11 Women Who Changed Journalism

Journalism was a realm of machismo and masculinity for much of history. But whether they were reporting on the frontlines of battle, penning columns about love and relationships, or redefining reporting as we know it, women have had an impact on journalism that can’t be understated. Even before being granted the right to vote, women like Ida B. Wells and Anne Royall refused to sit on the sidelines. Not only did these remarkable women reporters break into journalism—they transformed the industry as we know it. 

1. Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012)
2. Barbara Walters (1929–2022)
3. Nellie Bly (1864–1922)
4. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)
5. Gloria Steinem
6. Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961)
7. Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998)
8. Susan Goldberg 
9. Clare Hollingworth (1911–2017)
10. Anne Royall (1769–1854)
11. Connie Chung

Helen Gurley Brown (1922–2012)

As editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for more than 30 years, trailblazing writer Helen Gurley Brown transformed Cosmo from a standard issue, sanitized, suburbanite women’s magazine to the groundbreaking, sex positive cultural artifact it remains today. Brown had already established herself as a household name through publication of her best-selling self-help book Sex and the Single Girl in 1962. Later adapted into a comedic film starring Natalie Wood, the sex and dating advice provided in Brown’s book is fairly tepid by today’s standards, but at the time of its publication was comparatively progressive and empowering in its frank discussion of sex. 

When Brown arrived at Cosmopolitan in 1965, she supplanted the magazine’s focus on domestic splendor with a concentration on the kinds of young, single, “cosmopolitan” women Brown emulated during her own youth. Brown featured a decidedly more suggestive cover alongside articles about visiting a psychiatrist and using birth control in her first issue as editor-in-chief. Though she considered herself a feminist, her leadership at Cosmopolitan attracted significant criticism from feminist thought leaders like Betty Friedan, who once described Brown’s work at Cosmo as “quite obscene and quite horrible” according to former staff writer Sue Ellen Browder.  

Barbara Walters (1929–2022)

Broadcast journalist Barbara Walters was a galvanizing media personality largely credited with bridging the gap between “hard news” and personality-driven journalism. Lauded for her probing, emotionally resonant style of interviewing, Walters became the first woman co-anchor of an American network evening news program when she joined veteran TV journalist Harry Reasoner at ABC Evening News in 1976. Her almost unprecedented audience popularity helped catapult her from standard issue reporter to media mogul. Walters scored interviews with every single U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump; she also sat down for interviews with leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro, and even Vladimir Putin. 

After leaving ABC, Walters co-created The View in 1997, a program she hosted from its inception until 2014. Her formation of The View not only reinvigorated the careers of hosts like Rosie O’Donnell and Meghan McCain, but also platformed a multigenerational panel of women to give earnest opinions on news, popular culture, and media.  

Nellie Bly (1864–1922)

Under the nom de plume Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman established herself as a pioneer in investigative journalism after penning a bombshell exposé on the Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) Women’s Lunatic Asylum for New York World. Bly went undercover and was admitted to the psychiatric institute, where she experienced firsthand the horrid conditions of the facility, noting a widespread rodent infestation and routine physical and verbal abuse from nursing staff.

After spending 10 days “involuntarily” committed, New York World was able to have Bly released; her exposé was published shortly thereafter. Bly became something of a celebrity—a privilege she would leverage later in her career to score interviews and access to information. The intrepid journalist didn’t take long to approach her editor about her next assignments. Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly wanted to attempt her own record-breaking trip around the globe. She departed on November 4, 1889. and spent 72 days circumnavigating the world. Bly arrived back in New York City on January 25, 1890, to much fanfare. Her brief record for the quickest trip around the world was broken just months later by businessman George Francis Train, who completed the sojourn in just 67 days. 

Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)

Journalist and writer Ida B. Wells was an indispensable figure in the early civil and women’s rights movements. She was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and freed in infancy under the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Wells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, alongside five of her younger siblings after both of their parents and one of their brothers were killed in a yellow fever outbreak when she was just 16 years old. Wells began reporting on racial inequality facing Black Americans for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. 

