Dr Sarah Percy on Forgotten Warriors: The Long History of Women in Combat
Thursday 22nd February 2024
Dr Sarah Percy gave a lecture entitled 'Forgotten Warriors: The Long History of Women in Combat' on Thursday, February 22nd 2024. A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hDlh3DBhGb0
Synopsis
From Boudicca to Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Tracing the long history of female fighters, Forgotten Warriors puts the record straight, exploring how war became an all-male space, and getting to the bottom of why women were allowed to be astronauts a full thirty years before they were allowed to fight in combat. This talk will take a particular focus on the role of women in the British army. I will use the experience of British women on the road to combat integration to shed light on the role of women in military history more generally.
From the Mino, the all-female army that protected Dahomey from the West for two hundred years to the Night Witches, Soviet flying aces that decimated the Nazis; from the real story of Joan of Arc to cross-dressing soldiers, a series of extraordinary women come alive, determined not to be passive victims.
Every country has their tomb to the unknown warrior, picking out one unnamed body to represent the sacrifices of thousands of others. As Forgotten Warriors shows, those overlooked soldiers could well be female. Their heroic and compelling stories need to be heard.
Speaker Biography
Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Dr Sarah Percy was formerly Fellow in International Relations at Merton College, Oxford, where she was on the steering committee of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. Author and presenter of an acclaimed ABC radio series on the Cold War, her first book, Mercenaries, examined another unconventional military history, over multiple locations, from the medieval period until the present day.