The Home Front - source related study

Authors Avatar

Coursework Assignment: The Home Front.

1.

Much can be learnt from Source A about women’s work during the First World War. The source demonstrates how a woman, who lived through the First World War, was previously in domestic service and ‘hated every minute of it’. The source then informs how the woman started working in a munitions factory, hand cutting shell fuses. She worked for twelve hours a day and was paid £5 a week.

However the source does not state that the woman hated this factory job, like her previous work in domestic service. This suggests that women welcomed this new opportunity to leave their traditional jobs in domestic service and take over male jobs. It demonstrates that she was eager to leave and was grateful for her new work. The source also infers that despite factory jobs being more manual and laborious, there was good pay and shorter working hours which obviously made factory jobs seem more desirable than domestic service.

2.

Source C was written by a factory owner in 1917 describing how women prefer factory life as they have more independence and freedom. Furthermore the source states that the children also think they are ‘better off than before’. This source supports A and B to an extent.

Source A mainly agrees with source C as it implies that women favoured factory life to domestic service. Source A also states that the wages were preferable, earning about £20 a month as opposed to the previous £2 in domestic service. Similarly in Source C it is learned through children that they too were much better off than before as there was so much extra money coming in. Source A is also written by a former factory worker in the war and this makes the evidence of the factory owner more plausible.

Source B agrees with Source C as it shows that the women cared for their friends who were lying ill on the stones outside the workshop. It states that the women knew each other well which implies that they were talking outside working hours, so they had a social life. On the other hand Source B mainly disagrees with Source C as it infers that women were not at all happy in factory jobs as the poisonous varnish made them ill and they were frequently expected to work overtime for normal rates.

The source also states that the women were only paid a wage of 15 shillings a week which is only around £3 a month. This is certainly not much and would not have better fed, clothed and housed their children as stated in Source C. Also Source B was written by Sylvia Pankhurst, a suffragette who may have wanted to make women’s conditions seem worse than they actually were.  Source A also disagrees with Source C as it certainly does not imply that women had any freedom or social life. Instead it states that they ‘worked twelve hours a day, apart from the journey day and night’. There is no mention of having any free time for a social life. Source A does not infer it was the ‘spirit of independence’ they liked, but the extra money.

Join now!

In conclusion Source A is more supportive of Source C than Source B is as it implies that women definitely preferred factory jobs rather than domestic service. It also supports the point that more money was being earnt which meant that the family was better off financially. Whereas Source B inferred that the working conditions for women were awful, wages low and that women were most definitely not happy in their new jobs.

3.

Source D is a photograph taken in a munition factory during the First World War. The words on the board at the ...

This is a preview of the whole essay