Peggy
Goodnough was born in Bennington, Kansas, on 30th December, 1889.
The daughter of Edwy Goodnough and Minnie Goodnough, was brought up
on a farm. At the age of sixteen she found work as a typesetter for
the Junction
City Sentinel in Kansas. Later she became a reporter for
the El Paso Herald and the El
Paso Times where she covered the American army's attempts
to end the cross-border raids into Texas by
Pancho Villa and his band of Mexican revolutionaries.
On
the outbreak of the First World War Peggy volunteered
to report the war from the Western Front
but initially the editor rejected the idea because she was a woman.
However, he changed his mind and in June 1917 she was sent to visit
the US Army training camps in France.
Her articles were very popular and some were published in the Chicago
Tribune.
In
1917 jealous male reporters complained to the authorities that Peggy
was not a properly accredited war correspondent. Peggy was now forced
to return to the United States in an attempt
to obtain the necessary permission to work on the front-line. The
War Department in Washington was strongly
opposed to allowing a woman to report the war.
Permission
was therefore not granted until 14th October 1918, just a few weeks
before the armistice. Peggy now became
America's first woman to become officially accredited as a war correspondent.
However, Peggy knew that by the time she reached France
the war would be over. Determined to see military action, Peggy, now
working for the Cleveland Press,
decided to visit Siberia to report the role being played by American
troops in the Civil War that followed
the Russian Revolution.
After
leaving Russia Peggy moved to China
and worked for newspapers in Shanghai and reported on the invasion
by Japan for the New
York Daily News.
Peggy's
first two marriages to George Hull (1910) and John Kinley (1922) ended
in divorce. In 1933 she married her third husband, Harvey Deuell.
In 1939 Peggy was a founding member of the Overseas Press Club.
Peggy
had difficulties obtaining permission to report on the Second
World War. It was not until the end of 1943 that she was eventually
given the necessary papers to cover the Pacific
War. Working now for the North American Newspaper Alliance and
the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Peggy
was confined to military bases and hospitals in Hawaii until January
1945. Even then, she was only allowed to visit islands that were now
under the control of the US Army.
Peggy
wrote about the problems that women faced while trying to report the
war. "I am a woman and as a woman am not permitted to experience
the hazards of real war reporting." However, her human interest
stories of the war had a tremendous impact on her readers. One soldier
wrote to her during the war claiming: "You will never realize
what those yarns of yours did to this gang. You made them know they
weren't forgotten."
In
1953 Peggy, now a widow, retired to Carmel Valley,
California. Peggy Deuell died of breast cancer on 19th June, 1967.
The
photograph that appeared on her
War
Correspondent's Pass in October 1918.
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