‘To all the brave women who possessed the courage and imagination to serve their country in time of crisis and against all odds’
The extract above is taken from the dedication page of ‘They Fought like Demons’ by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. This book explores the history of women soldiers in the American Civil War, but its dedication could equally well preface many of the books we stock which explore roles of women in historical conflicts.
Perhaps the most extensive examination of this theme is contained in George and Anne Forty’s ‘Women War Heroines’ . The stories captured in this dense book are eye-opening. They include the tale of Christina Davies, born in Dublin in 1667, who donned a suit and enlisted in the navy (eventually being captured by the French during the summer of 1694) all the while looking for her lost husband, who had been press ganged a year earlier. Or similarly an account of the life of the nun Catalina de Erauso, who cut her hair short and escaped from her convent, eventually joining the army and fighting in Chile in 1619. I suppose in this context it is of little surprise that Joan of Arc is the patron saint of soldiers!
However, it is of course not just as soldiers that women have served during times of war. It was as nurses that many women found an outlet for their patriotism. The picture below is taken from the first hand account of Florence Farmborough, who, following a move from England to Russia in 1908, kept a diary of her experiences as a nurse on the Russian front during the First World War. Nursing took women far afield across both world wars, Angela Bolton’s book ‘The Maturing Sun’ is also a first hand account, recording her life whilst posted to India during the Second World War.
These diaries not only record their writers’ courage, but also uniquely give space to recording the practicalities of living as a woman on the front lines of a war zone. Just freshly on the shelf from a recent collection we have taken in is ‘Mrs Duberly’s War’ a book containing the journal and letters of Fanny Duberly, who accompanied her husband on a trip to the Crimea. Her journal was illustrated with many small sketches, many of which show how she coped with life in Crimea, for example the sketch below, showing her ‘walking dress’.
Whilst each of these books are as unique as the lives of the women recorded in their pages, they each do have a certain thing in common. Their heroines are those who, in the words of Angela Bolton’s own poetry ‘measured life in giving, not in years.’