Women in world war one

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GCSE History

Hajera Rahman

Women and World War One

How were the lives of women on the Home Front affected by the First World War?

During the early 20th century, an average women’s role in society would be to cook, clean and generally cater for her family. Along with this, they were not able to vote, work in industrial areas or be seen out and about without a chaperone. There was a scarcity of jobs for some women; and discrimination or low pay for the others. Although capable of much more, women never attempted to balance their opportunities with that of men’s. Whether it was because they never thought it would be possible to do as good a job or they just didn’t want to break years of tradition; World War One was about to affect the lives of these women in many ways.

While men set off for war in 1914, vacancies in the tertiary and secondary industry opened up. With the great demand of munitions and weapons, with higher pay and with no men to maintain things back at the home front, women thought they wouldn’t just be taking these jobs for themselves, but for the sakes of their husbands, sons, friends and family at war. The statistics in Source 1 are not only factually taken from the beginning and end years of the war, therefore proving reliable; but also supports this idea. Areas, such as ‘Industry’ grew by 625,000 and areas where women were hardly to be seen working at the beginning of the war, grew rapidly towards the end of the war; such as in ‘transport’, where an average of 50,000 women workers were employed per year; throughout the duration of the war. While all these employment areas grew, the only one that had seemed to decline was that of ‘Domestic Service’. This decrease suggests that the 500,000 workers lost, went on to work in the other fields that needed workers. Therefore showing that women were abandoning their responsibilities or rather the responsibility society had appointed to them.

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The jobs were not the only things that kept women motivated and grateful in their new fields of work. The pay did to. Before the war ‘£2 a month’ was practically the norm for a working class woman in domestic services. Mrs Felstead wrote in a letter about her experience to the Imperial War Museum in 1976; how she looked for every opportunity to ‘get out’. And ‘when the need for women ‘war brokers’’ came along, she jumped to it. Although it meant dangerous jobs, she was in desperate need of money, and started ‘hand cutting shell fuses’. Looking ...

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