Women in Journalism Archives

Editors Note: In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re sharing profiles of influential women in journalism. Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson was a pioneering American photojournalist, cinematographer and broadcaster whose adventurous life traced many of the political and social currents of the 20th century – from Depression-era rural America to wartime Europe to post-war diplomacy. Though born into privilege, Patterson used her access and education to carve out a career as a foreign correspondent at a time when few women did so. Patterson was born in 1905, into the prominent Breckinridge family of Kentucky. Family members included Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge and tire factory founder Benjamin F. Goodrich. Her family moved often when she was young – she attended a dozen schools before enrolling at Vassar College in 1923. While there, she helped start the National Student Federation of America and met another young organizer, Edward R. Murrow, who would be crucial in her later career. After graduation, Patterson did not opt for the predictable path of society debutante, but rather set out to study photography across several continents. She took classes at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York, the University of Berlin, the Catholic University of Lima and the American University in Cairo. In 1931, she turned her new skills into a silent film, “The Forgotten Frontier,” which documented the Frontier Nursing Service’s midwifery and healthcare mission in rural Kentucky. Decades later, the film’s observational style and focus on women and children’s lives in the Appalachian Mountains led to its inclusion in the National Film Register in 1996, cementing her legacy as a pioneer in the documentary space. By the late 1930s, Patterson was a successful freelance photojournalist, traveling widely and shooting for magazines such as Life, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country. She also learned to fly, becoming the first woman to get her pilot's license in the state of Maine. In 1939, while on assignment in Europe, she found herself in Switzerland when Germany invaded Poland, a turning point that shifted her trajectory from magazine photography to wartime broadcast journalism. Her old friend Edward R. Murrow, who was working for CBS in London, invited her to contribute radio pieces about how the war was reshaping everyday life in British villages. Though she was new to radio, her training in multiple mediums helped her learn quickly. She became the lone woman in the original cohort dubbed “Murrow’s Boys.” During the tense early months of World War II, Patterson shot the first images of civilians in air-raid shelters as well as haunting scenes of children being evacuated from the capital to the countryside, according to the Library of Congress. On radio she filed roughly 50 reports from seven European countries, including Germany. In one famous segment about the Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter, she noted that its motto was “Freedom and Bread” and then added, “there is still bread,” a subtle suggestion that freedom had vanished, which slipped past German censors, according to Tufts University archives. Despite her growing prominence, Patterson’s time as a war correspondent was cut short – not by a lack of ability or opportunity, but rather by marriage and official policy. In 1940, she married Jefferson Patterson, a U.S. diplomat serving as the first secretary at the American embassy in Berlin. Anticipating that she could return to photojournalism even as a diplomat’s wife, she resigned from CBS, but State Department rules effectively barred her from publishing anything that might reflect her husband’s work. Patterson was determined to reinvent herself within those new boundaries, though. As she accompanied her husband on postings in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, she started writing handbooks and guides for Americans navigating foreign societies. In “The Peruvian Way,” “Living in Egypt: From the American Angle,” and “At Home in Uruguay,” she blended her observations on local social etiquette, customs and history. In later decades, Patterson devoted herself to philanthropy. In 1974, she donated her family estate in York, Maine, to Bowdoin College, where it became the Breckinridge Public Affairs Center. In 1983, she and her husband gave their 550‑acre farm on the Patuxent River in Maryland to the state, creating what is now the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum. Patterson died in 2002 at the age of 97, having lived long enough to see her early work rediscovered and celebrated. In the 1990s, the Library of Congress showcased her photographs and broadcasts in the exhibition “Women Come to the Front,” which highlighted eight women who had broken barriers during World War II. Today, she is remembered as a trailblazer who insisted on doing serious work in spaces that were not designed to accommodate women, and who, when blocked, found new ways to turn her vantage point into service—whether through images, words, or the quiet gift of land. ◾

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