Women of war is an examination of gender modernity using the world’s longest established women’s military organisation, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. These New Women’s adoption of martial uniform and military-style training, their inhabiting of public space, their deployment of innovative new technologies such as the motor car, the illustrated press, advertisements and cinematic film and their proactive involvement in the First World War illustrate why the Corps and its socially elite members are a particularly revealing case study of gender modernity.

Bringing into dialogue both public and personal representations, it makes a major contribution to the social and cultural history of Britain in the early twentieth century and will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars working in the fields of military history, animal studies, trans studies, dress history, sociology of the professions, nursing history and transport history.

Juliette Pattinson is Reader in History at the University of Kent