Longest paper you were assigned to write with a writing major in college?

Your sex is unimportant. Believe it or not. A PhD is normally earned in order to teach at a college/university level.

Some PhDs in the humanities and social sciences end up in writing/journalism careers unconnected with academia, but such careers are very difficult to establish without connections, and those connections are often established first via academia -- research and publishing. However, this is a field in which academic jobs are not going to widely available, and the academic job market is in poor shape in general. This means that if you are going to have any hope of a tenure-track job, you need to earn your PhD at a top university.

Arizona State doesn't qualify. You will need to get into an Ivy, or a school like UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, or one of the public Ivies like UVA, UNC-Chapel Hill, Michigan-Ann Arbor, Wisconsin-Madison, etc. Sorry, but I can't recommend this field whether you are male or female. It doesn't matter.

You might be better off if you chose a dissertation topic that would make you an interesting candidate for a History, Sociology, or Psychology department appointment, but again, the academic job market is in poor shape, and I'm not expecting it to improve.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.