‘Gloried in her grotesque and spurious manhood’: constructing the uniformed woman, 1907-1920

In the short story, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (1934), about an ambulance driver on the Western Front, Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist evades the constraints of normative femininity by assuming a male nickname, donning manly clothing, cropping her hair and performing work more commonly undertaken by men, and in so doing, ‘gloried in her grotesque and spurious manhood, forgetting at times that she was but a woman’. What of the real-life ambulance drivers? The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, formed in 1907 and still in existence today, was the first self-styled military female force, the first to wear military uniform and the first to prepare for war service. In donning clothing that was so explicitly designed for combat without the protection of the backdrop of war, FANYs confused conventional gender norms and provoked hostile reactions from the public. Yet they were widely celebrated in the press.  By utilising both public and personal accounts, this paper discusses external perceptions of the FANY, as well as self-representations in order to construct the uniformed woman in the early twentieth century.

Juliette is the newly appointed Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. She’s a social and cultural historian of war with particular interests in gender and personal testimonies. Previous projects have focused on male and female secret agents, civilian men, humour, cultural memory, incarceration and Britishness. Her last monograph, Women of War, is about the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, 1907-20.

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