It’s never been easy for female war correspondents, but in the 20th century they mostly went unassailed in the course of their reporting (except for Martha Gellhorn, who actually had more to fear from Ernest Hemingway than the Spanish fascists or German Nazis).

Unassailed until now, that is.

Exhibit A:

The brutal attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on CBS correspondent Lara Logan, which she described on 60 Minutes last spring:

Exhibit B:

Clare Morgana Gillis’s piece in the current Atlantic magazine, What I Lost in Libya, which details her harrowing 45 days of captivity by Muammar Qaddafi’s forces in Tripoli.

Exhibit C:

Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy’s horrific abuse by Egyptian police this week, described here by Mediaite:

Eltahawy, a longtime human rights activist and journalist who had been covering the Egyptian revolution since this spring, was detained on Tuesday, she says, on the pretext that she did not have her passport. As soon as she could, she tweeted “I AM FREE,” and then described in detail (and with pictures, first of her swollen hand and, later, of her casts) the abuses she underwent.

Eltahawy later went on CNN to tell her story:

From Mediaite:

[T]he near-instant turnaround time from the attack to Eltahawy choosing to go public with her story is something completely new in the face of violent regimes. Part of this is due to the speed with which Twitter functions, but most if not all of the credit goes to Eltahawy for displaying a level of courage that is as humbling to the rest of us as it is admirable beyond words.

Amen.

UPDATE: I should have included New York Times photographer Lynsey Addario, held for six days in Lybia with three of  her colleagues.