I get asked a lot which one of my brief biographies is my favorite. That’s a lot like asking me which one of my children are my favorite, I love them all. But there are a few women that I’ve written about who do stand out to me when I’m asked that. And it changes by the day, but Gellhorn . . . she is absolutely someone I would have loved to sit down and have a glass of Scotch with on a rainy day while picking her brain. She was something else.
And one of my favorite quotes of hers - because fucking yes - is as follows:
"People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'
If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics."
You can find the following bio in Volume One of Brief Biographies of Badass Bitches.
She was born on November 8, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri to mother Edna, a passionate suffragist and advocate for the disenfranchised, child welfare, and free health clinics, and father George, a progressive and well-loved gynecologist. At just 7 years old, she, along with her friend, Mary, participated in The Golden Lane, a rally for women's suffrage at the Democratic Party's 1916 national convention in St. Louis, representing future voters.
She would become a journalist, novelist, and travel writer, as well as be considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century.
Meet Martha Gellhorn.
After graduating high school, Gellhorn attended Bryn Mawr College, but she left a year later to become a journalist. In 1929, Gellhorn gained employment at the Albany Times Union as a “cub reporter.”
Her mother Edna and Eleanor Roosevelt were both Bryn Mawr alumni and had remained friends since their college time together. One night Mrs. Roosevelt invited a 21 -year-old Martha to dinner at their home in the Governor’s mansion, where the Roosevelts lived and worked before FDR was elected president. They would hit it off and later become very close.
In 1930 Gellhorn took off for France with the goal of becoming a foreign correspondent. She got a job with the United Press bureau in Paris, but some fuckhead she worked with began relentlessly sexually harassing her on the regular. She reported the harassment to management and was promptly fired for being “a troublemaker.” Of course.
For the next few years, she traveled around Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and St. Louis and writing about fashion for Vogue magazine. She participated in the pacifist movement, later becoming more involved. She wrote about her experiences within the movement in her book What Mad Pursuit.
Upon returning home in 1934, Gellhorn was hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help end the Great Depression. FERA had Gellhorn traveling all over the United States reporting on how the Depression was affecting the country. She eventually teamed up with photographer Dorothea Lange to document everyday people living in poverty, their reports to become a part of the official government files for the Great Depression.
Gellhorn and Lange were able to delve into topics that women were discouraged from even forbade to consider at that time. The reports that Gellhorn would send her boss, Harry Hopkins, were often be sent directly to FDR.
In one observation, Gellhorn stated, “The people who seem most physically hit are young girls . . . I have watched them in some mills where the workload is inhuman. They have no rest for eight hours; in one mill they told me they couldn’t get time to cross the room to the drinking fountain for water. They eat standing up, keeping their eyes on the machines . . . I found three women lying on the cement floor of the toilet, resting.”
While in Idaho on assignment for FERA, she became involved in a situation with folks who were being taken advantage of by a crooked boss and feeling powerless to stop him. Having become quite the agitator, Gellhorn convinced the group to break the windows of the FERA office in an effort to shine a light on their boss’s fuckery. This proved effective . . . but she was fired from FERA for inciting a riot.
The Roosevelts invited Gellhorn to stay with them at the White House so she could regroup and consider what her next move would be. She took them up on the offer and stayed for a couple months. She took up temporary residence in the Lincoln bedroom, and, as a result, she ran into Mrs. Roosevelt frequently as their rooms were in the same wing.
Gellhorn and Mrs. Roosevelt became close confidants, writing to each other often. Gellhorn would state, “Mrs. Roosevelt’s letters were full of love. She loved me and she worried about me, and where I was, and what I was doing.”
In 1936, Gellhorn was hired by Collier's Weekly to report on the Spanish Civil War. Around the same time, she met Ernest Hemingway while in Key West, Florida, with her family for Christmas and their chemistry was undeniable. They fell hard for each other, and he ended up accompanying her to Spain.
She traveled to Germany where she began reporting on the rise of Adolf Hitler, traveling to Czechoslovakia months before the Munich Agreement to track his movements. Once World War II broke out, she reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England.
