WAR ON SEXISM

History is littered with the uncredited. Alfred Wallace, who developed a theory of evolution before Darwin. James Maxwell, the man who did the maths behind relativity. In wartime the situation is exacerbated. Posterity records the generals — Patton and Montgomery, Eisenhower, Bradley, Rommell and Zhukov. But there is more than one unknown soldier. As for women, history has too often written them out of the books, particularly with regard to times of national strife. Fed by stereotypes of world war two, the imagination conjures up only pictures of longsuffering homemakers in headscarves, every mother made a single mother, every woman plucky but domesticated, in every sense of the word. War, we were told, was a male pursuit.

The reality, of course, was very different, and not just in the sense that countless women served as medical staff or in vital desk jobs — be that as controllers for air command or as code breakers at Bletchley Park. If the British army has only recently accepted female soldiers in frontline roles, last year also saw — some 70 years too late, and sadly only in obituary — the celebration of the likes of Mary Ellis, one of the last surviving female Spitfire pilots who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary,