What WOMEN were inspiring during WWII

[Spidermama]

For her homework DD has to pick a person from the second world war and write about them and present their story to the class.

She wants to write about a woman. Can you think of any? (Eva Braun has already been taken).

But maybe there are stories that a living relative knows, about what her older relatives did?

Or could try local library for info/archives on local residents? Might be a step too far for the project!

Will be interesting as and when ds does something similar - one of his great-grannies was a leading light of the black market , another was detained in a mental institution... but another was looking after 3 children in 2 rooms in a condemned house in Soho, with a husband in the merchant navy and her eldest child, evacuated to the north for 5 years, was almost adopted by the host couple (the papers had been drawn up ready for the adoption).

Real lives, eh.

I really hope it's not about the inspiration element northernlurker - anyone inspired by Eva Braun? Unless it means inspired to do the opposite!

What about the women who delivered aircraft from the factories to the RAF bases? Bloody dangerous job, many of them died. It was an all-female workforce given any man who could fly was on active duty. (My Grandad was on an RAF base, saw someone making a very tricky landing in terrible weather, everyone came out to congratulate the pilot on making it - then she took off her flying helmet... he said he realised then there was nothing a woman could not do.)

There's a book about them somewhere but can't remember what it's called. Am sure RAF Museum at Hendon or Imperial War Museum would know.

The breaking of the Enigma code? www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2001_33_mon_02.shtml

Violette Szabo was the first person who sprang to my mind as well. Her daughter was so young when she went to work for SOE; I always find the picture of her with her mother's Croix de Guerre after the war heartbreaking.

Oh yes I was going to mention the women pilots - fascinating - only found out about that recently.

What about women who ran the railways during the war? They ran the signalboxes in lots of places as only certain signalboxes were deemed important enough for the signalmen to be exempt from the draft.

Interesting article about six women in WWII.
I don't think Eva Braun was inspiring at all!

corrie ten boom

Dame Myra Hess (the pianist who did lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery when the concert halls were closed).

Ida and Louise Cook are heroines of mine: they were opera-lovers who spent the 1930s getting Jews out of Germany and Austria by smuggling out their jewellery and valuables which the British govt would then accept as collateral (ie our government then as now would not accept refugees who could not prove their financial independence, and the Nazis wouldn't let Jews export their money).

Ida then wrote about 100 romantic novels to finance their work with refugees. They are among the Righteous Gentiles, but not well-known in the UK.

There's Sophie Scholl, too [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose]

edith paif or coco chanel, interesting to see the other side, ie the collaborators...if eva braun is ok they would be too..

Queen Mother????
That's a joke, right?

I was going to say Edith Cavell but I think she may have been WW1.

Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.

How about Susan TRavers?

Only woman ever get the French Legion of Honour?

www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552148148/ref=ox_ya_oh_product

Oh, and the German V2's were tested by a woman, but I can't remeber her name, only German woman test pilot...

Nurse Edith Cavell was indeed WW1!

(Point about Princess Elizabeth i.e. now the Queen would be that she was in the Land Army, I guess - people were genuinely short of food and the enemy was trying to starve us by targetting the North Atlantic Convoys from America).

what ever you might think about the queen mother personally , she was very important for morale in the war and people at that time valued the monarchy as role models much more than now.

I know she lived a life of enormous privilige and wasn't necessarily a very nice person, but you can't deny she was very influencial on the home front in the war.

This is a great site for inspiration women in WW2

Moondog - as Bonjour says the point of this exercise is to look at icons of the time not necessarily just those we admire today.

I think HRH was in the ATS, edam? Lorries rather than tractors!

She got her hands dirty anyway

ATS (army for girls)

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