Rebecca West (1892–1983) and Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961), both world-class journalists, were “new women” who sought not only to match the exploits of their male contemporaries, but to become, in the current argot, “brands.”

West turned her coverage of the Nuremberg trials into a profound inquiry into the nature of international justice, exposing the problematic and yet justifiable process of judging war criminals. The Allies, too, were guilty of atrocities, West pointed out—even as she provided the rationale for their sitting in judgment against their Nazi enemies. Her reports on the postwar treason trials put her on the cover of Time, adorned in a helmet-like hat that emphasized her militant pursuit of international events that she alone seemed able to absorb into her capacious and extraordinarily articulate sensibility.

Thompson, who befriended West in Germany as the Nazis were coming to power, quickly perceived Hitler’s monstrous ambitions. She also saw that his vague, shallow, and malign politics would bring the world to grief. In a column for the New York American in the early 1930s, West told her readers to buy Thompson’s prescient book I Saw Hitler! (1932). Thompson, the subject of a Time cover story in 1939, was hailed as one of the most influential woman in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Of course, other women journalists before and after West and Thompson have had remarkable careers, but none of them can quite match the fame and influence that Thompson enjoyed in the late 1930s