American Women Journalist Marguerite Higgins

A War Correspondence Known for Courage and Determination

Jan 11, 2009

Marguerite Higgins faced gender bias during her career as a war correspondent but her reporting won the first Pulitizer Prize awarded a woman international reporting.

Marguerite Higgins won respect among fellow reporters, the military, and the American public for her reporting from the front lines of war in Korea and Vietnam. However, the prevailing gender bias of the times often clouded her legacy.

Early Life of Marguerite Higgins

Marguerite Higgins was born on September 3, 1920 in British-controlled Hong Kong. Her father, Lawrence Daniels Higgins, was an American who served as a pilot in World War I and met her mother, Marguerite, when he was in Europe. As a child, she contracted malaria and was taken by her parents to Vietnam for treatment where her father took a job with a Hong Kong shipping company.

When she was three, the family moved to Oakland, Calif where he worked as a stock broker until the market crashed in 1929. During this time, Lawrence began drinking heavily and her mother went to work as a French teacher. Nevertheless, young Marguerite was an excellent student. Due to her international background and fluency in a number of languages, she received a scholarship to attend Anna Head School where her mother was a teacher.

Journalism Career Begins

Higgins enrolled in the University of California a Berkeley at age 17 and as a freshman began working on the campus newspaper, the highly rated Daily Californian. After graduating with honors and a degree in journalism in 1941, and unable to find a job, she entered Columbia University in New York City where she acquired a Masters of Science Degree in Journalism in 1942. During this time, she held a part-time job as a college correspondent for the New York Tribune.

Because many male newspaper reporters had enlisted in the U.S. armed forces, it provided opportunities for females that had been previously withheld from them. The Tribune hired Higgins full-time. She quickly acquired the reputation as a temptress, being accused of using her sexual allure to gain professional favors. However, in 1942, she married Stanley Moore, a Harvard philosophy professor but after her husband was drafted and sent overseas, the stress of separation caused the marriage to end quickly. She would later marry Major General William Hall, the director of American Army intelligence in 1953 and would later have two children with him.

Higgins as Foreign Correspondent

By 1943, Higgins had her own byline at the Tribune. When her editors refused to give her the foreign correspondent assignments she coveted, Higgins went over their heads to the owner's wife, Helen Rogers Reid, who was known for supporting feminist issues. With the help of Mrs. Reid, a post was arranged for Higgins in London, England in 1944. Still unsatisfied, Higgins finally received permission to travel to Paris in 1945 where she joined the Berlin bureau.

As a group of reporters that were allowed to tour parts of Germany after the War, and was there to see the arrival of the Allied Forces at the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. ane witness the fall of Munich. Her reporting won her a number of awards, including an Army campign ribbon for distinguished service, and the New York Newspaper Awqrd for the best foreign correspondent of 1945.

During the Korean War, she was ordered to return to her Tokyo post, to be replaced by Homer Bigart because females when American Lieutenant General Walton W. Walker banned all from the front. She refused to leave and finally permission was granted by General Douglas MacArthur to resume her front line reporting.

Higgins Legacy

Margerite Higgins accomplishments were legend, including the stories she covered:

Marguerite Higgins died on January 3, 1966 at the age of 45, having broken through the glass ceiling for female foreign correspondents. Her outstanding career as a journalist and service to her country as a war correspondent were honored with her burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Edwards, Julia, Women of the World: The Great Foreign Correspondents. Houghton Mifflin, 1988

May, Antoinette, Witness to War: A Biography of Marguerite Higgins. Beaufort Books, 1983 (Diseratation)

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