War correspondentMartha Gellhorn

Gellhorn didn’t want to be remembered as an ex-wife of Ernest Hemingway (“Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”) She was, in fact, a pioneering journalist who became the first female war correspondent, covering the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly magazine in 1937. An American, Gellhorn also covered World War II and conflicts in Vietnam, Israel, and El Salvador. She decided she was too old for her passion only when the Bosnian conflict broke out in 1992 (“You need to be nimble,” she said.) She died in London on February 15 of cancer at age 89.