"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville. She resorted to those measures because her husband, Ernest Hemingway, tried to take over her journalist career.

This Saturday, June 6, will be the 76th anniversary of D-Day, the battle that would come to represent the beginning of the end of World War II. 

There was just one woman, a war correspondent, on the beaches at Normandy that day the allied forces liberated Western Europe from Nazi Germany: the singular Martha Gellhorn. Author Janet Somerville traces Gellhorn’s extraordinary life in her book Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War.

"Since 1937, Martha had been a war correspondent for Collier’s magazine. She knew about the Allied invasion, that there was a plan to cover the Allied invasion of Normandy, and she was determined to cover that," Somerville said. 

The problem was, her very famous husband at the time, Ernest Hemingway, pulled the rug out from under her professionally.

"Hemingway had gone to New York, introduced himself to her editor at Collier’s and said ‘I’ll be your war correspondent.’ And he took her accreditation papers. Which was a bit of a problem," said Somerville.

Each publication could send just one correspondent. But Gellhorn was resourceful and clever. She found herself passage on a munitions ship from New York that would get her to Europe. She was the only woman and the only civilian aboard that ship, which landed in Liverpool. Then, she just needed to get to Normandy.

"She lied to a military police officer down by a hospital ship, said she was going to interview nurses about the 'woman’s angle,' and they let her on, because, as she said, no one gave a hoot about the woman’s angle. It served as the perfect forged passport for her," said Somerville.

Once on board the hospital ship, Gellhorn locked herself into a bathroom until they sailed. When the ship docked in Normandy, she waded ashore through waist-deep water with some of the medical officers.

"She became the only woman and the only war correspondent to be actually on the beaches at Normandy, evacuating the wounded."

Though she was there as a journalist to write about the event, she couldn’t help but tend to the wounded soldiers. She had an uncanny ability, Somerville says, to focus on what needed to be done. So when she saw that the wounded were hungry and thirsty, she set to work.

"She just took it in her stride and found somebody who could bring teapots to tip into their mouths,if they couldn't hold a glass. She just took charge and made sure that they got something," Somerville said.

She also managed to be one of many correspondents who wrote about D Day.

"The incredible thing about D-Day is that accredited correspondents produced 700,000 words of text, just about D-Day," Somerville said. "Martha was one of them. She had a piece called 'Over and Back' that Collier’s published."

Gellhorn went on to report into her old age, from all corners of the globe. She filed her last piece, about the murdered street children of Salvador, Brazil, more than 50 years after D-Day, when she was 87 years old.

Yours, For Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War, 1930-1949 by Janet Somerville is available at the link above, or wherever you buy your books.

genuinely it will never stop baffling me how people will wear twilight shirts and talk about team Edward vs team Jacob and then the same people will be like "I'm not basing my personality off of a piece of media (harry potter) made by a transphobe 😌" like good that's great! so you can excuse racism but you draw the line at transphobia? good to know

US transphobes are running with a new gotcha of “you never hear about WOMEN becoming MEN, hmmm curious!” and everyone is saying that you don’t hear about it because trans men are completely under the radar and like…that’s not true!

Did I hallucinate the “little girls are mutilating their bodies” “mentally ill girls are taking hormones” “what happened to our lesbians” “you wanna be a man I guess I can hit you” arguments that have been made for years??? Some of the main talking points of JKR???Hello!?

People are erasing trans men and it’s YOU TOO!

new game is to type one through ten in your tags and see what comes up. i think my favorite of mine is ‘my uncle told us he spent seven and a half hours in a sensory deprivation tank once’ but ‘gideon the ninth motherfucker’ is a close second

"what if you had a mutual aid network that occasionally told interdimensional monsters to fuck off": Discworld witches as a concept

I feel a lot of belief that “trans women obviously have it worse than trans men” it comes from assuming men & women are opposites & that their experiences must be opposite as well. As in, if trans women experience one thing, trans men must experience the opposite—but that’s not how it works in practice. Trans women are demonized and sexualized doesn’t mean trans men aren’t as well. Trans women feeling less safe after transition doesn’t mean trans men feel more safe. And transmasculinity being considered disgusting mutilation doesn’t translate to the opposite for transfemininity! I just wish we would stop comparing experiences as though they can be quantified & pitted against one another.

I love love love when trans women* give advice to trans men* about """manly""" things and when trans men* return that kindness with advice about """womanly""" things. I love the intracommunity commitment to supporting each other <<3

In the very first scene of The Wire, Garak asks Bashir if he was up late “entertaining one of (his) lady friends.” Bashir explains that no, he was up really really late reading a boring book that he hated. Why did the important space station doctor deprive himself of sleep reading a terrible book that he didn’t like? Oh, because this guy he has lunch with likes it.

I want to point out that Garak’s question was obviously intended to serve as the official “No Homo” announcement for the ensuing (very homo) episode, as was obviously necessary for super gay episodes of tv in the 90’s. However, Julian’s response was so gay, I submit that it instantly Homo’d the No Homo.

Speaking of contemporary reviews of Dracula, I found this one from Pall Mall Gazette (1897):

"Mr. Bram Stoker should have labelled his book ‘For Strong Men Only,’ or words to that effect. Left lying carelessly around, it might get into the hands of your maiden aunt who believes devoutly in the man under the bed, or of the new parlourmaid with unsuspected hysterical tendencies. ‘Dracula’ to such would be manslaughter."

