ABSTRACT
One of the better-known features of Britain’s First World War is, perhaps, its effect on women’s employment. Until 1914, the female working population consisted mainly of working-class women employed in unskilled jobs across the textiles, engineering and mining industries, as well as in domestic service, earning on average about a third of men’s weekly wage. Some women from the more prosperous classes had managed to claw their way into the professions, clerical work and teaching, but their ‘careers’ were always conditional on accommodating themselves to masculine attitudes and cultures. After a slow start, the war increasingly drew women from all social classes into new areas of work, with significant numbers entering armaments production and other trades in transport, services and offices. Patriotism, money and survival drove thousands to answer the government’s call to ‘do their bit’, and the sight of women working on shells and guns, driving trams, shovelling coal, cleaning windows and delivering the post, captured the attention of a masculine society unaccustomed to such sights, inevitably drawing out some raw and mixed reactions. Some women hoped that their efforts would bring recognition and reward. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared in 1919 that ‘the war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs and left them free … it revolutionised men’s minds … ’. 1 A triumph of hope over experience, perhaps.
