Women and War

Elisa Segrave and Virginia Nicholson in discussion, chaired by Anne Sebba

During the two word wars, women of all classes worked who had never worked before entered the workforce for the first time, in many cases doing jobs hitherto done only by men. Young women who had been in domestic service left it, never to return, to do jobs in munitions factories, shops, as car mechanics, land girls, as drivers and also, in ENSA, entertaining the troops.

As a social historian, Virginia Nicholson has explored the impact of both wars on women’s lives. The slaughter of the First World War left a generation of two million ‘surplus women’ who had to reinvent themselves, economically and emotionally. The Second World War demonstrated that women of all ages – in the services and on the Home Front – were cleverer, more broad-minded and more complex that even they themselves had guessed.

Elisa Segrave focuses on her mother Anne’s war diaries, in which she found a very different person from the needy and helpless one she had known: a competent and responsible woman of whom she could be proud, who had worked in intelligence and at Bletchley Park. After she was demobbed in 1945, however, she never worked again – something that her diaries make clear she regretted.

The authors will discuss writing about women and war, and how being in two world wars radically affected women’s lives, often changing them irrevocably. The discussion will be chaired by Anne Sebba.