"Two Women in Love and War"

Jack and Eve, Wendy Moore  (2024 TBR)

I bought this book after hearing the author on the BBC History Extra podcast. It is the story of Evelyn "Eve" Haverfield and Vera "Jack" Holme, who met while working for suffrage with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Eve had been married twice and had two sons, while Jack's relationships were primarily with women. They fell in love, eventually moving in together into a house that Eve owned. They found a community of other queer women, and both sometimes had flirtations or affairs, Jack in particular. But their bond remained strong.

Eve was a friend and ally of Emmeline Pankhurst, and Jack became Mrs. Pankhurst's driver, one of the first women chauffeurs in Britain. When the Great War broke out, they began organizing women to serve on the home front and abroad. Eve and Jack then joined Dr. Elsie Inglis's Scottish Women's Hospital (SWH) group in Serbia, where they worked to set up hospitals wherever the Serbian forces were fighting. Like many of the SWH women, both became deeply attached to the Serbian people and their country, refusing to leave even as enemy forces pushed the Allied armies out. After a desperate retreat, Jack ended up in Russia as the revolution was breaking out. Once safely evacuated to England, both she and Eve continued to raise money for Serbia. Eve felt called to return after the war ended, to open orphanages for the thousands of children left destitute. Jack followed her, but after Eve's death in Serbia in 1920, she returned to Britain, where she lived until her own death in 1969.

This book fascinated me on so many levels, starting with Eve and Jack's work in the suffrage movement. Reading Constance Lytton's autobiography (and then a biography of her) introduced me to the inner circle of the WSPU and the Pankhursts. But I didn't know about the WSPU car that Jack drove all over Britain, carrying the movement's leaders to meetings and protests. Both she and Eve were accomplished equestrians, and they often led suffrage parades (riding astride rather than side-saddle). Eve was arrested with Emmeline Pankhurst after a London rally in 1909, and their trial made headlines around the world.

Eve and Jack took their experience and connections from the suffrage movement into their war work. I learned so much about women's work in the Great War, about women in medicine, and about the war on the Eastern Front (the subject of podcasts and articles in recent months, though not focused on women's work). Like many women in the Britain, Eve wanted to put her talents and energy to use in supporting the war effort. She had an absolute belief that women could do anything men could, including working with the armed forces. The British government could not have disagreed more strongly. With other like-minded women, Eve founded the Women's Emergency Corps (WEC), "to register and coordinate offers of help from women . . . Within two weeks more than 10,000 women had registered..." She then went on to set up the Women's Volunteer Rifle Corps, which could function as a home guard if needed. Next, she organized the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps, known as the "Green Cross Corps," which would later send the first women's ambulance team to France.

Jack worked with her through all of this, but both of them wanted to do even more. When Eve heard Dr. Elsie Inglis speak on Serbia, raising funds to send a hospital unit, she was quick to volunteer. In September 1914, Dr. Inglis had offered to set up and run a military hospital, staffed by women. She was told, "My good lady, go home and sit still." Instead, she established the Scottish Women's Hospital organization. The governments of France, Belgium, and Serbia gladly accepted her hospitals and her staff. The time that Jack and Eve spent in Serbia is the largest section of the book. The SWH worked under incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions, often short of supplies and food. They dealt with epidemics of disease, in the civil population as well as the soldiers they treated. I did find the military aspect difficult to follow sometimes, particularly since the only small period maps included were in the photo sections. Wendy Moore also spends a lot of time on conflicts between the different members of the SWH, which made their work even more complicated.

Finally, this book explores queer women in Britain in the early 20th century, which is a subject I knew very little about. As Wendy Moore points out, we cannot know how people in the past defined themselves. Jack preferred male dress and re-named herself "Jack" in her early twenties, which is the name Wendy Moore uses (but refers to Jack as "she" and "her" since Jack did not present herself as a male person). She and later Eve were part of a circle of queer women, some of whom were settled domestic partners. Triangle relationships were also common, and after Eve's death Jack met two women with whom she shared a home and life for 32 years. From this book, I learned that there was little concern over women's emotional or physical relationships until the publication of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which sparked an uproar over lesbianism and eventually an obscenity trial.

I had previously read Wendy Moore's No Man's Land, about "the trailblazing women who ran Britain's most extraordinary military hospital during World War I." I am happy to see that our library systems have several more of her books. I also want to find a biography of Dr. Elsie Inglis, who persisted despite the misogynistic dismissal of her work.