Yeah, I'm planning to get Ransome's autobiography out of the library very shortly, because I know very little about him and he sounds like an interesting man. In re: World War I, you know, that's certainly true, and both WWs saw huge influxes of women in to work (WWII especially, actually.) However, there was a backlash post-war where a lot of women hurried back to their usual roles (certainly there was after WWII, I don't know much about WWI but I would assume there was similar process) and were urged to keep out of jobs so that those men who came home healthy could find it easy to be employed. So if Ransome was capable of holding onto his memories of that period/think about it as a good thing rather than as a desperate measure, it's great but unusual, IMO.