December 19, 1931

“She Goes to Vassar,” a film produced and directed by [Mary] Marvin Breckinridge ’27, was shown to the Vassar Club of Washington at the gymnasium of the Potomac School. Funded by the college and the Alumnae Association, the film featured three students chosen in consultation with Philaletheis and was shown to alumnae groups and parents of prospective students “to keep the alumnae in touch with the college, and to show parents…what their daughters will do at the school.”

The Washington Post

The Forgotten Frontier (1930), Breckinridge’s silent film about a nurse and midwifery health service in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, was highly acclaimed. Later, through an association with Edward R. Murrow that began when she was in college, Breckinridge became the first female news correspondent for the CBS radio network. Broadcasting from seven European countries prior to World War II, she famously slipped a barbed assessment of Germany under the Nazis past the German censors. Describing the Nazi newspaper Voelkische Beobachter, she observed, “The motto of this important official paper is Freedom and Bread. There is still bread.”