ABSTRACT
These two nurses who worked near the front lines in Spain viewed their motives for doing so in opposing terms, one saying that she was ‘purely political’, and the other that ‘political reasons’ had not motivated her at all. This gives rise to the
question, why did women in Britain become involved with the war in Spain, a country most of them had never visited and which was culturally and politically unfamiliar territory? They were not the citizens of a country at war, subject to the dictates of their government. For most of them, the question was one of personal choice. But merely to state that these women were motivated by what they considered to be a ‘just cause’ would be a gross generalisation which would fail to explain why, amongst the mass of the populace, these particular women responded as they did. Answering this seemingly simple question becomes a challenging task, due in part to the inherent complexities of the nature of women’s involvement with the Spanish war. Not only was there a wide diversity in the degree and manner of their participation but, in addition, these women held a great variety of beliefs and were representative of a wide section of the social spectrum.
