A History of the Royal Navy ─ Women and the Royal Navy

Never at Sea' was the motto of the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) in its two-stage life from 1917-1919 and 1939-1994. Yet most of its members-commonly known as Wrens-wanted to serve on the ocean wave. This book considers the history and identity of the Wrens and shows how they developed from port-bound cooks, clerks, telegraphists, radar plotters and mechanics to fully-fledged members of the naval service. Using previously-unpublished first-hand material, this book explores the very different periods in the twentieth century history of women associated with the Royal Navy. It shows how Wrens moved from the exceptionalised and chaperoned ladies of WW1 to the reality of the twenty-first century's highly respected female submariners and warship commanders. Jo Stanley provides the first accessible gendered analysis of Wrens and their successors and positions the women of the Royal Navy as above all, women who wanted mobility: the right to join the fleet.

Jo Stanley is an internationally acclaimed expert on gender and the sea. Her publications include Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea; Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas; and Bold in Her Breeches: Women pirates across the ages. She works as a creative historian with museums and marginalised communities on art-based representations of pasts and is a Research Fellow at Lancaster University's Centre for Mobilities Research.