Ok mid-book Van Helsing

booktok cannot handle unfriendly or emotionally complex female characters. show them a woman who’s a little problematic and they start shaking and shitting themselves. women can be either be martyrs or victims, anything else and ppl short circuit. men can be fucked up emotionally manipulative mass murders but if women have one unpalatable emotion they’re drawn & quartered.

if booktok bitches saw the female characters i liked they would piss blood for a week !!!!

i do not like the dany and rhaenyra stans that hate on sansa and alicent for "bowing down to the patriarchy" and "not stopping their oppression". dany goes through a traumatic marriage at thirteen in which she is regularly raped to the point of contemplating suicide. she forces herself to love her husband and make him love her to spare herself more abuse. she then gets pregnant with his child and goes through a horrific birthing and loses her baby at only fourteen. this whole situation is very, very common for women in their society. the only difference is that daenerys gains three dragons at the end. they empower her and help her move forward to claim her 'birthright'. let's looks at sansa in comparison. she is sold off as a child bride at twelve years old. her betrothed arranges for her to be publicly stripped and beaten. she is then married to the son of the man that killed her brother. her new husband sexually assaults her on her wedding night, but does not rape her. pretty much every man that she encounters tries to sexually harass and assault her. she escapes her marriage and is now being groomed by her mothers childhood friend. she knows that his feelings and actions towards her are wrong, but he's all she has. sansa has to use "a womans courtesy and grace" to get herself out of potentially harmful situations. we also see this with dany's 'seduction' of drogo. the only difference is that sansa is never given dragons to protect herself like daenerys is. she still has to rely on herself. people call rhaeneryas dragon moments 'badass' and put alicent down for sticking to the patriarchy. alicent sticks up for herself by calmly telling her husband that he can take her daughter away from her when she is cold and dead in her grave. that is the only thing she can do in that situation, and its a a risky thing to say to her groomer, abuser and husband (who is also the king) but she still does it to protect her daughter. when alicent is feeling lost, she prays to the mother. when rhaenerya is feeling lost, she rides syrax. alicent and sansa (and even cersei) are not afforded with magic and fantasy to escape their abuse, they have to do the best they can with what little power the average noble woman is given in their society.

Never forget and never forget that the first victims of Auschwitz were young women.

When Nazi Germany occupied much of Poland at the outbreak of World War II, the parents of Erna and Fela Dranger sent their daughters over the border from their home in Tylicz to the eastern Slovakian town of Humenné. Their cousin Dina Dranger went with them. Erna, 20, and Fela and Dina, both 18, found jobs and settled in with the local Humenné Jewish community. At some point, Fela moved on to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava with a friend.

The girls’ parents thought they had sent their daughters to safety. But on March 25, 1942, Erna and Dina were among the nearly 1,000 teenage girls and unmarried young women deported on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz.

Told by Slovakian authorities that they would be going away to do government work service for just a few months, the Jewish girls and women were actually sold to the Germans by the the Slovaks for 500 Reich Marks (about $200) apiece as slave labor.

Erna Dranger (Courtesy of Heather Dune Macadam)

Fela Dranger (Courtesy of Heather Dune Macadam)

Very few of the 997 girls on that first transport — or any of the other early transports — survived the more than three hellish years until the end of the war. Erna, Fela and Dina Dranger beat the odds, with the sisters going on to raise families in Israel and their cousin Dina settling in France.

The story of what happened to these and the other women on the first transports to Auschwitz is told in “999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz,” a compelling new book by Heather Dune Macadam. (The Nazis had planned to deport 999 Jewish women on the initial transport, but Macadam discovered typos on the list — now held in the Yad Vashem archives — making the actual tally 997.)

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The thing about the "fridged" trope is that obviously you can't have a female love interest dying as a defining moment for a male character because that's not feminist, but you also can't have a male love interest dying as a defining moment for a female character because then she's just going to have an arc revolving around her relationship with a man and that's also not feminist, and you also can't kill off a love interest from a gay relationship or a relationship involving a nonbinary person because that's burying your queers, which is at least as bad as misogyny if not even worse, and now suddenly you can't kill off romantic partners at all in stories because no matter the demographics, it's going to be problematic somehow, which is... a pretty ridiculous limitation to impose on storytelling.

And, like, it would be satisfying to have a solution other than "it depends on context if not straight-up vibes, and it's usually very reasonable for audience members to have a range of opinions on the execution of one specific instance," but. Yeah, you do kind of have to just vibe check it in a deeply subjective manner sometimes.

Well, I wish I could help you out. You know, I’m just… on vacation.

🫧 Dana Scully in Chinga (5.10)

So much m/m and m/f monsterfucker content on this horrible planet. Where are the scary dykes????

in a world filled with books written by male authors that make me go "uhhhhh this writer does Not have a good outlook on masculinity and women, this was definitely written by a man", the Chaos Walking trilogy stands as a complete opposite where I spent the entire series being like "WOW I never really thought about masculinity in this way, WOW this is painting a really interesting picture of gender dynamics and generational relationships, this was definitely written by a man"