10 women travelers who broke all the rules

Martha Gellhorn

“I had been a traveler all my life, beginning in childhood on the streetcars of my native city… and I had been hard at the real thing since my twenty-first year when I decided that it would be a good plan to see everywhere and everything and everyone and write about it,” writes famed foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn of her decision to drop out of Bryn Mawr in 1927 and simply start doing the work. 

Gellhorn was never one to play by the rules. Her storied career had great highs – like working with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and photographer Dorothea Lange – as well as devastating lows, such as reporting firsthand from a newly-liberated Dachau and the bedsides of napalm victims in Vietnam. Often it was a mixed bag, like when she stowed away in a hospital ship lavatory to become the only woman to report on D-Day from the beaches of Normandy, measures she was forced to take because women were barred from combat and her husband Ernest Hemingway sneaked her official press credentials.