Wells—an unabashed critic of Jim Crow laws and racial segregation—began investigating the lynchings of Black people after a mob of masked white men killed her friend, a grocer named Thomas Henry Moss Sr., and two other innocent Black men. She admonished the crimes in the Free Speech and Headlight. This attracted considerable criticism in other Memphis publications—and prompted a  mob of white people to lay waste to the Free Speech’s office. Wells then abandoned Memphis and relocated to New York City, where she began working for The New York Age, the nation’s foremost Black-owned paper. 

She continued her reporting on lynchings and published the pamphlets The Red Record and Southern Horror. Soon after, Wells embarked on two speaking tours across Britain, garnering even more international credibility and even inspiring some British manufacturers to temporarily boycott cotton sourced from the South. 

Gloria Steinem

While working on an article for Show magazine in 1963, feminist icon Gloria Steinem assumed a job as “bunny” in New York City’s notorious Playboy Club. She was determined to expose the sexist and demeaning working conditions of the club’s scantily clad, meticulously micromanaged cocktail waitresses. Steinem’s investigation started when she’d seen an advertisement recruiting “pretty and personable” girls “between 21 and 24” to work as bunnies with promises of glitz and glamour; she passed herself off as an aspiring bunny named Marie Katherine Ochs to infiltrate the club’s regimented bunny training program. 

Though the ad stated no prior experience was required, it did ask that applicants bring a swimsuit or a leotard to their interview. And despite advertising that bunnies make an average of $200 weekly (roughly $2100 today), Steinem quickly found that not to be the case [PDF]. She learned of the fastidious uniform and behavior codes bunnies were expected to follow, or risk having their pay docked and tips taken. The Playboy Club also required bunnies to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of their own uniforms, seriously cutting into the supposedly lucrative pay.

After spending just a few weeks working as a bunny, Steinem had garnered considerable firsthand experience of the kind of harassment and exploitation bunnies are expected to withstand and began to pen her two-part exposé. Her landmark series catapulted her to national recognition and solidified her as a leader in the feminist movement. Despite her newfound fame, Steinem claims she was blacklisted after the articles’ publication and struggled to find work in journalism in the years immediately following. She would later go on to found Ms. magazine, a feminist magazine publication still in operation today. 

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961)

Journalist Dorothy Thompson was an intrepid foreign correspondent best remembered for her nearly real-time reporting on the German Nazi Party’s rise to power in the early 1930s. She was both the first American to interview Hitler and the first to be expelled from Germany at his express directive.

After interviewing the fascist dictator in 1931, Thompson penned a scathing book titled I Saw Hitler, where she warned of Hitler’s potential for destruction, making her one of the first major media figures to (correctly) predict the disastrous ramifications of his nascent ascent to power. She described Hitler as “the prototype of the Little Man” and “ill poised and insecure.” 

Thompson received an expulsion order from the Gestapo (the Nazi Party’s secret police) on August 25, 1934, demanding she leave the country within 24 hours. Her expulsion from Germany transformed her into a martyr and heroine of the free press and earned her the nickname of the “First Lady of Journalism.” After her return to the United States, Thompson continued covering the outbreak of World War II in widely circulated radio broadcasts for NBC (that are now preserved in the Library of Congress) and penned a monthly column for Ladies’ Home Journal. 

Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998)

Daughter of pioneering suffragette Edna Fischel Gellhorn and German physician George Gellhorn, Martha Gellhorn was a groundbreaking war correspondent whose illustrious career spanned more than half a century. Gellhorn decamped to France—where she hoped to kick start her career as a journalist—after dropping out of Bryn Mawr College in the late 1920s. She spent a few years galavanting across Europe and writing for Parisian newspapers before returning to the United States in 1932, where she began assisting her personal friend First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with copy for her Women’s Home Companion column. 

Gellhorn was later hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) to report on the effects of the Great Depression across the United States—but was fired after she incited a riot among a group of workers in Idaho. The following year, Gellhorn met her future husband, novelist Ernest Hemingway, during a holiday trip to Key West, Florida. The couple left for Spain shortly thereafter, where Gellhorn began covering the Spanish Civil War for the general interest magazine Collier’s Weekly. 

