Speaker: Professor Juliette Pattinson

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. In so doing, she ‘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 (FANY), 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.

Note: This is a hybrid event, available to attend both in-person and online. In-person registration closes on 16 February at midnight and is only open to those with the necessary security clearance to access MOD Shrivenham.

Online registration for others also closes at midnight on 16 February. The MS Teams link will be sent on the morning of 18 February and will be accessible 15 minutes before the seminar's start time