Interesting article on female soldiers in WW1

[Grimfox]

Link

Usually I would associate the label "hero" with an act of outstanding courage, but it isn't clear if the women mentioned here did anything "heroic", or if they earned the label simply by being there at all (although I appreciate that would be no mean feat in itself).

Sounds like an interesting MOOC, I'm going to sign up I think.

In Leeds we have a new housing estate with roads named after the women who died in a massive munitions explosion there in WW1 - at the time it wasn't possible for the papers to report how they'd died, so they really were forgotten heroes of WW1.

Oddly I would guess that at the time some women were seen as heroic for doing something relatively normal but for which they were supposedly not fitted (e.g. driving a car). The label of hero may have been a reminder that the only basis for them doing the work was the war, and that after it they were to return immediately to their homes? Does anyone expect to be permanently heroic?

What a fascinating article! And it's so good to see the BBC giving so much airtime to this sort of thing - I think it's been getting more common over the last few years.

OP I also thought that the article was quite thoughtful in talking about the word "hero" and who can "qualify" for it being narrow, at times extremely narrow, and changing over time. And that many of the examples given are clearly of women being heroic! I suspect it's a semantics thing more than anything really - "hero" means different things to different people and a lot of people vehemently disagree about it.

Good that the BBC is producing so many articles to highlight the contributions of women to all sorts of endeavours, as they have been written out largely to now. There have been a lot of pieces about female scientists both historical and current which is always good to see.

Getting the facts out there that women, especially historically, have contributed to "important stuff", and done all these amazing things, is so important. As at the moment hardly anyone knows.

It is good that these stories are being told Seven. Especially when you think how hard it would've been for a woman to get to do anything "un-ladylike". I'm reminded of Vera Brittain upsetting her family because she wanted to be a nurse ffs.

Also rather depressing that a century on, a woman serving on the front line is still rare enough to provoke media interest (especially if she is attractive )

I remember Chris Ryan I think it was mentioning about a female russian sniper -

www.historynet.com/women-warriors.htm
Russia's most famous sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, didn't learn her craft at the school. The daughter of a Red Army soldier, she trained as a young woman with a shooting club affiliated with the arms factory where she worked. During the war, she racked up more than 300 kills and became legendary for her toughness—she was wounded four times—and endurance. Often, she'd lie in ambush for days.

The sad thing is that there have ALWAYS been women where there have been wars. Sometimes they fought, mostly they nursed, cooked and 'serviced' the men. Women who came back from serving in The Great War were often as shell shocked as their male counterparts, but where there were few services for men, there was nothing for women, so they just ended up in asylums. Women arrived on the Normandy beaches soon after the men, were among the first to look after the inmates at Bergen Belsen and have served in hair raising capacities in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hidden histories like these are always fascinating to me, thanks for posting.