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Acton Acton, welcome to We Have Ways and make you talk with me, Almari and James Holland

and today we're joined by a special guest, Jim. Who are we talking to today?

Well, we're talking to Dr Sarah Miller or Sarah Louise Miller, we should say we have

a published name, but only her grandmother calls her that, which is being strict.

Sarah is at the Faculty of History in the University of Oxford, lectures all over the place,

published all for an brilliant voice on the Second World War. So, Sarah, thank you for joining us and, well, and will common.

Thank you for having me.

You're new book, The Women Behind the Few. I'm trying to figure out how to skin this cat, because when we spoke about you coming on the show,

you said, I don't do women's history as such, but you're a war-intel historian and you want to look at women involved for the operational kill chain and battlefield stuff.

The stuff that kind of gets overlooked. Can you explain what your stall is then in that case, or what you mean?

Yes, I can. I sometimes get quite frustrated when this kind of history is branded women's history, because I feel like it just reinforces a kind of separation.

Today is International Women's Day, and I really look forward to the day where we don't need one.

I think I just prefer to look at this as military and war history. Yes, it involves women, but what they're doing is not strictly women's work.

It is directly contributing to that allied war effort and victory. I don't like to separate that from the rest of the allied war effort and victory.

I very much look at this from the angle of this is mainstream war history, and that's my preferred stance.

A mainstream war role for women, because after all, this is a thing that we talk about a lot in the podcast.

There's not very many people in the teeth, but an awful lot of people in the tail of the allied war effort.

Women are part of that tail that allows the teeth to function, and so to separate them off into women from that is perhaps bogus.

It amounts it really to a kind of false distinction, because after all, people tend to think, oh, land army, land girls is women's contribution to the war.

Even the name land girls, you sort of think, well, okay, there's some everyday sexism at work if anything. That's your angle, right?

That's my angle. The first world war, you've got tens of thousands of women involved in the three military auxiliaries. By the second, you've got hundreds of thousands.

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