United States
Mary Borden
1886–1968 Founder and head of a field hospital for the French Army in the First World War
Born in 1886 into a wealthy Chicago family, Mary Borden married a Scottish missionary and in 1913 moved to England, where she joined the suffragettes. After war broke out she used her own money to fund and run a field hospital for French soldiers close to the front, and was still running it at the Somme. There she met the British officer Edward Louis Spears, whom she married after her divorce. She wrote poems such as The Song of the Mud and published The Forbidden Zone, stories and poems about her hospital work, in 1929. Her love poems were not published until 2015. In the Second World War she set up an ambulance unit that served in France, North Africa and the Middle East. She died in 1968.