On her most recent trip to Syria, CBS correspondent Elizabeth Palmer and her team were going to "make a break" for Aleppo. To get there, they would have to travel on a road that ISIS controls and has already shelled. "There is always a little knot in my stomach just because of that," she says when I spoke to her via phone recently.
The veteran reporter has visited the war-torn country over a dozen times, giving her a sense of the land that violence has decimated. Aleppo "is a city that was once one of the great tourist destinations of the Middle East, and it is on its knees. This is a city of two million people with no power, no running water. People are drilling wells through the pavement just to drink." She pauses to approximate the magnitude: "We are staring at one of the greatest human tragedies of the last 50 years."
And yet, the veteran journalist finds moments of solace amidst the ruins. She remembers watching kids run in the streets outside Aleppo on her last trip. Kicking a soccer ball, a small boy stood out. He only had one leg. "He was very, very good on his crutches, fast, keeping up with the kids," she says.
Palmer was overwhelmed. "Here's a kid who had his leg blown off by a rocket less than a year ago in some skirmish. … And somebody in the mess of Syria and this war had gone to get him crutches. He was looked after. Somebody cared. It seemed to me to sum up some of the best and worst of the human spirit in just one moment."
And while she understands that not everyone is suited to this work, Palmer is a fearsome advocate for it. She has felt moved, in particular, to encourage women to pursue it. At the network, a host of women have followed in her footsteps—foreign correspondent Holly Williams, producers like Erin Lyall, Agnes Reau, and Justine Redman. Together, these women form a kind of Lean In circle for the guts-of-steel set. They are relentlessly ambitious. They have little patience for the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus school of thinking. And yet even as they assert over and over that male and female reporters have the exact same opportunities at work, they betray a sense of camaraderie. Like it or not, this is a sisterhood.
"It's important to be able to reassure one another that the kids, if you have them, will be fine, that they'll deal with the risk and the absences of our jobs," Palmer says. She has two children and a "saintly" husband. "I'm old enough now to be able to say to the women I meet, 'My kids didn't suffer one bit. It's going to be okay.'"
Holly Williams is grateful for the perspective. Adamant that she has never "hit my head against the glass ceiling in this industry," she concedes that parenthood introduced a unique set of issues. Returning to the field just weeks after giving birth in 2012, Williams ventured deep into the jungles of Burma to do a story on tribal soldiers. She pumped every few hours to make sure that she'd still be able to breastfeed when she returned home.
"It felt to me like what I had to do at the time," Williams says, looking back on what she now deems a "ridiculous" experience. "I think I wanted to show that motherhood wasn't affecting me," which, she points out, is impossible. "Parenthood tends to give people—all people—a different outlook. Journalists who are parents will all tell you that when they see something really horrific happening to a child, they see their own child. And that's definitely how I feel as a parent. It kind of punches you in the gut in a way it didn't used to."
A few months ago, Williams interviewed an Iranian refugee migrating from Turkey to Greece. As they spoke, he held his one-year-old son in his arms. "These people get into these little boats and they can't swim. And if that boat sinks or turns over, the children that they are so desperate to protect die. And yet it is for the sake of those children that these people take this risk."
Women on the front lines have found a way not only to report on the most pressing global issues, but to remain apprised of home, as well. Williams was recently about to go live with a story about a swell of refugees crossing the Turkey-Syrian border when her phone rang. It was her daughter: "She wanted to talk about whether I would buy her a Pocahontas costume."
These, Palmer asserts, are the straits all women walk at work. About a decade ago, when she was embedded in Afghanistan, Palmer recalls a French correspondent who returned from a grueling day and promptly "set up her [satellite] phone and started going over her son's math homework with him." Ten years later, it's a little different. Social media has made it easier for mothers to communicate with children a world away from home. "We keep up on Snapchat," Palmer says. " I love it because I can send them pictures of what I see."
Palmer and Williams both push back on the myth of guilt-ridden motherhood. "My absences were so much a part of life that my kids sort of took it just how it was," Palmer says. "When I was going back and forth to Afghanistan, my son came home from school just before a trip and said, 'Mom, you know, a lot of the guys at school have fathers in Afghanistan, but I'm the only with a mom there.'" Even she retells it, her pride is fresh.
While Palmer and Williams report from some of the most oppressive places for women on earth, both speak to the unlikely advantages that their gender gives them on the job. "People always want to know what it's like being a woman reporting in the Middle East," Williams says. "And I think all of the women who are in my line of work would give you the same answer, because it's true—it's kind of great." Women are able to talk to local men, who, Williams says, understand that women in the West have more prominent public roles. And they have access to local women who will often refuse to let men into their homes. Women in these societies "want to know that their stories will be told and they feel most comfortable telling them to women," says Williams.
"I've always believed that it's almost gender-neutral, being a reporter in the Arab world," Palmer explains. "To the men there, Western women kind of do not compute. We're a third gender or, I suppose, almost genderless. We show up and are bold and forward and show our hair and all that. We're aliens."
Still, neither denies that the risks are real. Both Williams and Palmer invoke the brutal sexual violence that CBS reporter Lara Logan endured in Tahrir Square in 2011. And while Palmer takes care to note that men are assaulted, too, it is more often women who are the victims—especially of casual abuse. Palmer remembers being in Tehran during the controversial election in 2009, trying to get through masses of people in the streets and locking arms with an Iranian friend to protect herself from the crowds. "He was pulling me—this big, burly guy—through this sea of people," Palmer says. It took them ten minutes to cut across the outdoor plaza. "And the whole way, I was getting my bum and my tits grabbed," Palmer says. "And I just couldn't do anything about it at all. And that is fairly common." But Palmer and Williams will not be deterred. Mostly, Palmer admits, she just tries to keep her sense of humor.
Both women assert they have many more stories to tell. Williams remains as ever enthralled by China, where she was based for many years. Palmer is watching Iran, waiting to see how its history gets made. "And, of course," she adds, "I want to be able to announce the end of the Syrian War." But people and promise make for the best stories, she says. "Our work is about the people," she says. "Men, women, children, whatever—it's all about the people."
