Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1908, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.
The First World War paused the suffragettes' campaign and Jack and Eve enrolled in the Scottish Women's Hospital Service and soon found themselves in Serbia. Eve set up and ran hospitals for allied soldiers in appalling conditions, while Jack became an ambulance driver, travelling along dirt tracks under bombardment to collect the wounded from the front lines.
Together, they carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could do anything men could do, whether driving ambulances, running military hospitals, becoming prisoners of war or bearing arms. They refused to compromise in their sexuality – they were lifelong partners even though Jack enjoyed relationships with other women. Determined to be themselves, 'forthright, flamboyant and proud', Wendy Moore uses their story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in WWI and the development of lesbian identity throughout the twentieth century.
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Wendy Moore is a freelance journalist and author of five nonfiction books on medical and social history. Her second book, Wedlock, was a Channel 4 TV Book Club choice and a Sunday Times no 1 bestseller. She lives in London.
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