I listened to Women’s Lives on the Home Front, a BBC special episode of Women’s Hour. This episode is a behind-the-scenes look at the start of a four year broadcast drama on Radio 4 called Home Front. Home Front itself is a radio drama broadcast designed to look at the lives of “people normally hidden from history” during World War One, – indicating the stories of women and working-class people – and this behind the scenes look is a conversation with creators and actors about the historical details they used to craft their characters.

This delves into an array of topics, including the rapid militarization of a town called Folkstone and their early refugee acceptance, how women supported or rejected British participation in the war, what women felt their role in the war was, how non-wartime issues were affected by the outbreak of war, how modern issues like sexual violence were treated (and ignored) at this time, and even a little myth-busting. Apparently it’s been commonly spread that combatants believed they’d be home by Christmas, but when one of the writers did a little historian sleuthing, he found that it was only a common idea among the Germans! They were so confident in their military capabilities they thought they’d be able to outdo their opponents in no time.

This podcast does well in covering a lot of ground quite quickly as well as introducing some topics not often brought to the forefront of war conversations, but in moving through topics so rapidly I think some opportunity for detail was lost. This episode feels like the beginning of a conversation, but because it isn’t part of a larger series these topics don’t get explored beyond the surface level introductions in this episode. That said, I do think there’s value in these surface level introductions. When lessons on World War One intersect with women’s suffrage the conversation often starts and ends with “women replaced men in factory jobs and saw increased employment before being forced back home after the war”, but this introduces the point that women’s suffrage was already a movement before the war, and as such the war had an impact on an already existing ideology and group of advocates. The women’s suffrage movement was split into many groups who disagreed on whether or not to support the war, how exactly to support the war, how exactly to resist the war, and what it may mean for the suffrage of women – or if they should even be considering women’s suffrage during war time. While this topic could be an hour long podcast episode on its own, I’d rather have the three minutes of education on it than the zero minutes I had before listening.

In addition to discussions with the writers on the research they did to create the show, this episode also includes clips from the Radio 4 broadcast, which allows the actors to talk about the beliefs they included in their character creation – this connects really well with our class, and how we parse out wartime ideas through the frame of specific characters. It also provides an interesting disconnect – we often discuss women in our course, but our focus has been on upper class women like those in the ambulance brigades as opposed to those working at home.

Overall, I think this episode could stand to be two or three times its current length, but there is certainly still much to be gained from the interviews. The focus on beliefs and experiences of people less glorified by common historical accounts is not only interesting in itself, but interesting in the ways it intersects with our classroom conversations on the women’s experience during the war.