Q. Describe the employment opportunities for women at the outbreak of war in 1914?

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Q. Describe the employment opportunities for women at the outbreak of war in 1914?  

   

        

   When the Fist World War broke out in 1914, 5.9 million women were working in Britain out of the total female population of 23.7 million. The most common jobs that women worked in were domestic services, textiles and the ‘sweated trades’ although they did work in other jobs such as teaching and nurse those were the most common. Women worked in these jobs as inferiors and were paid two-thirds or less of a man’s wage.

                  In 1914, women’s education was not advanced. The compulsory free school stopped at the age of twelve and so most girls would go to school until the age of twelve and then stop. So if a girl wanted higher education it either meant paying school fees or winning a scholarship. The other problem facing young women was that society thought that a woman’s job was to get married and have children and because they didn’t need an education for that they thought that it was not necessary. After all that if a young woman decided to further herself and won a scholarship, her parents would still refuse because it meant that they would lose the wages that she got. So mostly only the higher class and wealthy middle class girls went no to secondary school and never the lower class ones. As a result only 2 percent of girls went on to higher education. Women couldn’t change this situation because they had few rights and they couldn’t vote. There were also no laws to protect them against discrimination.

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                The most common jobs that women worked in after they left school were domestic services and about 1.5 million worked in them in 1914. Some of the servants worked in poor conditions. They lived in cramped conditions in the houses that they worked in and worked long hours as cleaner, cooks and chambermaids. Their wages were very low and they often only got half a day in a month off. Domestic services attracted many lower class women because the jobs didn’t require a high level of education.

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