Few historians would disagree that World War I brought about a dramatic increase in the female participation in the British labour force in the early 1910’s. The percentage of women in the total number of people employed rose from 24% in July 1914 to 37% in November 1918; that is, two million women were estimated to be directly replacing men by the end of the war. (McCalman, Janet 23) The employment of married women were the increased the most predominantly, accounting for almost 40% of all women workers by 1918 (Braybon, 1989: p. 49). The Great War was therefore responsible for the unquestionable incorporation of women in the British labour force which therefore changed their roles in society. However, many historians disagree on the extent to which these changes had long-term effects. Some historians refer generally to this war as a “watershed” event leading to the permeant incorporation of women into the labour force and therefore having a change in roles. Others refute this statement by arguing that the war’s influence on womens roles “have undergone little change” (Webb, Beatrice). The status of working women before the war reflects the traditional view that women’s work was of lesser value and therefore deserved lower pay. When looking broadly, British women working in an industry during 1911 outside of cotton weaving, worked as cheap unskilled labour, performing processes which required little or no training and required a minimum physical strength. The most differentiating factor was their pay; Beatrice Webb, an economist from the time, estimated in 1912 that the full time weakly earnings for women manual workers were around 10 shillings and 10 pence. Only 17% of the women employed were believed to receive more 15 pence weekly. By contrast, the average full-time wage of an adult male worker was around 28 pence per week (I, O, Andrews). Two separate but interrelated issues affected women in the workplace: the belief that women were unsuited for wage-paying work and the threat that their lower wages would affect the re-employment of men as they returned home from war. These issues created a tension between male and female workers which implies a critical time in which their roles in society started to develop. In addition to male hostility and lower wages, the majority of women often lacked time as a result of the ongoing demands of domestic society. Many women only held work temporarily, some leaving their jobs after marrying, but the majority of their work being isolated in nature; that of the home labourer or sweated domestic worker. Women furthermore frequently lacked the motivation to unionise as a direct result of having strong ties with domestic labour. At the begging of 1914, only one sixteenth of working women had been unionised as opposed to one third of all working men (Pyecroft’s, Susan). There was a general stigma about combining the domestic sphere and industrial sphere and many were discouraged to work at all. Women who departed their homes to find work were often battling the popular view that only their domestic role was vital, and their role in the workforce was not only secondary but unnatural. The outbreak of war created an occasioned shift in the work experience of millions of British women. At first, there was a massive depletion of employment in the areas of work in which were hit by the effects of men departing. As the war progressed, women gradually started to exhibit both self confidence and viable presence when they began to fill in for the absence of their fathers, brothers, sons in mostly family owned businesses. By 1915 the labour supply in many industries, predominately in ammunition work, began to reach a critically low point as many male workers began leaving the factories to start fighting in France (Condell, Dianna). At first, women were not considered a solution to the labour shortage and instead, the British cabinet were considering importing male Belgian workers. Despite of this, they finally came to a decision to recruit what was perceived as a largely untapped work force, ‘pliable’, ‘docile’ and ‘well suited to repetitive tasks’. To assemble the numbers needed, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George and a well known member of the suffragette movement Emmeline Pankhurst joined forces to create the War Service for Women campaign. Most individuals sought for a change in employment, however the Times noted that the majority of “educated” and “well-to-do” women who had barely worked before also responded. Ammunitions in particular, demonstrated to be one of the most popular area for registration, followed closely by clerical and then agricultural work. As the war progressed, the number of women working full-time rose by 1.3 million or increased by 22%. In ammunitions and shell factories the total amount of working women escalated from 0 in 1914 to over 53,000 by 1918. The amount of women in clerking jobs, or postal, office and service work nearly doubled to 1,394,000. This sudden visibility of women in the work force, especially their shift from the hidden world of domestic service such as textile factories and dressmaking to am extremely public world of clerking and ammunitions work, reinforced this new image of the ‘working woman’. (Pyecroft, Susan) Many working women contributed a strong patriotic element to their jobs as they felt a deep need to take risks or make sacrifices for the good of the cause. This patriotism was predominately fuelled by mass government propaganda and headlines that congratulated women war workers. These women thought of themselves as war participants, rather than observers, because they felt they were contributing valuable resources to the home-front whilst also benefiting from providing an income. Many women observed the changes around them with optimism, now that they were active and productive, the next logical step would be to demand greater recognition and freedoms. A variety of representatives from several women’s groups began to bind together and discuss post-war issues. In consequence, ‘The Women’s Worker wish list’ was published to the public and was mainly focused around the right to work, right to live and the right to leisure. This last demand reflects the growing consciousness that women began to have of themselves both in and out of the workplace. Despite the demands and campaigns fought by women desiring a world with more equal rights, at the signing of the armistice in 1918, the government starting to release contrasting propaganda in comparison to the beginning of the war. Instead of “without you, we cannot win the war”, the mood represented drastically changed to “women must go”, and so they did. Nearing the end of 1919, almost 3/4 of a million women lost their jobs as men started to return home from battle. (Pyecroft, Susan) Therefore, the first world war did not present as a positive turning point for British women in working and societal roles. The over-emphasised wartime rhetoric in which promised women new opportunities, deflated into a few limited options, returning to their homes or falling back on “women’s work”. By 1921, the percentage of working women was even slightly less than it had been in 1911. British society may have been undergone change by war, yet its ideas of women’s roles at home and in work remained the same. The ideal was arguably challenged during the war as they had proven themselves capable of being in a workplace that wasn’t bound by societal titles. This as a result, placed a new emphasis of motherhood as it was thought that they could now serve the nation by staying home and taking care of their families. In the end Britain possessed to halves of a whole – a woman and a worker. Women had performed the exact same jobs as men, yet earned half the money. They had proven they could accomplish difficult tasks, but they were still ordered back to a domestic lifestyle. As long as British society continued to devalue the work in which women did, then they would persist in accepting their role in the docile, disengaged and cheap labour of the nation.
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