIY project ever since.

I'm obsessed with design and with,nesting, but. But at the same time, she makes a house and then she leaves. She likes the process of creating it, but she's afraid of it trapping her. Um, and I feel that's so relatable. and I think it's Rebecca West who says, don't do the housework.

Ne never do your own housework, which is such a privileged, British to say, I am sorry, but never do your own housework. Or never learn to drive. Never. And

[00:28:38] Julia Cooke: That was Mickey, which

[00:28:40] Isabelle Roughol: it. Was it Mickey? Never learn to drive. Yeah.

[00:28:42] Julia Cooke: I, to me, like the game of telephone that, that advice took, which is, Rebecca was saying to Mickey Hahn never do your own housework, or you'll never write another word in your life, which is profoundly privileged. And also I don't know.

there are days when I do like doing my own housework. 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

[00:29:16] Isabelle Roughol: there is such, there is

[00:29:18] Julia Cooke: so much truth to it.

[00:29:19] Isabelle Roughol: there is so much truth to, her understanding of, the male psyche of,don't do the, don't learn to do the things that they will take advantage of. It's just something every woman has experienced, It feels very real.

[00:29:34] Julia Cooke: Yeah. Martha Gel Horn and her nests. Uh,

[00:29:39] Making a home abroad
---

[00:29:41] Julia Cooke: When I was in my twenties and I lived in Mexico City, I also, I 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 household to be such an incredible reporting, like pre-work.

It connects you with a community that is new to you [00:30:00] in a totally different way. And I recognise 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.

[00:30:14] Isabelle Roughol: 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.

[00:30:36] Julia Cooke: Totally. Yes. When I lived in Mexico City, I had the, 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, that then totally inflects the reporting. It inflects your ability to humanise the people that are around you and that you're reporting on. It's, so much a part of their writing process.

[00:31:10] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Yeah. But this sense of wanting to feel rooted while fearing the cage,

[00:31:16] Julia Cooke: Absolutely.

[00:31:17] Isabelle Roughol: just feels, like an incredibly, universal, or at least for women, experience. That's just something that I felt extremely relatable.

[00:31:26] Virginia Cowles, Julia Morgan and women who leave no archives
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[00:31:26] Isabelle Roughol: I do wanna talk about the woman who's missing from the book. Virginia. Virginia Cowles? Cowles

[00:31:33] Julia Cooke: I think it's pronounced.

[00:31:34] Isabelle Roughol: Coles. Okay.

[00:31:35] Julia Cooke: sure.

[00:31:36] Isabelle Roughol: Uh, I never know with the English language. Uh, but, I, 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

[00:31:52] Julia Cooke: Absolutely.

[00:31:53] Isabelle Roughol: why it is that she's not more present in the book.

[00:31:55] Julia Cooke: 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 draught of Starry and Restless that has her much more present in it. but that draught feels awkward because she did not leave an archive.

She made a distinct choice not to, not that 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. Her husband was Aiden Crawley, he was an MP in England.

He then went on to, 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 You 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 [00:33:00] 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 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. And it's a total mystery. I've written to Howard Gottlieb who started the 20th century archive in Boston, which is where Martha Gellhorn's archives are held. Cowles 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, Cowles never responded or didn't record her response or, but there's no archive. so in that draught 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 it on a narrative level, the book is pretty long as is, and I didn't wanna 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.

[00:34:41] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Yeah. Let that be a lesson for women to, document your thinking.

[00:34:49] Julia Cooke: 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've 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, 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, it just must be terrible.

[00:35:26] Isabelle Roughol: With all the social trappings and the weights of shame and modesty and all of that, that is. Can I tell you a story that that reminded me of?

I sort of got into women's history. I mean, 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 Hearst Castle in California, which is, for people who don't know the [00:36:00] very grandiose, ridiculous home of William Randolph Hearst in California, sort of around Santa Barbara. And, I found out there about Julia Morgan who'd never, 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 sounded incredible, fascinating.

I found nothing. And there was like 10 biographies of Hurst there, and there 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, 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 architectural reviews than biographies, but there isn't a narrative biography of her because you just can't write it. There's just, there's She 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 sketch out 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 school because women could get in. I mean, there was so much to her life. It's

[00:38:04] Julia Cooke: Well, and it's, it, look. It's a level of vulnerability that I think is really hard to, digest. and I concluded via Virginia Cowles 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. Virginia Cowles was hard at work in the fifties, in the 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 was such a [00:39:00] private person, which I'm sure is also the case, but to me it's a much more emotional choice than that. It's terribly sad because it leaves all of us no roadmap. on the current draught 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, 8:00 AM till 6:00 PM every day. What were the tiny things that she did 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.

[00:39:41] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, that will remain our frustration. Um,

[00:39:45] Why men should read women's historyw
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[00:39:45] Isabelle Roughol: I saw you in an interview say that the audience you wished most for this book was men. And so, 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?

[00:40:04] Julia Cooke: 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 a director of a journalism programme, 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, and I, I really respect his, his own vulnerability in this moment, to be honest. He said, you know, making a syllabus is an incredibly personal thing. you include the 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 prioritise 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 and into the, into the fan clubs. So there's that.

And then there's also the fact that these 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

[00:41:40] Isabelle Roughol: Of course.

[00:41:42] Julia Cooke: Easier sell there.

Yeah, that's, that is an easier sell. And I think it's really important because I was literally just talking about that earlier today with a reader of Broad History and we were talking about our shared love of the Band of Brothers series, which I have re-watched so, so many times. And I feel like [00:42:00] 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 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. And, and it's actually no, it's, it's stories of people that all people should be reading. Yeah.

[00:42:36] Closing Thoughts
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[00:42:36] Julia Cooke: 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, that's the, that's the friction that is much more important to me to be tackling.

[00:42:55] Isabelle Roughol: That's a good place to end I think. Thank you so much, Julia. I really, really enjoyed our, our conversation and so I can recommend everyone to read and be inspired by Starry and Restless, um, until your next book, which I'm gonna be curious about.

Thank you.

[00:43:13] Julia Cooke: Thanks so much for this.

[00:43:13] Outro
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[00:43:13] Isabelle Roughol: 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.

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This was Broad History, I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol. I'll talk to you very soon.