Women Workers in World War One and Their Changing Roles

Women continued to work out of necessity.  Women worked for low pay and in poor conditions performing unskilled labour.  “Many of the most unpleasant and low-paid jobs were done by women, and the most exploitative were done by married women who had no better jobs to turn to.”  The areas that employed the most women were domestic service, tailoring and clothing, and the textile industry.  The domestic service sector was declining right before the outbreak of the war.  Girls did not like the long hours and the lack of privacy and freedom that came with being on call all the time for their masters and mistresses.   However, it was still the largest single trade for women.  Domestic services employed 1,743,040 female servants and only 387, 677 males. 

The second most frequent employer of women was the clothing and tailoring trade.  However, its prominence was decreasing because of the increasing use of machinery.  Men tended to do the complicated tailoring and women did the less skilled and lower paid mending.  The textile industry was the third largest employer of women.  It provided women a chance to learn a skill and earn good wages and women were allowed to keep their jobs even after getting married.

The period before the First World War was an intense period in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain.  The various suffrage groups “having appealed to Parliament, having tried to deliver petitions and send deputations to the Government, having fought in courts for these rights as well as the right to be free from forcible-feeding, the suffragettes turned their back on such tactics and turned militancy toward the only other direction – the public”.  Mrs. Pankhurst gave a compelling speech in 1913 that urged the suffragists to militancy towards the general public and their private property.  The suffrage movement was gaining a lot of attention until war broke out.  At this time “militancy ceased, as did much other suffrage activity.  Suffragette prisoners were release unconditionally; the NUWSS and other suffrage societies declared their intentions to turn their vast financial and organizational resources to relief work”.  The announcement of war stopped the Suffrage movement in its tracks.  The groups became united against the war and united for peace.  However, when it became apparent that the war would not end quickly the suffragists altered their standpoint.  Unity was broken as “the ELFS decided to continue the suffrage campaign as usual, while the WSPU suspended both militancy and suffrage activity.  The NUWSS suspended its suffrage campaign but split over the issue of women and pacifism”.  The choice to continue suffrage activity during the wartime was viewed by many to be unpatriotic.  Those groups who supported the war by any mean possible made their cause more popular.  The suffrage campaign would be helped by the women workers in world war one.

The outbreak of war led to a period of about five months of unemployment.  Women were usually the first to lose their job because the industries worst hit were those that employed large numbers of women.  “The textile trade contracted by 43 per cent in the first five month period of unemployment at the beginning of the war, clothing manufacture by 21 per cent.”  The domestic service industry also experienced difficulties.  Households where expected to sacrifice servants for war work but at this point there was not yet war work for women.  At this time unions and the government were very concerned about the unemployment of women.  They tried hard to organize relief work for unemployed females.  They had no idea that in a few weeks Britain would be facing a labour shortage.

        The labour shortage in Britain created opportunities for women workers.  Industries expanded to supply troops with equipment.  Leather, hosiery, boot, kitbag, medical dressings and tailoring industries all hired more women.  These were jobs that women had already performed during peacetime.  In 1915 women began to obtain jobs normally done by men.  Women were being employed in non-industrial jobs such as replacing men in offices and in the transport system.  “As men enlisted, women were indeed employed as van drivers, window cleaners, shop assistants, etc., but they were often informally taking the places of husbands, father or brothers.”  Many employers were worried about the affects of hiring women on wages and job security.  But a practice of substitution soon took affect and employers and unions soon started to accept the use of women in many industries.  Women were employed in large numbers in the munitions industry and they were also used in engineering and explosives.  Women were so drawn to this type of munitions work that there was actually a shortage of female labour in the textile and clothing trades.  By 1917 women also replaced men in other industries such as grain milling, sugar refining, brewing, building, surface mining and shipyards.  “In 1917, the Labour gazette estimated that 1 in 3 working women was ‘replacing’ a male worker in industry.”  The cause of this rapid expansion of women in the workplace was primarily due to conscription.  The following are statistics of the number of employed women during war time:

In July 1914, 3,276,000 women were classed as employed (not including small dressmaking establishments, domestic service, the self-employed, and those employed by husbands), and in April 1917 the figure had increased to 4,507,000.  By April 1918, only another 300,000 women were employed, and the total stood at 4,808,000.

