OK, so if I’d been a girl in my late teens in 1914, what might my life choices have been? Better than if I’d been born a man – at least in the short term. I wouldn’t have been required to be an active combatant in a war which cost 16 million lives, and in its bloody four year course, left a further 21 million wounded. Britain alone lost 995,939 men, and a further 1.6 million survived, wounded.

I may not have been fighting on the Western Front or on another European battlefield in those indescribable conditions portrayed so powerfully by War Poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Unlike many men, however, my war-induced ordeal might well have run over, long after the 51 months the First World War lasted.

My life of active service may not have ended then. There would have been pieces to pick up: lives of friends, relatives, sweethearts, husbands to nurture. Damaged, depressed and desolate: what can it have been like for a young woman caring for such a man? A hero – yes, but a stranger, changed forever by the experience of war.

Vera Brittain, the author and poet arrived in Oxford in September 1914 as an undergraduate at Somerville College. In this, she was lucky. Only one per cent of her age group had the opportunity to go to university. That’s 99 per cent who didn’t. What’s the chances of that being you or I? Almost insurmountable odds against us. Yet within months, Brittain had abandoned her studies and left for France to nurse, in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. There, she saw the soldiers’ suffering first hand.

Later, having lost her fiancé, her brother and two close male friends in the war, she was to decry the ‘terrible barrier of knowledge’ which existed between the sexes: one who could not say, and one who could not imagine.

Yet 1914 was also a breakthrough year in womens’ emancipation. They were needed as never before. They were trained in areas once male dominated. It was the beginning of the modern world.

Women moved out of the home into a wider sphere of employment opportunities. Still shop assistants, dressmakers, teachers, nurses and office clerks, with so many men gone, there was much more to do. Vacancies everywhere and only women to fill them.

With the introduction of conscription in 1916, men no longer had the option of volunteering. Only a handful of exceptions among the male workforce were made – although Government decision-making, which affected everyone else, remained a staunchly male preserve. Now women became rail guards and ticket collectors, postal workers, police, fire fighters and heavy or precision machinery operators and engineers. They drove buses and trains, they ran offices, they made munitions and they took over the running of farms.

By 1919 women had the vote. In the same year, they were finally awarded the degrees they had earned through examination success years earlier.

The campaign for equal pay, and equal opportunity had begun. Yet still, a century on, one glance at David Cameron’s male dominated Front Bench demonstrates that 1914 was only the starting pistol.

The race is still on.

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