Jack and Eve: Two Suffragettes in Love and at War

Vera ‘Jack’ Holme was a cross-dressing actress who became official chauffeur to suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Evelina Haverfield was the twice-married daughter of an English baron. They met in 1909, fell in love and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison for the cause. War turned their world upside down. Together they travelled to Serbia, Russia and Romania to run field hospitals for allied soldiers and drive ambulances under bombardment. They carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could drive emergency vehicles, run military hospitals and bear arms in the face of constant danger. They refused to compromise in their sexuality, and were determined to be themselves, ‘forthright, flamboyant and proud’.

In her book, JACK AND EVE: TWO SUFFRAGETTES IN LOVE AND AT WAR, Wendy Moore uses Jack and Eve’s remarkable story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in war and lesbian identity in the twentieth century.