MEDIA LIBRARY

Women have been involved in emergency relief operations since the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, little is known about their history in comparison to that of their male colleagues. Here you can find some examples of research which aims to provide a better understanding of the action of humanitarians in the Europe of Empires in the light of gender, class, race, ethnic and religious relations.

War godmothers were women who volunteered to correspond with soldiers and prisoners of war during the First World War.

Claire Bertschinger director of Tropical Nursing Studies at the Londond School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Elisabeth Wilson was an English humanitarian from the northern town of Huddersfield.

Emily Hobhouse was a British nurse and militant pacifist known for her opposition to British concentration camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War.

“Feeling humanitarianism during the Spanish civil war and Republican exile,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 21(4): 445-457.

Jeanne Egger was the first woman to become an ICRC delegate in 1963, almost 100 years after the Geneva Convention was signed!