Audio Programme
An accompanying audio programme enabled visitors to listen to women describing their experiences in letters, diaries and tape-recorded reminiscences.

Listen to some extracts:

Queen Elizabeth 1  (mp3, 1.18MB)
Extract from the 'Tilbury Speech' of 1588, delivered to the army assembled at Tilbury to prevent a possible invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Let tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects, and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst of heat and battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down my life for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.  I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; the which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

Mary Seacole  (mp3, 234KB)
Mary Seacole, the daughter of a West Indian mother and a Scottish father, was denied the opportunity to volunteer for nursing duties during the Crimean War. Undaunted, she travelled to the Crimea and established the British Hospital near Balaclava.

I made up my mind that if the army wanted nurses, they would be glad of me, and with all the ardour of my nature, which ever carried me where inclination prompted, I decided that I would go.

Sarah Macnaughton  (mp3, 308KB)
Sarah Macnaughton, a journalist who visited the Belgian front line in 1914, comments:

It is a queer side of war to see young, pretty English girls in khaki and thick boots, coming in from the trenches, where they have been picking up wounded men within a hundred yards of the enemy's lines, and carrying them away on stretchers. Wonderful little Walküries in knickerbockers, I lift my hat to you!

Emmeline Pankhurst  (mp3, 455KB)
On 17 July 1915 a procession of women, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, marched for the right to serve in time of war.  She had issued the following appeal to women:

We in this country must to more than we have yet done to support our splendid Allies, who so far have suffered the worst of the enemy's attacks.  We must do more to help our heroic soldiers who have gone out to the front to win or die.  We must do more to save the liberties which the enemy would destroy.  We must do more to save this country and the Empire.  In short, we must win.

Josephine Pearce  (mp3, 178KB)
Wren Josephine Pearce remembers celebrating VE day:

I remember flinging myself at some burly man in the dockyard and kissing him on both cheeks in the proper, true French way. And he heaving me up off the ground and whirling me round. Everybody went absolutely crazy!

Edith Kup  (mp3, 240KB)
The end of the war provoked mixed feelings, as WAAF Edith Kup, who lost her fiancée, explains:

Everybody, all the WAAFs that you ever speak to will say that they wouldn't have missed it, since it had to be, they wouldn't have missed it for the world.  And that's really very true.