By Stephanie Seul
Since the 1910s, the International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8 in recognition of the contributions of women to society and their struggles for gender equality and reproductive rights. Over the past century and more, women have made remarkable progress in science, politics, sports, business, technology, the media and the arts. However, gender discrimination prevails in many fields and the struggle for equality continues.
A field that has traditionally been strongly affected by gender inequality is the media. Even today, women are underrepresented in leading roles as journalists or editors. ‘Hard news’ such as politics, economics and war is reported predominantly by men. Often, women are paid less and offered fewer promotions. Moreover, women face sexism and sexual harassment in their work environment, making it often difficult to get on with their daily work.
A woman defying the odds
Over a hundred years ago, a woman defied the odds and became a foreign and war correspondent for The Times of London, one of the oldest and most prestigious newspapers in the world. The American-born journalist Avis Waterman was hired as Milan Correspondent in May 1915. For much of the First World War, she brought news of the war between Italy and Austria-Hungary to readers of The Times and shaped how this war was viewed in Britain, in Allied and in neutral countries. After the armistice, she travelled through Central and Eastern Europe, covering the political and social transformations in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Romania, and also briefly the Russian Civil War in Ukraine. Her contemporaries praised Waterman as a skilled and courageous war correspondent. Today, however, she is entirely forgotten.
Born in Chicago in 1882, Waterman left the United States in 1909. Little is known about her early life and the beginnings of her journalistic work. After spending some time in Paris and St. Petersburg, she arrived in Milan around 1910 or 1911. In the spring of 1915, she offered her services to The Times and was duly appointed ‘Correspondent for The Times at Milan and in Northern Italy’ at the beginning of May 1915. A fortnight later, Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, and Waterman suddenly found herself at the epicentre of the war in Italy.
The Italian front developed into one of the most brutal battlefields of the First World War with high casualties and little territorial gains, similar to the trench warfare on the western front. Between 1915 and 1918, Italy and Austria-Hungary fought savage battles at high altitude under inhumane conditions and amidst rock and snow in the Alpine region Trentino and along the river Isonzo in today’s border region between Slovenia and Italy.
Going with the Italian army
Because The Times’ Rome Correspondent, William McClure, was needed in the Italian capital and was also suffering from ill health, preventing him from frequently visiting the front, the brunt of reporting the fighting on the Italian front thus fell on Waterman. During the summer and autumn of 1915, she undertook several trips into the war zone under great personal risks. In order to evade the severe Italian censorship, Waterman crossed the border into Switzerland several times and telegraphed her dispatches from Chiasso and other places.
However, Waterman gradually won the trust and respect of the Italian army. At the beginning of the Austrian invasion in the Trentino in May 1916, she was officially accredited as war correspondent by the Ufficio Stampa del Comando Supremo, the Press Office of the Italian Supreme Command. Until the summer of 1917, she paid frequent visits to the frontlines in the Trentino and on the Isonzo, attached mainly to the First Army under the command of General Alberico Albricci. Her dispatches from the front, covering the military fighting, usually appeared under the byline ‘From Our Milan Correspondent – Italian Headquarters’ or ‘From Our Special Correspondent – Italian Headquarters’. As a general rule, The Times never printed the names of its correspondents.
Witnessing the fighting on the Italian front
Many of her articles explicitly state that Waterman had been at the front. In the autumn of 1916, The Times introduced one of her long dispatches from the Isonzo front with these words:
Our Milan Correspondent, who is with the Italian troops at the front, depicts the fighting on the Carso in a vivid dispatch printed below. The struggle is described as an unbroken series of attacks and counter-attacks, in which the Italians are steadily pressing forward, the artillery demoralizing the enemy as well as causing enormous casualties.
Waterman called the Carso plateau the ‘most bleak, most desolate, and most monotonous of all battlefields (…). Miles of rocks and blood – that is the background of Italy’s new endeavour towards Trieste.’ Like all war correspondence, her articles had to be passed by the Italian censor before being telegraphed to The Times, and they were also subjected to British censorship.
