Sapper Dorothy Lawrence Analysis

Dorothy Lawrence

Dorothy Lawrence was an English journalist and war correspondent during World War I (WW1). She disguised herself as a man with the help of British soldiers to serve on the front lines in France. She revealed her gender to her commanding officers after becoming ill and, eventually, wrote a memoir of her experience entitled Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier. Dorothy Lawrence was forced into an asylum in her later life and perished with little recognition and no obituary.

==Youth and Journalism==

Dorothy Lawrence was born on October 4, 1896, in Hendon, Middlesex, England. Marzouk, 2003 She did not know her parents and her mother abandoned her to the Church of England shortly after her birth. She was
She needed a complete khaki uniform to blend in and the two army soldiers smuggled her by stealing a piece every laundry service. The two soldiers enlisted the help of eight other men to assist in the completion of her uniform and she referred to them as her “Khaki accomplices” in her memoir.Lawrence, 2010 She used a homemade corset to flatten her chest and cotton-wool sacking to make her shoulders appear larger. Two military policeman from Scotland cut her hair to the correct short, military style needed to assimilate. She made her skin darker with Condy’s fluid, razored her cheeks to give the appearance of a razor burn, and finished the look with a shoe polish tan. Her British army friends then taught her how to properly drill and march. She abandoned her petticoats for a blanket coat and received fake identity papers disguising her as Private Denis Smith of the First Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment.Oliver, 2014

==Fighting on the Front
She confided in a physician that her childhood church guardian raped her as a teenager, and since she had no family, they took her into their care. They later deemed Lawrence insane and she was committed to the Hanwell, London County Mental Hospital in March of that year.Oliver, 2014 She was transferred what became known as the Fiern Hospital and died there in 1964.Newby, 2012 Dorothy Lawrence is buried in an unmarked grave in New Southgate Cemetery and received no obituary.Oliver, 2014

==References==
===Bibliography===

Lawrence, D. (2010). Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier, Late Royal Engineers, 51St Division, 179Th Tunnelling Company, B. E. F. United States: Nabu Press.

Marzouk, L. (2003, November 21). Girl who fought like a man. Times Series. http://www.times-series.co.uk/features/nostalgia/432132.girl_who_fought_like_a_man/

Newby, J. (2012, July 28). Dorothy Lawrence: The Woman who Fought at the Front. Writing Women’s History, https://web.archive.org/web/20140112184548/http://writingwomenshistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dorothy-lawrence-woman-who-fought-at.html Oliver, S. (2014, January 12). She fought on the Somme, so why did Dorothy die in a lunatic asylum? Daily Mail.