In 1914 roughly a quarter of the total female population were working (women 23.7 million, 5.9 million working). In 1914 after the beginning of the war about 470,000 women were working in jobs connected with the war by 1918 this had risen to approximately 1,354,000 of these jobs less than half 552,000 jobs were direct replacements of men’s jobs. Many of these jobs disappeared at the end of the war because we no longer needed to make huge numbers of guns, shells and tanks once the fighting had stopped.
The war work open to women included work as nurses, munitionettes and other factory workers, the Woman’s Land Army, VAD, WRAF, WRNS, WAACs. These jobs slightly changed and represent some kind of revolution in the women’s status. Although on the other hand, they went back to being second class citizens after 1918 because before the war broke out, the women were used to doing their usual jobs as domestic servants, teachers and nurses. Below is a table, which shows women at work in between 1914 and 1918.
The table above shows that most of the jobs women did in the war were in the metal industry making ammunition and other things directly for the war and of these 195,000, about a third, were replacements for men who had gone to fight. There was huge increase in women working for the government between 1914 and 1918 it rose from 2,000 to 225,000. There was also a large increase in the women employed in transport, it rose from 18,000 to 117,000 but only 42,000 0f the almost 100,000 increase were replacements for men’s jobs. More transport was needed during the war; for example buses to get workers to ammunition factories such as Woolwich Arsenal and more trains to move soldiers around Britain and to bring the wounded home.
Although women had been nurses before the war this was the first time they had fully looked after men and dressed terrible wounds. Men had thought women could not cope with this but they could. Women were seen doing jobs in the war that no one could have imagined they would do. All the ambulances in London as early as 1916 were driven by women, who also worked in the fire service, in ship building as aircraft mechanics and as chimney sweeps. Although women were bus conductresses few of them drove the buses as this was better paid and the older men wanted to keep the better paid jobs for themselves.
In 1917 there was a survey of nearly half a million women about their employment. Of these 68% had changed jobs since before the war, 146 had stopped being domestic servants, 22% had not worked before the war but now had jobs and 22% had moved from one factory job to another. This showed that women had more freedom of opportunity because of the war and that was one positive thing to come out of the war.
During the war, 750,000 women worked as clerks and although women had worked in offices before the war, there had never been so many female clerks. Some of the jobs were replacements for men who were away but with new technology, in such things as telephones, introduced during the war, which men had not used, they were able to keep these jobs after the men returned from the war. Although men had been secretaries before the war after the war women kept this kind of job. The employment of women in offices was never a real problem it was in industry that problems came after the war.
During the war women had earned much more in munitions factories than they had ever earned before the war in factories or domestic service but it was less than men earned. By 1918 men were earning on average £4. 6s 6d a week but women only got £2.2s 2d for doing the same job. Men were worried that they would lose their jobs because women were cheaper and had proved they could do the job. Men did all they could to show the women were not as good as them, including playing practical jokes on them. The trade unions put pressure on the employers and the government to make sure that men came first and did not get their salaries reduced to the level of women’s pay.
Women gave up their jobs reluctantly when the men returned from war and there was a lot of moral blackmail to make them do so. They were told they might have been heroines during the war for taking the place of men but now they were scroungers taking the job and the pay of the men who had come back from the war. They were made to feel very guilty by being reminded of all the dead men who had done so much for them by keeping England safe.
Women who had been in domestic service before the war were interviewed by ‘The Woman Worker’ magazine in February 1919. 65% of the women interviewed stated that they were never go back to domestic service however much they needed work. 5% stated that they would only go back to that work if the wages were more reasonable, £40 a year and they did not have to buy their own uniform and got two and a half days free every week. Even though women had to give up many jobs for the returning soldiers’ women still continued to work. Within 3 years of the end of the war the number of women working as domestic servants had risen 1,845,000 which was a lot more than had been servants before the war. There are no figures to show if these were the same women who said they would never go back to such work.
There were two areas of real change for women that came mostly as a result of their war work. The first was in the new political and legal rights they obtained and the second was in the widening of the kind of jobs they were allowed to do. Although women were given the right to vote in 1918, it was only some women, and still not on equal terms with men. All men over twenty one got the vote but generally only women over 30 could vote from 1918. There were some exceptions, women over 21 who had property or who were married to property owners also got the vote. Many people thought this was unfair because the young, poor, women who had done most of the war work in dangerous factories were not rewarded for their hard work. Some women were given the vote because the politicians knew they had to if they wanted to avoid the problems the suffragettes had given them before the war. There were many MP’s like Herbert Asquith who genuinely believed women had earned the right to vote. Even so there was still opposition in parliament to any women voting especially in the House of Lords. It took another 10 years before women were no longer second- class citizens as voters and finally got the vote on equal terms with men.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave some women the right to vote but still did not allow any of them to actually become MP’s. To put this right, just before the General Election in November 1918 an act, ‘The Eligibility of Women Act’ was rushed through parliament and although 17 women stood for parliament only one actually became an MP and took her seat, this was Nancy Astor. She was not poor and working class, but very rich and actually American and her husband had also been born in America but educated in England. He was MP for Plymouth but when he became a Lord in 1919 she wanted to take over his seat and managed to. So this first woman MP was not a revolution but someone acceptable to the House of Parliament. It took a very long time for ordinary women to become MP’s and even in 1945, nearly 30 years later,
after another war, there were only 25 female MP’s.
The 1919 Sex Disqualification Act did help some woman to stop being considered second-class citizens because they were allowed to become barristers, solicitors, vets, and other professionals. It was only the middle and upper class women who benefited generally because few poor girls could achieve such jobs; it was unlikely that poor boys could achieve this.
Two other legal acts helped women to be more equal in the law, if not in their homes and communities. The first was in 1922 when the Law of Property Act gave wives the same rights as husbands to inherit each others property. The second was in 1923 when getting a divorce was made equal for men and women. Before this time women had to provide more proof than men of bad behaviour by their husbands to get a divorce. In reality this only helped the rich because divorce was too expensive and complicated for the poor.
Although in real terms there was no immediate huge revolution in the work opportunities and attitudes of men to women, the First World War was the beginning of the modern life that women have today. Poor women’s working life and their wages did not really improve in the years just after the war in fact by 1921 there was world wide economic decline and there were actually less women in work than in 1911. Attitudes had to change also because these were so many war widows with families to provide for and they needed to work or the government would have had to spend more money keeping them, the allowance they got was not enough without the women working. Perhaps the biggest change was that women of all classes had more personal freedom. All women wore more practical clothes, such as shorter skirts and they cut their hair. Middle and upper class women could go out unaccompanied and working class women had more opportunity to change their jobs to improve their lives than they had before the war. Women had more freedom but it was still a world dominated by men and this would not change for decades.
