Women of World War I: Marie Curie, Mabel St. Clair Stobart, and Aileen Cole Stewart

World War One did much to accelerate the technological and political upheavals already brewing at the turn of the 20th century, but the changes to the societal order were a bombshell all their own.

You might know about Marie Curie’s groundbreaking work in physics and chemistry, but did you know that Curie and her daughter personally lead a corps of intrepid women who delivered portable x-ray devices to the front lines?

How about the battle-tested female doctors and nurses whose guts and determination paved the way for women’s suffrage? Or the African American nurses who shattered color and gender lines while saving lives?

Britannica explores these untold stories of women who changed the world from the homefront to the battlefront of the first world war.

Marie Curie

When war broke out in 1914, Marie Curie had just established the Radium Institute in Paris.

With German armies encroaching on the French capital, Curie gathered her entire supply of radium, stashed it in a remote bank vault , and set off to put her science skills to a daring new test.

Curie was a Nobel-winning scientist, not a soldier, but she knew there was one way her work could make a difference to the war effort.


Early x-ray machines were enormous and found only in the most advanced hospitals of the day—not exactly convenient to the front lines. So Curie designed a portable one; a device which would forever revolutionize medicine on and off the battlefield.

Curie’s first mobile radiology lab must have seemed like something hatched by a mad scientist. Combining an X-ray machine, a darkroom for developing images, and a dynamo [explain] to power the process.

For the first time, military doctors could detect the most minute pieces bullets and shrapnel lodged in wounds, without having to transport casualties.

Soldiers at the front dubbed the portable X-ray labs “petites Curies” (“little Curies”), and Curie enlisted her teenage daughter, Irène, as her assistant .

Curie not only taught herself basic automotive maintenance, but also how to drive. She soon had a fleet of 20 petites Curies servicing the front lines.

As the cars were useless without trained technicians, Curie personally trained at least 150 women in the fundamentals of radiology, anatomy, car repair, and photo processing.

After the Western Front stabilized, Curie established some 200 radiological labs in battlefield hospitals. Thanks to her determination, an estimated one million Allied soldiers would receive X-rays during the war, saving untold lives in the process.

In the years after the war, the portable X-ray unit underwent significant advances, and it remains a fixture of battlefield hospitals to this day

Mabel St Clair Stobart

Mabel St. Clair Stobart was a product of the British upper classes. Like other suffragists of her day, she felt strongly that women should be afforded the same rights as men.

Unlike other suffragists, however, Stobart believed that demonstrating the value of women on the battlefield would help secure their right to vote.

Originally a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, an all-women’s medical auxiliary, Stobart broke away in 1910 and founded her own organization, the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps.

In the summer of 1910 Stobart led dozens of female volunteers through a week of training in the English countryside.

The course covered first aid techniques as well as basic military skills such as marching and signal recognition.

When the First Balkan War erupted in 1912, Stobart approached Sir Frederick Treves, the head of the British Red Cross, to offer the services of her organization.

When Treves told her that women had no place on a battlefield, Stobart simply bypassed him and took her group to Serbia and, later, Bulgaria.

To finance their mission, Stobart used her influence in British high society, essentially crowdfunding the whole project.

The Convoy Corps spent the duration of the war at the front, with women working as doctors, drivers, orderlies, and administrators.

The Convoy Corps returned to England in 1913, and when World War I broke out the following year, Stobart again petitioned the British Red Cross for an assignment.

Treves again dismissed the performance of the Convoy Corps in the Balkan Wars as “exceptional,” implying that it could not be repeated.

Stobart later wrote that “Action is a universal language which all can understand.” Once again, she simply side-stepped Treves and made her own arrangements.

Stobart’s troupe served first in Belgium, and then in Serbia. She was commissioned as a major in the Serbian Army, becoming the first woman to hold that rank in a national armed force.

When German forces broke through Serbian defenses, she led her unit and a column of refugees over 200 miles of mountainous terrain to safety in Albania.

After Stobart returned to England, her wartime heroics were widely publicized, and she took the opportunity to continue speaking up for women’s rights. By the end of the war, the United Kingdom had passed a law that gave some women the right to vote, and full suffrage came not long after.



Aileen Cole Stewart

When the U.S. Army Nursing Corps was established in 1901, its ranks were limited to white women. But during World War I, the increased need for medical services led the Army to admit a number of African American nurses. One of them was Aileen Cole Stewart=.

Stewart first received recognition in 1918 when she helped the Red Cross monitor the Spanish Influenza pandemic in West Virginia.

Miners were key to any war effort for the precious fuel they provided for an army. . Keeping them healthy became a top priority.

Stewart went to work in Bretz, a small town in northeast West Virginia, where she monitored the health of some 20 families.

Just after the armistice ended the war in November 1918, she was asked to serve in the U.S. Army.

After an intense training course, she was sent to Camp Sherman in Ohio, where she nursed ailing soldiers.

Though it would be another three decades before the Nurse Corps became fully and permanently integrated, Stewart and her fellow African American nurses proved that all women were capable of serving their country with honor.



Marie, Mabel, and Aileen weren’t the only heroines of World War One, but their stories remind us of how the horrors of a conflict on that scale—the likes of which the world had never seen—brought out the best and the brightest of every part of society, especially those who hadn’t been given the chance before.