Make Her Praises Heard Afar: NZ Women Overseas in World War One

Description

Publisher: Booklovers Books, 2017 | Format: Paperback | Condition: Excellent

New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote. It was also a country that spent a century leaving women out of its own war story. Jane Tolerton’s exhaustively researched collective biography sets the record straight — not with a single dramatic narrative, but with more than 350 names, each one a woman who went to the other side of the world during WWI and did something that was never properly written down.

They were doctors and dentists, ambulance drivers and mathematicians, munitions workers and managers of convalescent homes. Many paid their own fares. Some funded amenities for soldiers that were later attributed to men’s groups or the military. They worked in Egypt, Gallipoli, France, Belgium, Serbia, Macedonia, Britain, and Manhattan. The title lifts a phrase from the national anthem — make her praises heard afar — and turns it into a demand: here they are, finally, and they were here all along.

Tolerton brought a Churchill Fellowship and a New Zealand History Research Trust Fund grant to this project. The research shows. This is a 368-page act of recovery, and it reads like one — dense with lives, driven by a controlled fury at how completely these women were erased.

Why We Stock It:

A NZ Book Award-winner and Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, Tolerton has spent decades recovering the voices that official history preferred to lose. This book is her most ambitious act of retrieval — a corrective to the ANZAC narrative that deserves to sit alongside every conventional account of the war.