By 1915, the Western Front was a 450-mile line of trenches, barbed wire and concrete bunkers, stretching across Europe. Attempts to break the stalemate were murderous and futile. Censorship of the press was extreme--no one wanted the carnage reported. Remakably, the Allied command gave two intrepid American women, Edith Wharton and Mary Roberts Rinehart, permission to visit the front and report on what they saw. Their travels are reconstructed from their own published accounts, Rinehart's unpublished day-by-day notes, and the writings of other journalists who toured the front in 1915. The present authors' explorations of the places Wharton and Rinehart visited serves as a travel guide to the Western Front.

An essential history of women in American journalism, showcasing exceptional careers from 1840 to the present Undaunted is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put in their way to do journalism’s most valued work. From Margaret Fuller’s improbable success to the highly paid reporters of the mid-nineteenth century to the breakthrough investigative triumphs of Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and Ida B. Wells, Brooke Kroeger examines the lives of the best-remembered and long-forgotten woman journalists. She explores the careers of standout woman reporters who covered the major news stories and every conflict at home and abroad since before the Civil War, and she celebrates those exceptional careers up to the present, including those of Martha Gellhorn, Rachel Carson, Janet Malcolm, Joan Didion, Cokie Roberts, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. As Kroeger chronicles the lives of journalists and newsroom leaders in every medium, a larger story develops: the nearly two-centuries-old struggle for women’s rights. Here as well is the collective fight for equity from the gentle stirrings of the late 1800s through the legal battles of the 1970s to the #MeToo movement and today’s racial and gender disparities. Undaunted unveils the huge and singular impact women have had on a vital profession still dominated by men.

Such esteemed writers as Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf can be counted among the women writing about World War I. But more ordinary writers were also compelled to write about the war, revisiting their often extraordinary wartime experiences - as nurses, ambulance drivers, munitions workers, and more. In Women Writers and the Great War, Dorothy Goldman, Jane Gledhill, and Judith Hattaway explore the literary, social, and psychological themes that emerge from the writings on the war by women from all walks of life. Diaries, letters, newspaper and magazine pieces, short stories, and novels document their powerful and complex response to what remains one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history. The authors of Women Writers and the Great War argue that it is to a large extent women's exclusion from the trenches that has resulted in their exclusion from the canon of war literature. Even to this day, scant critical attention has been paid to the wide range of women's writing on the war. What can be found there are not only valuable eye-witness accounts of history but literary history in the making. Examining the work of many women writers from Great Britain and the United States, the authors look at the way in which they devised an appropriate literary form, the extent to which their identity as women shaped the content and style of their work, the extent to which that work does - and does not - fit into the literary history of the period, and whether these women can be said to share a common literary voice.