A review of the impact of women's military or wartime service in the aftermath of the First World War

This PhD project will study the long-term impact that working for the British war effort during World War One had on the women involved. Whilst many studies have been completed in relation to women's wok during the war, a detailed and comprehensive examination of how this work affected their lives afterwards has yet to be produced. It will look at how women's wartime experiences changed them, how they reflected on their changed roles, and how the experience influenced their work and lives in the inter-war period and beyond. As such, this work will feed into the lively debate about the aftermath of World War One that is currently on-going both within and beyond academia. In particular, the collaboration between the IWM and the University of Manchester which this project entails offers a unique opportunity for my research to make a significant and distinctive contribution to this debate.

The research project aims to identify and explore a neglected aspect of the legacy of the First World War, namely the post-war impact of the
participation of British women in the war effort. Work by Susan Grayzel, Gail Braybon and Susan Kingsley-Kent has contributed significantly to this historiography of this area. However, my work will mobilize hitherto largely untapped resources held at IWM, notably the extensive collection of journals of former servicewomen, started by the Old Comrades Associations of the women's auxiliary services in 1920 and 1921 to track the ways in which women's wartime experience was constructed and reconstructed after World War One.

Through a close examination of these sources, this PhD will aim to engage with the following key questions. To what extent did the Old Comrades Association journals keep alive the camaraderie of women's wartime service and preserve and enlarge friendship networks established in the war period? Similarly, how were the skills and disciplines developed by servicewomen in wartime remembered post-war, when such attributes were, ostensibly, no longer socially valued in women?