It's a busy week for military history! While the Imperial War Museum teases the world's media with their newly renovated London museum, the week also sees the release of 'The First World War on the Home Front', by the IWM's senior historian Terry Charman. To celebrate this new book, which takes account of the domestic toll of the Great War on Britain, we're blogging direct from the war. Charles Balston, a 61 year-old retired civil servant, kept a diary throughout the war - his is one of many that Charman drew on to reveal the situation on the Home Front.
Today we see Balston's thoughts on the way the war changed the lives of women:
"Young women had realized their opportunities & the daughters of the cultured & leisurely homes were responding to the call of service and sacrifice with enthusiasm. Gone... are the young ladies of Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Thackerey & Dickens and the ladies of Cranford would have been scandalized if asked to do the things their descendants cheerfully performed. They had learned the luxury of doing good in the hospitals of France, Gibraltar, Malta & in Serbia - where typhus was raging - hundreds of British women were performing heroic duties and thousands more were seeking all manner of employment.
In July Mrs Pankhursy - the leader of the suffragette movement - employed the Women's Social and Political Union to form a procession in London on the (Saturday) 17th of women eager to give their services to their country and announced that Mr Lloyd George would receive a deputation of them.... In bad weather she led the procession of 40,000 women through London preparatory to meting him at the Ministry of Munitions on the Thames Embankment."
Charles Balston is one of dozens of everyday Britons whose stories come together to form a picture of life in Britain throughout World War One in Terry Charman's 'The First World War on the Home Front'. You can buy a copy here, and don't forget to check back tomorrow for more of Charles' war experiences!
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