In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, Gellhorn lamented, “The news from Spain has been terrible, too terrible, and I felt I had to get back. It is all going to hell . . . I want to be there, somehow sticking with the people who fight against Fascism . . . I do not manage to write anymore, except what I must to make money to go on living.”
An early anti-fascist, Gellhorn was horrified and baffled by Hitler’s rise, “The whole world is accepting destruction from the author of Mein Kampf, a man who cannot think straight for half a page.”
( . . . and holy shit doesn’t that all sound entirely too recently familiar?)
Gellhorn and Hemingway lived together off and on for four years before finally marrying in November 1940, once Hemingway quit stringing his second wife, Pauline, along.
Hemingway was a jealous prick and constantly undermined Gellhorn’s career. He became increasingly tantrum-prone when her work would keep her away for any length of time. He wrote letters to her berating her for having the audacity to be more than a penis-cozy for him. A letter he wrote while she was just trying to do her fucking job covering the Italian front had him whining, “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?"
When that oh-so-charming method of luring his wife back home was ineffective, he ended up traveling to the front just before the Normandy landing and did everything he could to block her travel. She was forced to travel via dangerous ocean voyage in war-torn London. She found him and let him know she’d had enough of his crap. They would divorce after five tumultuous years of marriage.
While a lot of interviewers thought of her mostly as “Hemingway's third wife,” Gellhorn wouldn’t have it, saying that she had zero intention of "being a footnote in someone else's life." As a condition for granting interviews, she would stipulate that Hemingway's name not be mentioned.
At one point, she pushed back with, "I've been a writer for over 40 years. I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him. Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?"
Gellhorn made every effort to follow the war to report on it. She lacked any official press credentials to witness the Normandy landings, but her whiny prick of a future ex-husband wasn’t about to stop her; she snuck into a hospital ship’s lavatory, and, upon landing, she pretended to be a medical aid. She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944, and when Dachau concentration camp was liberated by US troops on April 29, 1945, Gellhorn was there and among the first journalists to report on it.
At the conclusion of WWII, Gellhorn found employment with The Atlantic Monthly, and covered both the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, and in the 1980s, she, as a woman in her 70s at this point, covered the civil wars in Central America.
Gellhorn covered the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. She finally reached a point where she was just worn the hell out and retired from journalism altogether, wrapping it up in 1995 with one last overseas trip to report on poverty in Brazil. She had a lot of difficulty on the trip due to her weakening eyesight. Left with permanently impaired vision after a cataract surgery, she stated that she was "too old" to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.
Gellhorn figures she’s created homes in almost 20 different locales all over the world. She published numerous books, including a collection of articles on war titled The Face of War, a novel on McCarthyism titled The Lowest Trees Have Tops, and a travel memoir titled Travels with Myself and Another—which when I first researched for this project, I read it was a memoir about Gellhorn's travels with Hemingway, but once again, his importance to her relevance was overstated, as only one of the many stories in the book involve him. Fucking exhausting.
Gellhorn birthed no children of her own, but she adopted a boy, Sandro, nicknamed Sandy, from an Italian orphanage. She loved her son, but she was no June Cleaver or overly maternal on any level. She left Sandy in the care of relatives in New Jersey for long periods as she traveled, and their relationship was strained due to her continual absences. Her work came first.
She had affairs and random dalliances over the years and married and divorced another time.
Regarding sex, Gellhorn wrote:
“If I practiced sex out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it . . . seemed a defeat. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action, in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that . . . but not sex; that seemed to be their delight, and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose, and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.”
On her relationship with Hemingway, she quipped, "My whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses, and failing that, the hope that it would soon be over."
Gellhorn spent her last years in poor health, suffering from terminal cancer that had spread to her liver, and she also dealt with being mostly blind. On February 15, 1998, she decided to take control of one more thing in her life—the ending—by swallowing a cyanide capsule in her home in London at the age of 89.
Gellhorn covered damn near every major conflict of the 20th century. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in 1999 in her honor, and twenty years later, a blue English Heritage plaque was unveiled at her former London home, the very first to feature the dedication of "war correspondent."
I love this. I have the same birthday and also lost vision in one eye due to a botched cataract surgery. But I’m not nearly as bad ass as she was.