By Nate Ferguson, dramaturg

They were heroes, but did they need to be?

The war gave them a place to call home, but should you thank the war for that?

Why did so many women choose to risk their lives in a war zone for little pay and no benefits? Were they all selfless patriots willing to give up everything for king and country--even a country that saw women more as natural resources than as citizens? It's not only that women couldn't vote, but that they weren't allowed to have jobs until the factories stood empty from conscription, that "doing your bit" at the beginning of the war meant the government telling them to have babies and convince the men around them to become soldiers.

It can be tempting, at times, to buy into the mythologizing, to say that the bravery of the Volunteer Aid Division changed hearts and minds about the worth of a woman, or that everyone put on the uniform out of inherent selflessness rather than social pressure and desperation. How could anything involving the Great War be so clean?

The way that the people of England saw their splendid daughters changed rapidly during the course of the war. At first, when volunteers weren't as necessary to keep the fight going, the few women who could pay their own way to the front were seen as dangerous eccentrics. As things shifted over to official regulation, volunteering met with official approval, but there was a constant conflict as to how much of a soldier a woman could be--fears that being put in too much of a man's role might drive them insane.

From the perspective of the VAD themselves, and their counterparts in the factories and hospitals back home, little pay was better than no pay, and the "vomit, piss, blood, and shit" at least came with some freedom from the demands of your family. The army just wanted some of your time, after all, not a lifelong commitment.

Many of them went to Canada or Australia after the war, rather than face what they had ran from. Some things changed a bit--women over 30 could vote by 1918--but others didn't, as after the men came home, anyone working as anything but a maid now faced shame and disapproval. In a way, the war didn't end with the fighting; it just changed to a war for what you were allowed to do.