ABSTRACT
Once again, not all men were delighted at the prospect of women joining them in the factories. Skilled engineering work had returned to being a male preserve after the First War and there was a repetition of the abuse to which women dilutees had been subject then. As in 1914–18, men's feelings were concerned with the impact that an influx of women would make on their wages and status. Men feared that employers would pay women less for doing the same work, and that men undercut in this way would be pushed into the Army, even though a Schedule of Reserved Occupations, drawn up in 1939 because of the chaos caused at the start of the First War, prevented most skilled men in the munitions industries from being called up. Men also feared that they would not earn enough if paired with a woman because she would go too slowly, or alternatively that women would bring piece-rates down by working too fast. Some men refused to help women who had ‘taken a man's job’ like acetylene burning in the docks which involved carrying heavy gear around, even though they would give another man a hand. In one Birmingham factory men on the night shift expressed their disapproval of the fact that a woman worked on ‘their’ lathe on the day shift, at a lower rate, by loosening all the nuts on the lathe before they knocked off. Needless to say this was dangerous as well as having the effect of slowing the woman up while she put it right next day. 1 All men were not as openly hostile as this, but Mark Benney, an aircraft worker, described the apprehension with which he and his workmates regarded the arrival of the first women workers during 1942:
One day a signwriter appeared in the shop. A new washplace had recently been completed, and on its door he wrote the word ‘Women’. On the doors of the two old washplaces he wrote the word ‘Men’. This caused a great deal of talk.
It was in February that the first batch of women arrived. Fred's massive shoulders dropped perceptibly when he first heard the news of their coming; and when they were distributed about the detail shop he breathed a deep sigh of relief.
But it was short-lived relief. The following week, an apologetic clerk from the Personnel Office brought us Mrs Stone.
We looked at her. She was in bright blue overalls, and wore them with an air. A slender, dark-haired woman with carefully made-up face. When Fred asked her what she could do her make-up splintered into a sudden smile and she said: ‘Not much I'm afraid, but I can learn.’ She had a sharp voice, unaffected. Fred shrugged despondently and told Danny to find a job for her.
We looked at her, nine of us, for days, as though we had never seen a woman before. We watched the dainty way she picked up a file, with red-enamelled fingertip extended as though she were holding a cup of tea. We watched the way she brushed the filings off her overalls after every few strokes, the awkward way she opened and closed her vice, her concern for the cleanliness of her hands, her delicate, unhandy way with a hammer. Sometimes she would look up from her work and see us watching her, and throw us one of those sudden splintery smiles. Behind her back we had great fun mimicking her; to her face we treated her with an almost desperate punctilio. 2
