Women and War
Elisa Segrave and Virginia Nicholson in discussion, chaired by Anne Sebba
7pm, Tuesday 23 September,
Lady Violet Room,
National Liberal Club,
1 Whitehall Place,
London SW1A 2HE
During the two world wars, women of all classes 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 and drivers.
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 thought.
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.
ELISA SEGRAVE is the author of The Diary of a Breast, about her battle with cancer, and the novel Ten Men (both published by Faber.) She writes for many newspapers and magazines, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent and The Lady. The Girl from Station X: My Mother’s Unknown Life (2014) is published by Aurum.
VIRGINIA NICHOLSON is the author of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (Viking 2002), Singled Out: How Two Million Survived Without Men after the First World War (Penguin 2007), and Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949 (Penguin, 2011). Her Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes will be published in 2015 by Viking Penguin.
ANNE SEBBA is a biographer, writer, lecturer and journalist, the author of nine non-fiction books, mostly biographies of iconic women with a strong historical context. Her most recent book is That Woman: The Duchess of Windsor and the Scandal That Brought Down a King (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011).
Tickets cost £10 for members, £15 for non-members, and can be booked online only – there will be absolutely no ticket sales on the door:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/authors-club-discussion-women-and-war-tickets-12624334725?aff=eorg
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