Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Traditionally VADs are portrayed as selfless, middle class ‘ladies', who rushed off to the front risking life and limb to assist professional nurses in the trenches. But is this the full picture of members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments? In this talk, which introduces an overlooked (and less glamourous) group of nearly 100,000 women who ‘stayed behind’, Sue Hawkins explores one military hospital, based in the Pennine mill town of Holmfirth, to persuade you that the VAD cohort was much broader.
Speakers:
Sue Hawkins gained her doctorate on nursing in Victorian London in 2010, and has taught19th and early 20th century British social history. Her research interests focus on topics related to the history of medicine and women’s role in society. She has published on nursing as an emancipating occupation for late Victorian women, the history of women’s involvement in science and the development of early children’s hospitals in the UK and edited a collection on women in magazines.
Recorded July 2024.
Traditionally VADs are portrayed as selfless, middle class ‘ladies', who rushed off to the front risking life and limb to assist professional nurses in the trenches. But is this the full picture of members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments? In this talk, which introduces an overlooked (and less glamourous) group of nearly 100,000 women who ‘stayed behind’, Sue Hawkins explores one military hospital, based in the Pennine mill town of Holmfirth, to persuade you that the VAD cohort was much broader.
Speakers:
Sue Hawkins gained her doctorate on nursing in Victorian London in 2010, and has taught19th and early 20th century British social history. Her research interests focus on topics related to the history of medicine and women’s role in society. She has published on nursing as an emancipating occupation for late Victorian women, the history of women’s involvement in science and the development of early children’s hospitals in the UK and edited a collection on women in magazines.
Recorded July 2024.