Gellhorn not only reported on the nascent rise of Germany’s Nazi Party, but also became the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day. After her request for British press credentials was denied, she posed as a nurse to board an American hospital ship and hid herself as a stowaway. Her actions resulted in her war correspondent credentials being revoked. But Gellhorn was unfazed and continued her reporting on the conflict. After Hemingway and Gellhorn divorced in 1945, Gellhorn continued her war reporting, later covering conflicts in Vietnam and Palestine. She continued writing even into her eighties; she made her last trip as a war correspondent in 1989 to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama. 

Susan Goldberg 

In 2014, Susan Goldberg became the first woman editor-in-chief of National Geographic. As a stalwart advocate for cross-platform storytelling, she helped expand National Geographic’s coverage to cater to a more contemporary audience. In January 2017, under Goldberg’s leadership, the magazine published an issue highlighting gender inequality that would later be shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Prior to joining National Geographic, she worked for the publications like the Detroit Free Press and USA Today, covering news, politics, and culture, often through a gender-critical lens. 

Goldberg eventually stepped down from her role as editor in chief in 2022, subsequently assuming the role of President and CEO of GBH, making her the first woman to head the foundation in its nearly 75 year history. 

Clare Hollingworth (1911–2017)

Described by The Guardian as “one of the most active war correspondents of the 20th century,” Clare Hollingworth made history when she became the first person to report on the 1939 German invasion of Poland that catalyzed the beginning of World War II. Hollingworth was sent to Poland to report on rising military tension in the region after working for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph for less than a week. She noticed German troops amassing while traveling along the Polish-German border and reported her observations to The Telegraph and the British Foreign Office in Poland.

After reporting on the war’s outbreak, Hollingworth remained in Eastern Europe and continued working as a foreign correspondent. She reported from countries like Turkey, Romania, and Egypt, where she’d often need to devise convoluted plans to bypass press censorship in the region. 

Hollingworth covered conflicts in Vietnam, Algeria, and Palestine following the conclusion of World War II. She bypassed traditional press channels to gather firsthand accounts from the frontlines. Later tasked with overseeing The Telegraph’s newly founded China office, Hollingworth was one of the first Western journalists to report from China since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in the late 1940s. She retired to Hong Kong in the early 1980s and split her time between France, the UK, and China. 

Anne Royall (1769–1854)

Anne Royall is considered by some to be the first ever professional female journalist. She is rumored to have secured the first ever presidential interview conducted by a woman after she discovered President John Quincy Adams on an early morning nude swim in the Potomac River; Royall purportedly sat atop Adams’s clothing until he agreed to grant her an interview. 

A trailblazer in the field of travel journalism, Royall’s journalistic career began after her husband, Revolutionary War veteran William Royall, passed away in 1812. She spent the next four years travelling across the newly formed state of Alabama, corresponding with a friend through letters that would later be published as Letters From Alabama in 1830. 

Royall was known for her sardonic wit and uncompromising opinions—which could sometimes get her into trouble. She was arrested for being a “public nuisance, a common brawler, and a common scold” following a spat with a local Presbyterian congregation. After being convicted and fined $10 (later paid by two fellow newspaper reporters), Royall returned to her travels, later establishing Paul Pry, a Washington-based newspaper focused on exposing government corruption. She then created The Huntress, which she continued publishing until her death in 1854 at the age of 85.

Connie Chung

Connie Chung is celebrated as a trailblazer for women and underrepresented groups in journalism. She became the first Asian American—and just the second woman—to ever co-anchor a major network news program. Chung got her start as a part-time evening copy person at WTTG-TV, a local Washington, D.C., news station after graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Maryland. But she soon rose up the ranks to become a weekday news writer (she also met her husband, Maury Povich, while working at the station, though the two didn’t get together for several more years).  

Chung went on to work as a news anchor at large, national networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC. She has interviewed high-profile subjects throughout her career—she even nabbed an exclusive interview with Richard Nixon amid the Watergate scandal—and has earned several prestigious awards, including a Peabody award and three Emmys. Chung’s influence on Asian American households has been so great that there are now many women named after her.

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