EP 85: Paris History Avec A Hemingway (Martha Gelhorn)

Martha Gelhorn, born in St Louis in 1908 to two parents that wanted much more for their daughter than the role women were to play at the time. Her father George was a doctor and her mother Edna was politically active in the suffrage movement and also served as a president of Bryn Mawr. Her father pulled her out of school as soon as he learned the nuns had covered the pictures of the female anatomy and took her to the Mary Institute where her mother was the president. It was also the school of another young girl that had been there a few years before, Hadley Richardson.

After attending Bryn Mawr for one year she decided to leave and chase her career as a writer. In 1930 it would take her to Paris where she would later meet Bertrand de Jouvenal who had also been the stepson and lover of Colette. Martha was not content to stay in one place too long. She became one of the first female war correspondents after she traveled the US documenting the Depression for President Roosevelt. Never one to shy away from conflict she was able to bring the stories in a way nobody else did. Gelhorn would find the real story and tell it from a raw and sympathetic point of view that touched her readers. Of course many know her name from being the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

Their relationship started out as two writers always chasing the excitement but ended from jealousy and her need to never sit still. Gelhorn never wanted to be the postscript in his biography, nor should she be.  Gelhorn was an inspiring and amazing woman. The only woman on the beaches of Normandy on D-day, witness to the destruction of Hitler and a front seat to the Spanish Civil war bringing the world to people in a way few did at the time. That is what she should be remembered for.

More info and photos: https://www.claudinehemingway.com/paris-history-avec-a-hemingway-podcast-1

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