Fighting on the Home Front by Kate Adie is subtitled The Legacy of Women in World War One. I found it to be a really interesting read and although I’ve read numerous books about the war I learned a lot from this one. For instance, I had no idea that towards the end of the war there were thousands of women more or less right on the front lines. They had been recruited to free men up for fighting and they were doing all the cooking, cleaning, driving tasks and such – which men had been doing until then.

Did you know that there was an English woman in the Serbian Army? Her name was Flora Sandes and she was a sergeant major, she had started off as a St John Ambulance volunteer but begged to be allowed to fight when she saw that she was needed.

Women’s lives were changed radically but it was always known that the work they were doing was ‘only for the duration’ and they would have to go back to their domestic duties after the war. Although women got the vote due mainly to their war efforts, in some ways things went backwards so far that we still haven’t recovered the ground. It’s only now that women’s football is beginning to be taken seriously but during the war there were lots of female teams playing, due to the lack of men.

This book has interesting photos as well as lots of new (to me anyway) information. It’s a must read for anyone interested in the social history of the time. Kate Adie often adds in bits about what was happening within her own family in Sunderland at particular times during the war. Somehow those bits didn’t sit well within the book, especially as the Adie family was always described as her adoptive family, as if she was defending herself from any possible accusations of them not being her ‘real’ family. One mention of adoption would have been enough – not that I think it was necessary at all.

I believe that this book featured as a BBC Book at Bedtime.

You can find BBC podcasts about the role of women in World war 1 here.