The lives of British women underwent enormous and permanent changes as a result of the First World War To what extent do you agree with this statement?

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Jamie Buckler 11S

“The lives of British women underwent enormous and permanent changes as a result of the First World War” – To what extent do you agree with this statement?

        Before, during and after World War One women’s working, social and political lives underwent enormous and permanent changes.  Women were affected in different ways depending on their social class.  This essay will consider many of the changes which women underwent, as a result of the First World War, and how enormous and permanent these changes may have been.

        Before the war women were thought of as fragile things that belonged in the home, caring for their families.  This attitude was mainly towards middle and upper-class women because they were better off and were not expected to work.  Between 1870 and the outbreak of WW1 more well-educated women were coming through because education was improving, e.g. elementary schools were extending and Girton, Newnham, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall colleges were opened as all-women colleges.  This increase in well-educated women opened up new jobs for working and middle-class women.  More working-class women were getting “middle-class” jobs, such as, in teaching and nursing.  Even so, lower class women were the “industrial drudges of the community”, according to Arthur Marwick, so they were expected to work in jobs such as textile industries and as maids and cooks for the middle and upper-class.  Any middle-class women who did work would work in better jobs, as secretaries or shop assistants.  Upper-class women were always expected to stay at home and “grace a leisurely life”.  About 29% of women worked but as soon as they got married they stopped working; only 10% of married women worked – all of which were probably working-class.

        Women’s working lives had a big effect on their everyday, social lives; the better their job, the more improved their social status was.  Most working women would be working almost all of the time so would not have much time to socialise.  Women were expected to wear ankle-length skirts and dresses, except for working-class women as they usually wore less restrictive clothes because of the nature of their job.  Women were also expected to only go out with a chaperone and not smoke or drink; however, these things still went on and were frowned upon.  Working-class women were expected to spend most of their time at work and not go out and socialise too often.  Middle-class women may also work but not as much, this meant they could have more of a social life but still had many restraints.  Mainly upper-class, but some middle-class, women were expected to stay at home, running the house and looking after the family; when they did go out they, also, had the same restraints as working and middle-class women.

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        As well as not having much of a social life, women did not have as many political rights as men.  By 1884 all men over the age of 21 were allowed to vote; men thought it would be a bad idea to let women have the vote because it would cause a great change in politics, and men thought that women would not be able to vote intelligently because they knew nothing about politics.  “In 1987 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was founded to campaign peacefully for the right of women to vote”; this led to the making ...

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