Not So Quiet Book Summary

Doing Their Bit: The Women on the Front Lines of World War I Back in the times of World War I, there was no such thing as women soldiers. Because of this, it can be easy to assume that men were the ones who were more affected by the war than women. The novel Not So Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith (a pseudonym for the author Evadne Price), challenges this idea. Although the story is fictional, the truth is that many women actually experienced what the protagonist of Not So Quiet… Smithy experiences. It is clear, that the assumption that men were further impacted by the war than women is false, as many women who aided the injured soldiers, and were placed in war-torn areas of the world, suffered the war as greatly as the soldiers did, and in such

In Not So Quiet…, Smithy is shown to hold two different jobs throughout the war: ambulance driver, and domestic worker. Working as an ambulance driver places her at the center of the war, putting her in direct contact with the men who are injured and killed. As a domestic worker, however, she falls into a pattern of tranquility. Even when air raids arrive, she states, “We are so accustomed to this sort of thing that we regard it merely as an infernal nuisance” (Smith 232). Still, despite not being as directly involved in the war as, say, the ambulance drivers were, Smithy and the other domestic workers are still much closer to the terrors of war than their family who remained at home. The final air raid described in the novel ends in the death of all of Smithy’s friends, showing the reader that, even as a mere domestic worker, she was still not safe. Although she was not as near the front lines, and was not forced to endure the realities of war day in and day out, as she did as an ambulance driver, Smithy still experiences traumatic events. In her article, Lucy Noakes talks of women’s role in the war and in the WAAC, and how the effect this had on them has not properly been explored, especially not in regards to each individual (Noakes 144). In the documentary And We Knew How to Dance, each woman has a unique experience within the war. Sometimes this is due to her gender, sometimes to her role, but overall it is due to the war itself and her closeness to it. The women’s gender, as well as which role they held within the WAAC, should not be ignored. Just as well, however, it should be made clear that anybody who was present in areas overtaken by the war will inherently have different views and experiences of the war than those who spent the entirety of the war in their