For many months during 1916 and 1917, Waterman was the only woman, and also the only foreign war correspondent on the Italian front. In August 1916, she wrote to an Italian friend:
Since the middle of May, my life has been continued turmoil. Have been most of the time at the Italian front, having had the entire war service for The Times from that front. Am returning to Vicenza and Udine today for another two weeks and a half, after which McClure comes on.
Waterman won the respect of Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of The Times, who realized the advantage his paper had over other English newspapers because for several months, Waterman was the only English correspondent on the Italian front telegraphing exclusive news which appeared in no other paper.
Until the end of June 1917, she continued to dispatch her war reports to The Times. But then the Italian authorities unexpectedly introduced a new rule excluding all women from the war zone. The reason apparently was that too many ladies of various nationalities had made applications to come to the front, much to the dislike of the Italian authorities. This meant that also Waterman was barred from the front. The focus of her reporting now shifted to Italian war aims, and in particular on the Yugoslav question, and to general war news from northern Italy.
Travelling through Central and Eastern Europe
After the armistice in November 1918, Waterman went on a long tour through Central and Eastern Europe, reporting as Special Correspondent of The Times from Vienna, Prague and Bucharest. She also paid visits to Ukraine and the Bolshevik front during the Russian Civil War. The large number of articles she dispatched reveal that also after the war, Waterman was furnishing important and exclusive news to The Times. Notable are her reports from Vienna in December 1918, a long interview with King Ferdinand of Rumania in April 1919, a dispatch about the evacuation of 30,000 civilians from Odessa after the occupation by the Soviets in April 1919, and a long report about the fighting on the Dniester front in the south-west of Ukraine, published in June 1919.
In early August 1919, Waterman was ordered by The Times to immediately return to London. When she arrived a fortnight later, she was unexpectedly informed that her contract as temporary correspondent would not be continued. The reason given was that after the end of hostilities, the male journalists were rapidly being demobilized from the Army, and that there was no available vacancy for her.
Descent into oblivion
The archives provide only sporadic insights into Waterman’s life after 1919, but enough to show that this life was restless and destitute. Her dismissal from The Times brought Waterman’s journalistic career to a sudden halt. Like many women after the First World War, she was pushed out of her job when the demobilised soldiers returned. Unemployment was high in Britain and work in journalism rare, and in the misogynistic climate at Fleet Street, women journalists had little prospect of finding employment. Moreover, after the war there was generally less demand for foreign and war correspondents. Despite her experience of working under difficult circumstances for a prestigious newspaper, she was unable to build upon her previous success.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Waterman moved between England, Italy, Switzerland and France, desperately seeking employment with an English or American newspaper, but with little success. In early 1927 she pulled up stakes and left Europe, hoping to find journalistic work in the United States. After a few months she returned to Italy, disillusioned, depressed, and broke. Various sources suggest that she earned a living as a translator in Italy during the early 1930s.
The final years of Waterman’s life remain in the dark. She died in Paris in March 1939, aged 57, after falling on the stairs of her home and suffering serious head injuries. Impoverished and alone, she was buried in an anonymous mass grave in the outskirts of Paris. Apart from a short notice about her accident in a Paris evening paper, no newspaper wrote an obituary for her.
Traces of a forgotten life
Today, The Times’ only woman war correspondent is entirely forgotten. No history of journalism or war reporting mentions the woman who covered one of the most brutal battlefields of the First World War. After years of research in digital archives in Britain, the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand, and in a several analogue archives in Italy and Britain, I have been able to catch glimpses of Waterman’s life. These archives reveal the story of an adventurous and fearless woman, who gained an indisputable place in the male-dominated profession of foreign and war reporting. Many of Waterman’s male colleagues honoured her courage and journalistic skills. The British journalist Herbert Bailey, who had met Waterman in Paris in August 1919, wrote:
Few women have seen so much, heard so much and traveled so far and under such discouraging circumstances as Mrs. Waterman. Friend of kings, generals, statesmen and diplomatists no woman was even better qualified to act as a correspondent for England’s greatest daily newspaper […]
More research remains to be done, but the truly remarkable story of Avis Waterman is gradually emerging from the archives, where it has been buried for over a century.
