Dickey Chapelle - Infinite Women

Born: 14 March 1919, United States
Died: 4 November 1965
Country most active: International
Also known as: Georgette Louise Meyer

Lorissa Rhinehart on Dickey Chapelle transcript

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.

Dickey Chapelle had a similar experience: her editors changed the title of her 1962 autobiography from “Trouble I’ve Asked For” or “With My Eyes Wide Open” to “What’s a Woman Doing Here?”—an insulting question she’d been asked time and again as a war correspondent. They also removed her dedication “to my Communist interrogators, in deference to their repeated assurances that I would never live to write another line for print.” Worst of all was that they rewrote entire sections of the book, to play into stereotypes of femininity—as she put it, “my story seems to have been feminized the hell out of.” Her editor assured her it hadn’t been because the men in the office didn’t think so. “Her self-deprecating humor had been contorted into buffoonery. Rather than a gritty reporter willing to risk life and limb to get the story, she came off as a ditzy dame who stumbled into the middle of things despite herself,” writes biographer Lorissa Rhinehart…
Famed war reporter and photographer Dickey Chapelle was also warned about the lack of “facilities for women” at the start of her career, when she applied to photograph U.S. soldiers training in the jungles of Panama. She responded, “I’m sure the 14th Infantry Regiment has solved much tougher problems than that. And they’ll probably think of a way to lick this one, too.”…
Photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chappelle met her future husband Tony when she was just twenty-one and he was her photography teacher and twice her age at forty. It would be fifteen years before she broke away from the abusive Tony, who routinely told her that her work wasn’t good enough and sabotaged her professional opportunities to keep her in his control and supporting him…
More broadly, many men with fragile egos will seek to “put a woman in her place” if she dares wound said ego. War correspondent Dickey Chapelle’s incredible reporting from World War II was largely buried because she offended the ego of an admiral. Due to a misunderstanding, lack of communication, and a series of events largely outside her control, the admiral believed she had deliberately violated his orders about where she was allowed to go with U.S. troops in Okinawa. He had her arrested, with a Marine holding his gun on her during transport, and sent back to the U.S. There, her abusive husband was waiting with a letter addressed to him stating that her press credentials had been revoked, meaning it would be almost impossible to get her work published, including a book deal she had lined up. No amount of reason or pleading would get the admiral to change his mind, and her credentials wouldn’t be restored for another ten years.