There has hardly been a time when the world has been conflict-free, and reports from the frontline have been brought to readers and viewers sitting safely away from home. Traditionally, men have covered war zones; in the early days of print journalism, when women were finally—and reluctantly—allowed into newsrooms, they were forced to cover soft subjects like cookery, fashion, and c. However, even when women were forbidden from going to the front, there were intrepid female reporters who ignored the risks and wrote about the violence and tragedy of wars. There was a human side to wars that the whisky-swilling, chain-smoking male foreign correspondent, mythologized by novels, movies, and Ernest Hemingway-style machismo, did not think it worth their while to write about. The struggles of women and children coping with destruction, shortages, and paying the crushing cost of survival while the men were away fighting in the trenches were understood by women writers, who could then bring these stories to the world.

Today, names like Oriana Fallaci, Christiane Amanpour, Alex Crawford, Christina Lamb, Arwa Damon, Sarash Ashton-Cirillo, and Barkha Dutt are well known, but long before them, there were women who kicked the door open for other courageous journalists who were part of the golden age of journalism. Their contribution has been downplayed, if not altogether forgotten. Julia Cooke’s triple biography, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, turns the spotlight on three pioneering women journalists who were not confined by boundaries or........

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