        The decline of the rate of expansion of women’s labour can be explained by the unavailability of suitable women to work, the return of discharged soldiers to work, the high wages now being required to pay munitions workers, the saturation of the industry available to women and the stopping of certain work that employed women.  These statistics were examined by A.W. Kirkaldy in his book Industry and Finance.  By the end of the war many factories were already closing or returning to their normal pre-war production levels.  Women workers were being let go at the height of their employment.

        Women workers unknowingly aided the suffragist movement.  In August of 1916 Parliament suggested a bill to allow service men to vote.  It was suggested at this time that women also be allowed to vote.  It was suggested that women:

cannot fight in the gross material sense of going out with rifles and so forth, but they fill our munitions factories, they are doing the work which the men who are fighting had to perform before, they have taken their places, they are the servants of the State, and they have aided in the most effective way in the prosecution of the war.

The public newspapers also elaborated on this idea.  They explained that women and servicemen should both be allowed to vote because they had served their country and had earned the right to vote.  Servicemen earned the right to vote in 1917.  The women’s suffrage movement was being discussed more frequently.  It took on a more positive tone after the war.  For example:

Both suffrage activists and the general public recognized that women’s war work had surpassed the prewar estimations of women’s capacity for work in the public sphere.  The press and public opinion seemed inclined to give women the vote because they had proved they were more like men than anyone had imagined.

 It was believed that the war was the caused this change in the public opinion and not a sudden realization to the public about the justice behind giving women the vote.  The Representation of the People Bill was introduced to the House of Commons in May 1917.  This bill would give the vote to women who met certain conditions such as being over 30 years of age and being a property owner.  Despite these restrictions, when the Bill became law on February 6th 1918, it enfranchised around seven million British women.  This was a huge victory for the women’s movement that came about after over fifty years of struggle.  Helena Swanwick explained that despite this victory,

old suffragists cannot forget the curious standard of values which resulted in British women being told that they were given the vote in 1918, not on account of their patient toil for ages as workers and mothers, not in virtue of their humanity, nor because they had a peculiar contribution to make to political life, but because they had helped to carry on the war.  

Swanwick clearly felt like women had been given the vote for the wrong reason.  Nevertheless, the partial enfranchisement of British women in 1918 was a huge victory in the women’s movement and it can be almost directly related to the efforts of women’s work in the First World War.

        After the war many women returned to the home to be wives and mothers.  Women very often participated in clerical and retail jobs after the war.  Trades women often returned to the domestic services, cotton and clothing industry that they worked in before the war because the men returned to reclaim their jobs.  However, some industries recruited female labourer such as: “the pottery industry, light metal trades, boot and shoe, printing, bookbinding and the new electrical goods industries”.  These were some of the new opportunities available to women after the war ended.  Debates continued about ‘suitable’ work for women even after the First World War.  Different protective legislation was proposed for female workers during this period.  Many middle class feminists strongly objected the protective legislation for women because they thought it interfered with a woman’s prospects.  In many ways Post World War One life for women was very similar to Pre World War One life.  Women were employed in similar jobs even though technology altered them significantly.  The 1920’s produced much propaganda about that echoed the Victorian ideal that a women’s proper place was in the home.  Women’s work had drastically changed during the first world war but after the war women began to adopt traditional and stereotypical roles once again.

        Before the advent of World War One women were employed in three main industries that were deemed suitable ‘women’s work’.  Single women were often employed in the domestic service sector.  Other women were employed in clothing and tailoring trades and the textile industry.  There was also a strong women’s suffrage movement at the eve of World War One but the outbreak of war soon became a bigger priority then the women’s rights movement.  Britain experienced a brief unemployment scare at the beginning of World War One but it was soon replaced with a labour shortage as men were being sent off to war.  Women workers valiantly answered the call the replace their fellow male workers.  They were now being employed in jobs that broke the conventional idea of women’s work.  Women workers were only temporary substitutes while the men were at war; however, the success of women’s work aided the women’s suffrage movement and ultimately won the vote for women.  Many historians give World War One the credit for the changes in traditional women’s roles that had already been on the way.