Female Poets and Inspirational Women of The First World War - Guest Blog

In May 2012, following attendance at a performance of the musical “Bullets and Daffodils” about the life and work of WW1 soldier poet Wilfred Owen, I volunteered to help the little group of actors who travel around performing the musical drama. They also run a museum to the memory of Wilfred Owen called The Wilfred Owen Story, which is situated in Argyle Street, Birkenhead on the Wirral Peninsula in the north west of England.  Wilfred was brought up and educated on the Wirral Peninsula and by a strange coincidence so was I. At the request of  Dean Johnson who runs the Wilfred Owen Story Museum, I began researching women who wrote poetry during World War One for an exhibition held there in November 2012.  I began by looking for a woman poet with a connection to the Wirral Peninsula and discovered that May Sinclair was born in Rock Ferry, which is a few miles down the cost from Birkenhead.

By the time WW1 broke out in Europe in August 1914, May was famous on both sides of the Atlantic as an author and poet.  It was May who first used the phrase "stream of consciousness" to describe a literary work. Although she was by no means a young woman, May went to Belgium in September 1914 with the Dr Hector Monro Flying Ambulance Unit as Dr Monro's Personal Assistant.  May also financed the unit.   The experiences of the unit were such that within six weeks May was sent bak to England suffering from medical symptoms described as "Shell Shock".  She wrote about her experiences and wrote two poems which she dedicated to the unit.

I began to add poets of other nationalities and am slowly building up a list of women poets of all nationalities and from many different countries, for this was the first time a war affected every country of the globe and every man, woman and child too.  I'd love to know if you have poets to add to the list which you will find here http://www.femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk/p/female-poets-of-first-world-war-revised.html.

One of the poets for whom I have a great deal of admiration is Ella Wheeler Wilcox.  Ella travelled to France to entertain the American troops in 1918.  Can you imagine what it must have been like taking a liner across the Atlantic (no Jumbo Jets in those days) with the risk of torpedoes and mines sinking the ship at any moment?  And practical everyday things like travel-size cosmetics and toiletries and light-weight cases did not exist back then.  For younger women, Tampax and Lil-lets hadn't been invented yet either, but they were resourceful women and in spite of the terrible conditions they lived and worked in while in the various theatres of war, and in spite of being hampered by long hair, long skirts and high-button boots, they coped admirably and wrote about their experiences.

By the time the exhibition was up and running in November 2012, I was well and truly hooked on researching the poetry of the First World War and had started a weblog - www.femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk.  People contacted me and asked for some of the exhibition panels and exhibitions were held in several other venues. I was also contacted by relatives of some of the poets on my ever-growing list.

I had also branched out to include some of the amazing women who were not poets - women like Mary Riter Hamilton, the Canadian artist who went to paint the aftermath, travelling to France in 1919.   Mary's story was so incredible - she lived in a tin hut among the Chinese workers who cleared away the debris left by the conflict and helped to bury the dead - that I could not leave her out.  Mary stayed in France for three years painting well over 300 pictures, her health suffered and she lost the sight of one eye but she did not give up.   That is how the heading "Inspirational Women of World War One" came into being and I put together a book which features some of those women.  I called the book "No Woman's Land" and started a weblog too - www.inspirationalwomenofww1.blogspot.co.uk.

The stories of those women is very inspiring and I feel we should celebrate their lives more.  I think it is a shame that women in general the world over do not seem to have built upon the progress made during the First World War when the world needed women.

Lucy London, January 2015  Photo:  One of Mary Riter Hamilton's pictures.

Do you know where you're goin' to? To infinity and beyond!

They say you should never meet your heroes. But sometimes it is not until you meet someone that they become your hero in the first place.

And when you do meet them, be sure to ask them awkward questions about how they got to where they are - being your hero - because the paths they take can often be as surprising as they are influential in helping you find your own way in life's great adventure...

I had just such an experience this summer at my first ever international scientific conference which took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. Having decided to make the most of this experience and attend a pre-conference workshop - and, what's more, having decided at the last minute to switch workshops - I found myself in the presence of one Dr. Melora Larson of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). 

There's no point in hiding the fact that, space, spacecraft and spacecraft engines being obviously cool, the fact that Larson worked for JPL made her immediately equally cool in my eyes. Or, at least, potentially - and boy, did she live up to those expectations.

Levitating helium droplets in Spacelab 3

Like Prof. Athene Donald, Larson is one of the great science communicators who manages to express her own enthusiasm for a subject and make it both interesting and comprehensible for her audience. Although unassuming in nature, it was clear from the start that Larson knew not only a lot about cryocoolers (on which the workshop was based) and low temperature space applications but the notoriously difficult low temperature Physics underlying it all. An unusual combination of someone who has both the practical outlook and abilities of an engineer, as well as the depth of understanding of a pure scientist. This is highlighted in many of her projects but perhaps most so in that of the magnetic low-gravity simulator which she not only used for high-end experimental Physics research but was also instrumental in building.

Do you like the things that life is showin' you?

This combination of hands-on skills and a thirst for knowledge can be perhaps traced back to her childhood and her early influences and ambitions. Larson clearly takes after one of her own inspirations, her father, who was both a physical chemist and a dab-hand at woodwork.

She initially wanted to be either a fire-fighter or an astronaut and, unfortunately for America's firefighting community, the astronaut dream won out. Deciding to take the academic rather than the military route to walk among the stars, Larson studied astrophysics but soon became side-tracked by pure Physics - very in-depth pure Physics. 

In studying for her PhD from the University of California (Santa Barbara) she not only added extensively to our knowledge of low temperature helium but in the process also developed two very high accuracy (resolution of 5-20 nano-Kelvin) thermometers.

Do you get what you're hopin' for?

Manoeuvering MIRI towards ISIM

But the space community need not have worried that they'd lost their budding young astronaut. After her PhD Larson was offered a postdoc position at JPL where she has risen from triumph to triumph. The breadth of projects she has worked on range from the Confined Helium Experiment (CHeX) which flew on the Space Shuttle in 1997 to the Low Temperature Microgravity Physics Facility (LTMPF), an International Space Station (ISS) project until 2004; and, currently, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), part of the very exciting NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope project.

Larson has also been a member of the board of directors of both the Cryogenics Society of America (CSA) and the Cryogenics Engineering Conference (CEC). She has been a past CEC board president and in 2017 will take office as CSA president. 

"I need to repair my turbo boosters. Are you still using fossil fuels, or have you discovered crystallic fusion?"

So you don't need to be an astronaut to work in space. And you don't need to have a plan to find where your talents lie - or, at least, if you have a plan you don't need to follow it. But it does help to have heroes to look up to, to inspire you and to encourage you. Thanks, Melora, for being one of mine!

Thanks also Diana Ross and Buzz Lightyear for the lyrics/quotes. Whether they contain cryogenic* instrumentation or not, spaceships will always be seriously cool....

ISS over Earth

 *Note that Cryogenics is not the same as Cryonics (see here).