In what ways did the First World War change the employment opportunities of women in Britain?

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Assignment One: Objective 1

In what ways did the First World War change the employment opportunities of women in Britain?

Women did not really have many jobs before the war started in 1914. Women were not permitted to have jobs because if they were married their loyalties ran with their husbands. This also applied if they had a child. The women's job was to make sure that the house was nice, clean and tidy for their husband to come back to and they had to cook all of the meals. Overall in life the women were expected to do all of this. They had to accept that they could not go to work; it was the job of their husband. The women were dependent upon the men to bring in the money so that they could go and buy everything so that they could cook the meals

Pre 1914, women worked as servants and in factories. In 1914 there were 5.9million women working out of 23.7million. In domestic service, there were 1.5million women working, 900,00 were working in textiles and 500,000 in the sweated trade. Middle class women sometimes worked as lawyers, teachers, teachers or doctors. But this was a very small number and very few middle class married women would be working at all. Upper class women rarely worked either. Upper class women usually did charity work and the few upper class women that did work had better jobs than the lower class women.

A government census of 1911 revealed that 11 million adult women did not have a paid job. In 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War nearly 5.9 million women were working in Britain out of a total female population of 23.7 million. The main reason for this is that women were expected to marry and become housewives. Their job was to care for their husbands and raise children. The majority of men did not consider it respectable for their wives to work. However some working class women had no choice other then to work as well as look after their husbands and raise children. The most common job was domestic service. Approximately 500,000 women worked in the textiles industry and a further 900,000 in the sweated trades. This extract is taken from a letter written by a woman in 1976 that lived during the war:

       ‘I was in domestic service and “hated every minute of it” when the war broke out, earning £2 a month working from 6am to 9pm.’

        

Before world war one, women did low-paid jobs, like dressmakers and servants for example. This changed during the First World War (1914-1918). Men had to leave the their jobs to join the army, so all the men’s jobs became vacant. This was a great opportunity for women to have. They could show everybody that they were capable of doing the same jobs as men could.

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In 1914 most women did not work but the war was to change this. When war began in 1914, 1.2 million women went to work for the first time. Women made up 31 per cent of the new workers brought into work in industry. 840,000 women found jobs in commerce and the local government for example. Approximately 700, 000 women played an important role in the chemical, metal and munitions industries during the war. This information clearly shows that this was an increased opportunity during the war, but in the years to come, was not maintained. In 1916 after ...

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