Woman Reporter's Pearl Harbor Story Finally Published 70 Years Later

Betty McIntosh was a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the day that the Japanese air force bombed Pearl Harbor. "After a week of war, I wrote a story directed at Hawaii’s women;," McIntosh recently wrote, explaining that "I thought it would be useful for them to know what I had seen. It might help prepare them for what lay ahead." In this interview with the Washington Post, she recalls how her male editor told her to do something from a woman's point of view; McIntosh says she couldn't figure out why women were different from men. After writing the story, the editor spiked it because it was "too frightening for women to read." This takes us back to the readings about the women reporters working during the Depression and war years and their efforts to break free of the soft news angle and report real stories. You can read that account, which has been published by the Post on its website.