On Topic: A woman’s perspective

The Association of American University Women released a report this spring that puts a bit of a drag on the celebratory nature of this month's National Women's History Month.

For one thing, there's the matter of pay.

The earnings ratio of women to men in Iowa is around 78 percent, according to the AAUW's report. For contrast, that number is 91 percent in Washington, D.C., which stands at the top of the chart, and in Louisiana, at the sad lowest rung, it's 66 percent.

So, we're not the worst, but our ranking's nothing to brag about with a clear conscience.

Nationwide, the report found, things really haven't got any better in a decade. And that's true in just about every occupation, CEOs to clergy members.

Moreover, the Equal Pay Act - signed way back then by President John Kennedy to tighten the wage gap between genders - hasn't been updated in more than half a century.

I was thinking about this lack of progress for more than half the U.S. population while I've been reading a lot of, and about, Martha Gellhorn.

Gellhorn died in 1998, but by all accounts, she was a force with which to reckoned in her day. She wrote novels, short stories and travel features.

She became a well-known war correspondent - she was on the ground in battle zones and in planes overhead, or as close as she could get, by whatever means necessary. She covered just about all the war-torn hot spots during her long professional life, from Barcelona to Normandy, Finland to China, Nicaragua to Vietnam.

With her brisk, right-between-the-eyes writing style, she also detailed the Great Depression and Dachau.

Gellhorn smoked, drank, hung out with the guys and went big-game hunting in Africa and fishing off Cuba. She said what was on her mind - 'This conversation is so boring, I think I'm going to faint,” she once told an interviewer.

The type of person one said yes to so as not to anger her.

And for five years, from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to just after World War II, she was married to Ernest Hemingway. (She was among the crowd he paled around with at the bullfights in Madrid and he immortalized in 'The Sun Also Rises.”)

Two items from her adventures - and I don't know a better word for how she went about her job:

In 1942, she convinced Collier's magazine to allow her to write about island-hopping across the Caribbean. She was, she wrote only half-joking in recalling the trip for her memoir, 'Travels With Myself and Another,” looking for German submarines:

'…

I told myself I might pick up survivors from torpedoed ships or find stashes of supplies for submarines or hidden enemy radio transmitters and anyway, since the war hereabouts was taking place on the sea, obviously I should travel on the sea, too.”

So Gellhorn started at St. Thomas, where she hired some men she did not know to take her on their tiny boat to the next island, then convinced more brave souls she'd never before met to ferry her to the next island … and so on across some 275 watery miles that indeed probably did have German submarines, ultimately to an American base at Antigua.

Gellhorn never reported rescuing any survivors at sea or coming across enemy transmitters. But she was abandoned on one of those near-desolate islands by a crew who declared they'd had enough adventure.

Here's another item:

She knew something was afoot and desperately wanted to get to what we now know would be the D-Day landing. But someone - by one account it was Hemingway, with whom she was going through an exceptionally acrimonious break-up - stole her press credentials.

So Gellhorn told guards at the port she wanted just a quick word with some of the nurses on board a hospital ship before it launched - for a feature she was working on, she explained disingenuously, from the women's point of view. Once on the ship, she hid in a restroom.

At the debarkation in France, she pretended to be a stretcher bearer so she could get ashore.

When she died, at age 89, the New York Times obituary called her 'daring.” I'll say.

I don't know if Gellhorn would've been inclined to observe National Women's History Month - she probably would been far too concerned about booking her next passage to some war zone or finagling some magazine editor into putting up money for a trip to Mokolo.

But she certainly demonstrated a concern for equality between men and women, and she wouldn't have been too pleased about the lack of progress on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to haul the Equal Pay Act into the 21st century, or any similar remedy.

None of us should be happy about it, either.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; [email protected]