The most poignant discovery I made last year was that my grandfather had not only fought in the First World War at the Battle of the Somme 1916, but that he had made it out alive. Seeing his medal was a tangible reminder. Sadly, I never met him; but this story of survival, even in its skeletal form, stays with me.

What I hadn’t thought about was how my grandmother coped with his absence. Did she undertake work in the munitions factory or find other ways of helping to fill the gap left by the menfolk fighting in the trenches?

As my department, in collaboration with art, drama and music, started to prepare the school’s tribute to those who fought and those who kept the country going during the First World War, I began to realise what the women’s war looked like.

I first encountered the journalist and propagandist Jessie Pope in the context of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, a poem that criticises her for her insensitive and inaccurate depiction of what the fighting would be like. Rightly so, as the men who enlisted faced a nightmare that for many continued long after they escaped the war.

I was intrigued by her War Girls. It has a rather brisk tone and, of course, it’s terribly uplifting stuff designed to show everyone how to make the best of things; but it’s also a recognition of the value of women’s contribution outside the home. My students find it hard to imagine a world in which it’s a novelty to pay a female conductor for a ticket or to get the meat from a female delivery driver. Pope’s poem is a good window to the experiences of real women of the time. Their experiences through their own voices we derived from the wonderful British Library website and books within our library.

The chivalrous spirit that may or may not have operated before the war was in short supply when it came to men welcoming women on equal terms into the male-only occupations, especially the driving of lorries.  Perhaps in later years, some men were ashamed of themselves for the ways in which they had sabotaged the vehicles by cutting petrol pipes and ensuring that the women did the trickiest delivery routes. If the sources we looked at were anything to go by, women had to be tough and prove they were more than equal.

An excellent documentary, Women of World War One by Kate Adie shows us that women’s football was not a recent phenomenon by any means. Tens of thousands watched the matches between the various female skilled teams from munitions and gas-fitters for example. Sadly, in 1921, the Football Association decided that the world was not yet ready for the female game and banned their matches.

We have long known that women were invaluable at the front, nursing soldiers on both sides. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is so incredibly moving as it covers so many losses in her family and among her friends.

When we, as a school, commemorate the final Armistice of that terrible war, we won’t downplay the horrors of the trenches or the appalling nightmares that so many men brought home to haunt them for years to come.

But we will tell the other side of the story, the story of women like Vera Brittain who endured so much so stoically, nursed the wounded on both sides out on the Western Front but also those who stepped into the shoes of their absent menfolk, and who still ran their homes.

When our school’s front entrance (the one that would have been in use in 1918) is opened up on 13 November 2018, our visitors will be welcomed with ceramic poppies and textiles designed by our students to salute the courage and endurance of our female forebears. Poems by Charlotte Mew and Vera Brittain will be recited as they ascend to the top of the building to see the creative writing inspired by the women of the Great War.

In among the awful and unnecessary suffering of 1914-1918 was the beginning of a changing society.  After proving themselves so valiantly at home and abroad, women could never retreat to their former obscurity.  A hundred years on, we salute women’s courage, adaptability and determination. These women made the life choices our students have in 2018 truly possible.

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama at a school in the south of England