This is a picture of my mother. It was taken in 1944 in Santo Spirito, Italy, when she was working at New Zealand army headquarters. During the Second World War, the role of women was changing. They began to do work previously done by men – in education, in health, in factories, in transport and on the land. These women often became more independent as their experiences took them beyond the world of their mothers. As the Irish poet Seamus Heaney said, ‘in a life the nucleus stays the same but with any luck the circumference moves out’.