Event Description

When war broke out across Europe, women in Northern Ireland began to organise. They volunteered, they entered new professions, they took on roles that were
unthinkable for their mothers and grandmothers. This talk explores the lives of women during the war; those who served officially, those who assisted unofficially
and those who dealt with the daily reality of war.

Women played key roles in war-time Northern Ireland and were on the front line in response to the Belfast Blitz in 1941. Using testimony from the women themselves, historian Dr Robyn Atcheson tells the stories usually neglected in histories of the Second World War by focusing on the women who lived and died in 1940s Northern Ireland.

Dr Robyn Atcheson is a social historian and history communicator who specialises in the histories of the marginalised in Irish history. Her research focuses on the poor of Belfast, public health in Ulster and the history of women across the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.