ABSTRACT
By the end of the First World War there was no doubt that women’s participation in the workplace had been crucial to the war effort. We have seen in the previous chapter that women had been present in the workforce in large numbers at the outbreak of the war.2 By the end of the war, the figure stood at 4,940,000 or 37.7 per cent of the total workforce. Bruley has argued that war was, indeed, a golden age for women’s trade unionism, with the number of women members increasing threefold from 433,679 in 1914 to 1,209,278 in 1918.3 However, we have already seen that women were often encouraged to join a union for expedient purposes, rather than because male trade unionists wanted to see women as their equals. We have also noted that male workers were often extremely hostile to women entering their trade as they felt that once there, they would be hard to remove. Consequently, deals were drawn up with the government and without women’s representatives being present to ensure that women would be the first to lose their jobs in munitions when they were no longer required. Further, the dilution of the more skilled work and strategies to ensure that women would not earn as much as men, even when lip service was paid to equal pay, all indicate that women were accepted reluctantly into the workforce and that male opinions of women workers had hardly shifted at all.
