Women have played an important role in wartime, working in diverse roles including nursing, teaching and farming and as clerks, fitters, cooks, pilots, drivers, anti-aircraft gun operators, decoders, RADAR operators and spies.
In this ‘Focus on…’ feature we profile individual women and some of the organisations in which they served. Using diverse documents including pension records, diaries, census entries and service records, we cover a 100-year time period from the Crimean War to World War II.
This resource has been archived as the interactive parts no longer work. You can still use the rest of it for information, tasks or research. Please note that it has not been updated since its creation in 2009.
You can find more content on this topic in our other resources:
Lessons
- Who was Noor Khan?
Noor-Un-Nissa Inayat Khan was a British spy who served in the Second World War in the Secret Operations Executive. - Florence Nightingale
Why do we remember her?
Themed collections
- Medicine on the Western Front (part two)
How did trench warfare affect injuries and treatment?
Finding aid
- Women’s Histories
This resource contains a hyperlinked list of National Archives current resources for Women’s histories on The National Archives website.