Do you agree with the view that, in terms of employment opportunities, women did not gain any significant advantage from their wartime experience (Source 16, lines 36-37)?
Do you agree with the view that, in terms of employment opportunities, women did not gain ‘any significant advantage from their wartime experience’ (Source 16, lines 36-37)?
Source 16 is in agreement with the statement that in terms of employment opportunities, women did not gain ‘any significant advantage from wartime experience’. This is shown by the definition given by Lloyd George in this source which says ‘the workers of today are the mothers of tomorrow’. He also mentions that women’s ‘independence was short-lived’ and how those women should ‘return to their domestic responsibilities’. This shows that Lloyd George thought that wartime work for women was only temporary and how the government did not want women to work as they were using policies to make women return back to their original work which was within the home. From my own knowledge, this can be referred to dilution which was when it was made sure that women were not as skilled as men in order to prevent the women to overtake men’s work. As well as this, a statistic which shows evidence in support of Lloyd George’s statement is that once the First World War had come to an end, within 2 weeks 100,000 women had come out of their work and returned back to their domestic responsibilities. This shows that even though women worked during wartime, once the war ended they had returned to their domestic roles which may have been because those women had become encouraged by the government’s policies to do so.
