ruin

Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisholm, amongst rubble in Pervyse, Belgium

Being a woman sometimes helped
At a time when women were still considered to be fragile, dainty and ‘lady-like’, it was incredible that they were out on the front line, surrounded by the horrors of war. Back home, many men were shocked that the women had gone out there. Even in the heat of the battle, attitudes were typically sexist. But, it was this stereotypical perception of women that actually allowed them to play a greater role.

“They managed to do stuff men couldn’t,” explains Shipton. “People didn’t know how to treat women in warzones.” She tells me an example of two women – 30-something Elsie Knocker and teenager Mairi Chislom. The pair met on a motorcycle unit (Mairi’s dad was a mechanic and she set off on his bike), and later set up a first-aid station by the British trenches.

It was within shouting distance of the German trenches and after a while, the German officers started to recognise the two women. “The story goes they told them, provided you wear the nurses’ wimpoles rather than tin hats, you can go into No Man’s Land and we won’t shoot you," says Shipton.

Consequently when planes were shot down into No Man’s Land, the nurses were able to rush across in their uniforms and rescue the pilot if he was still alive. The only condition was that they had to be identifiable as nurses, and they could not try and salvage any parts of the plane. It meant they had access to a part of the battlefield that men didn’t, and they could save lives.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/w...e-Tommies-and-sexism-helped-save-Britain.html

Volunteer Units
These were set up and offered freely to the War Office but not seriously received. After the campaigning and negotiations by well connected and persuasive members with Britain’s foreign allies units were eventually allowed to go abroad.

The small Flying Ambulance Corps set up by Dr. Hector Munro (a feminist sympathiser) was welcomed in Belgium. It included four women - Mairi Chisholm, Lady Dorothy Feilding, Elsie Knocker (later Baroness T’Sercales) and an American Mrs. Helen Gleason
https://www.geni.com/projects/World-War-One-Participating-British-Women/24770