Emily Goes to War

The WAAC was the largest among the women's voluntary, paramilitary organizations in wartime Britain. The waacs were predominantly working class with a conspicuous lower-middle-class element in the clerical section, and a famous handful of ambulance drivers who were mostly upper class. They were employed in army bases in Britain and France as cooks, secretaries, domestics, and drivers, thus releasing fit men for combat duty. According to the conventional view, the Great War generated social changes that were highly beneficial to women. Thus, the WAAC exemplify the retreat of military prejudice against women's service under the pressure of total war and its insatiable demand for manpower. ¹ Researchers have since dismantled much of this argument. Although revisionists agreed that the army generated a strong demand for female labor, they were skeptical as to whether the attitudes and assumptions underpinning women's employment in the military genuinely changed. ² This paper uses original data extracted from some six hundred service files of women who served in the WAAC, and combines economic and quantitative perspectives with those attentive to gender and class. ³ It contributes to the revision of the tri-umphalist interpretation of women's military service by showing that the expansion of the WAAC was precipitated by a massive wave of female unemployment that has hitherto escaped the attention of the Corps's historians. Indeed, many working-class women joined the WAAC only after more lucrative and emancipatory forms of women's war work had been eliminated. Considering the longer-term impact of the Great War on gender relations in Britain, this study suggests that, rather than the culmination of women's wartime penetration into male occupations, the growth of the WAAC represented the demise of their wartime integration, foreshadowing the coming contraction in the range of women's employment opportunities that characterized the 1920s.