Female correspondents reporting from a conflict zone are a common sight amongst the news coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the fall of Afghanistan in 2021.
But not so long ago, this would have been unthinkable.
It was during the Vietnam War that three young trailblazing female journalists broke through the male-only reporting space and changed the terrain forever, veteran foreign correspondent Elizabeth Becker explains.
These extraordinary women were Australian news reporter Kate Webb, French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy and American journalist Frances FitzGerald.
"They just excelled beyond belief, and not simply compared to women but they excelled compared to their … male colleagues," Becker, the author of You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War, says.
And beyond their pioneering efforts, she believes these women changed the way the Vietnam War was reported to the world.
'It was a boys' club'
The 1960s were a time when female journalists "couldn't write anything but women's pages", Becker says.
So "most … women didn't have the imagination or the wherewithal" to hop on a plane and travel to a war zone, she says.
Many young and relatively inexperienced male journalists made their way to Vietnam to cover the war, and they were welcomed by fellow male press colleagues. They didn't face the barriers that women did on arrival, Becker says.
These women had no guaranteed job, accommodation or health insurance. On top of that, they faced sexual harassment as "they were looked on, not as colleagues but potential people to take to bed and the lack of respect was unbelievable," Becker says.
"It was a boys club, and if you were out of it … it was very, very hard," she says.
But the Vietnam War was the world's biggest story at the time, "so every media [outlet] wanted stories, even from women".
So these three women, all in their early to mid twenties, travelled independently to Vietnam to cover the war, not only as rookie reporters but as completely inexperienced war correspondents.
A one-way ticket and a Leica camera
Catherine Leroy was the first of the women to arrive, landing in Vietnam in 1966.
With a Leica camera around her neck and a one-way plane ticket, Leroy had applied to Horst Faas, the bureau chief of Associated Press, for a job.
"He had the then-radical idea that he would buy any good photograph, no matter who took it, even a woman," Becker says.
So "with nothing, no resume, no experience … she goes to Saigon."
For the next year, Leroy spent more time on the battlefield than any other reporter.
And in 1967, she became the first woman to win the George Polk award for photography.
Seeing the war from all angles
Not long after Leroy arrived in Vietnam, American journalist Frances FitzGerald followed.
She was the daughter of an elite family and an Ivy League graduate, but FitzGerald "wanted to do something with her life other than make a great marriage and have fancy dinner parties", says Becker.
Becker says she took a different approach when she arrived in Vietnam.
"Catherine [FitzGerald] wanted to write long-form magazine pieces, which people weren't doing much back then," she says.
FitzGerald saw that the best way to do this was to "see [this war] from all angles, particularly [from that of] the Vietnamese, which sounds normal, but it was very radical [for the time]", Becker says.
"As one of her colleagues said, ‘she put the foreign in foreign correspondent'."
Unlike most war correspondents covering Vietnam, FitzGerald didn't spend a lot of time on the battlefield or in military briefings. Instead "she went out in the field and she spent time recording in villages," Becker says.
From that material, she wrote "amazingly deep articles on what it's like to live in a village when both sides are ruining your life".
FitzGerald went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards for her work in Vietnam because, as Becker says, "no-one else had even asked the questions she was asking".
Identifying the loopholes
Australian journalist Kate Webb arrived in 1967.
Her parents were intellectuals who had been killed in a car accident shortly before she left Australia. "She's the one who goes to Vietnam with a lot of shadows in their soul", Becker says.
"Like the other two, she gets her one-way ticket [and] her typewriter, she has no resume to speak of and goes over to Saigon."
Webb took advantage of a loophole that would allow her to report from the battlefield.
Most militaries, including Australia's, forbid female journalists from being on the battlefield.
However, because the United States did not want to declare that they were at war in South Vietnam, all the rules about journalism were suspended," Becker says.
"The handful of women who lived there and covered it started to cover the combat and Kate, more than any other, mastered combat [reporting]."
Webb approached this reporting "with a beautiful sense of language, a deep sense of burrowing into Vietnamese culture", says Becker.
The toll of war
As a highly experienced war correspondent, Becker describes war "as the most penetrating story you can cover. It takes over your life".
She says Leroy, FitzGerald and Webb were deeply committed to covering the Vietnam War, arriving in 1966 and staying until its end in 1975.
These women took immense risks and made great sacrifices. For example, in 1971, Webb was taken prisoner by North Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia for 23 days.
And after the war finished, their lives weren't easy, particularly for Leroy and Webb who had spent many years on the battlefield.
"They saw more battle than almost any other soldier" at a time when "PTSD was not recognised, particularly not among journalists, much less women," Becker says.
For Becker, it's vital this part of history is not forgotten and the way these women reported on the war is remembered.
"These women, they added, they broadened, they deepened the reporting," she says.
This conversation with Elizabeth Becker was originally recorded by the Lowy Institute as part of Lowy Conversations and broadcast on ABC Radio National's Big Ideas.
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
