"I Wish My Mother Could See Me Now": The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and Negotiation of Gender and Class Relations, 1907–1918

This paper focuses on war as a gendering activity and explores the founding and service of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an elite British women's voluntary organization active during the First World War. As the first women to officially drive for the British Army, the FANY negotiated their work and resistance to it in the context of a shifting gendered terrain. I argue that such representations of gender in the masculine role of militarized ambulance transport driver-mechanic relied on a number of key social constructs that mediated and ultimately defused the subversive nature of their work.