As the ‘Female other’ of World War 1, the Eastern Front, and in particular Serbia, provided British women with unique opportunities for involvement. Serbia enabled women to experience the war at close range, often facing many of the same threats as combat soldiers. Here female bodies were put to the test in ways not previously imagined, and some women explored gender roles in unexpected ways. This chapter examines the ways in which this stark new experience pushed societal understandings of gender boundaries through the experience of two very different women, Mabel Dearmer, a hospital orderly who worked and died in Serbia in 1915 and Flora Sandes, a nurse-turned-soldier whose experience questions accepted understandings of gendered war experience. The chapter considers various elements that might shape or alter gender expectations, such as dress, uniform, performance and behaviour patterns. It sets out the conventional expectations of Edwardian femininity and then juxtaposes them with the actual physical and emotional experience of life on the Eastern Front.
This book explores the experiences and contributions of British women performing various kinds of active service across the Eastern Front in Serbia, Russia and Romania during the First World War. The book is roughly chronological, but also examines related themes such as gender, nationality and legacy. Upon the outbreak of the War in 1914, rejected by the British military, surprising numbers of British women went to work for the allied armies in the East. The book considers their experiences before and after the fall of Serbia in 1915. Other women were caught in Russia and remained there to offer service. Later, women’s Units moved further East from Serbia to work on the Romanian and Russian Fronts, only to be caught up in revolution. This book explores their many experiences and achievements, within an appropriate historical and cultural context and interprets their own words by examining the many and varied written records they left behind. Women such as Dr Elsie Inglis, Mabel St Clair Stobart, Flora Sandes and Florence Farmborough are studied alongside many others whose diaries, letters, memoirs and journalism help to shape the extraordinary role played by British women in the East and their subsequent legacy.