Women’s wartime contribution has been an object of fascinated attention since the first year of the war.  Historians have argued about how far women did do men’s work, how far they did new work and how much benefit did they get from these opportunities.  All agree that women made a substantial contribution to the war effort and that the collection of the imperial war museum provides a major source for measuring that contribution.  The Imperial War Museum’s collections of documents and photographs on women’s work were assembled with the specific intention of showing what women had contributed to the war effort.  There were many forms of ‘mobilisation’ and the variety of experiences behind the term ‘war work’.

            Women’s manual work was the subject of debate before the war.  The 1911 census recorded about one-third of all women doing some paid work.  However, these figures are limited by under-recording of informal work and unemployment.  The largest single category of women’s work was domestic service, not covered by National Insurance and women were disinclined to register as unemployed.  The second largest women’s employment was in textiles and here the trade was on half-time.  Feminists campaigned for access to professions and education, and, for manual workers, protective legislation.  They wanted to exclude women from some trades altogether, as in toxic chemicals, for example, particularly lead.  In other trades, they wanted minimum wage levels fixed by Trade Boards or ‘Fair Wages’ agreements.  This was restricted to a few occupations where the majority of the workforce, as in textiles and clothing, were women.  Campaigns on the issue of women’s employment were important in informing opinion about women’s waged work, arguing that society’s need for fit mothers and children should be first factor in legislating or regulating employment or wages and emphasising the social determinants of women’s work.  These arguments are evident in the views of organisations for workingwomen – women’s trade unions.  The image of women’s work was based on their concentration in the ‘sweated trades’.  Married women workers provided particular philanthropic concern.  They predominated in low-waged women’s trades, and, they were mostly tied to one area by family, and employed, ‘in poor or underpaid industries and in towns and districts where women are largely employed without a sufficient balance of men’s staple industries to enable the husband or father to be the main breadwinner of the family. Their work was not extra to the family budget, the ‘pin-money’ of popular journalism. In such areas, and in cities of high unemployment, they were often the main wage earners.  A Fabian Women’s Group survey found one-third of all women workers were supporting dependants, reflecting life in areas of high female labour force participation such as Lancashire, Belfast and Dundee.  This information showed married women’s commitment to paid employment but also demonstrated links between women’s work and low wages, a reason for male trade-union hostility to women’s work.  As the Fabian Women’s Group, the Women’s Industrial Council, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Women’s Trade Union League were investigating workingwomen’s living conditions and social reasons for low wages, working women themselves begun to agitate over conditions of work. Between 1910 and 1914 omen’s organisations grew, particularly women’s trade unions.  The image of the defenceless woman worker was tempered by the recognition that unionism could improve working conditions.  Such agitation allied to the raising of the ‘woman question’ in parliament had a cumulative effect.  Gender came to the forefront of public discussion and reinforced the notion that women were inherently deficient as workers, because they were inhibited by family responsibilities, were physically weaker and lacked a tradition of work expertise.  Workingwomen were more often discussed in 1914 as potential or actual mothers rather than as workers.

War accentuated social explanations current in 1914.  This happened in two phases.  First, five months of high female unemployment in 1914.  This was followed by a year spent negotiating some replacement of men by women.  Textile employment fell 43 per cent in the first five months of the war, clothing manufacture by 21 per cent, and women were badly affected by lay-offs and short-time working.  Large numbers of domestic servants and needle-workers were sacked.  The ‘sacrifice’ expected of households employing servants was often interpreted as the release of servants for war work but there was, as yet, no war work for women.  The question of women’s employment thus became the problem of women’s unemployment.  The belief that women were likely to accept inadequate conditions of work at low wages through a combination of ignorance, docility and patriotism was thoroughly reinforced by high unemployment among women, accentuated by volunteer troop mobilisation.  Working women’s organisations worried about wartime unemployment and feminist organisations were divided about war.  The Women’s Social and Political Union became active proponents of the wartime recruitment of men as soldiers and women as their replacements in the workplace.

            As early as November 1914, there was some expansion in employment opportunities, the greatest in clerical and shop assistant work.  ‘Feminisation’ had been under way before the war, but the numbers of clerical staff were to increase further due to increased volume of paper work. Most women taken on were not replacements but extra workers.  Finally, and most importantly, this ‘feminisation’ aroused no social concerns.  Office and shop work was clean, respectable and presented no obvious threat to gynaecological health.  As one suffragist wrote, there were some jobs for which women are ‘naturally suited’ such as clerks or teachers, work was also generally undertaken by younger, single women, since marriage bars (dismissal on marriage) operated pre-war.  It appealed particularly to women’s interest in ‘meantime’ work to fill in the years between school and marriage.  ‘The working girl has good habits, she is industrious and thrifty.’  What was contentious to both the general public and representatives of women workers alike was the employment of women in new forms of arduous manual labour.  One journalist wrote, ‘The extremist feminist in her wildest moments would not advocate dock-labouring, mining or road-digging as suitable employment for women’.

            Some feminists had drawn attention to the equal, unseen rigours of domestic work.  The TUC discussed women’s employment in 1915, approving a motion that allowed manual labour but rejected heavy, dirty or poisonous work for women, which did happen later, but the consensus on ‘proper’ work for women was not cynical.  The TUC was expressing genuine fears as to how far the needs of the state might override the needs of society.  Trade unionists, particularly women, believed that their knowledge of industrial processes was greater than government’s.  Their duty was to present such information and thereby preserve the nation’s health.  They became reconciled to women working in industry even in heavy manual work because it was temporary, provided welfare services and tasks were, to some extent, reorganised to reduce adverse effects on health.  They saw these changes as necessary for greater involvement in negotiation between management, government and trade union representatives over when, where and if ‘dilution’ and ‘substitution’ should take place.  Dilution meant the replacement of skilled men by semi-skilled or unskilled workers; substitution meant the replacement of one semi-skilled or unskilled worker by another, usually in both cases women.  Very few women did in fact do very much new ‘unsuitable’ work.  Most were to work throughout the war on work defined as ‘women’s’ work.  Those who did undertake heavy, outdoor work were explicitly there for the duration only.

            In 1914, a rhetoric of service dominated government propaganda and journalists’ descriptions of women’s work. [Employment 1: Min of Labour Scheme for Women’s Employment] Women were to volunteer as women, rather than on the basis of previous labour experience, age, marital status or education.  In summer 1915, the Women’s War Register was set up, primarily to provide a workforce in munitions factories.  The government began to monitor the movement of labour in order to control the processes of production, particularly dilution.  Statistics were designed to demonstrate the success of dilution and substitution in the years 1915-17, figures for trends rather than absolute totals, since they were for large firms only.  [Employment 25/1-11: quarterly reports on increased employment of women] Government’s Labour Gazette published monthly dilution totals based on these returns which were the source for most published surveys of the extent and effects of dilution on women as workers (see Appendices 1 and 2).  All new female employees in wartime industry tended to be called substitute, if not dilutee, although they were often not replacements at all but extra workers.  Such women were often described as though all came straight from home, without history or knowledge of employment.  There was sustained growth in the numbers and proportions of women in the workforce (see Appendices 1 and 2) but since July 1914 saw high unemployment for women (particularly in textiles) the amount of growth seems larger than a longer view would show.  War was credited for many changes that were already underway.  Replacing men for the Front was not the only effective force for change, some of which was only indirectly a result of war because it was a time of full employment.  Other workplaces were distorted by the war but fundamentally unaffected by it, for example, the deskilling of work on the typewriter.  Trade unions had agreed dilution ‘for the duration’.  Women’s representatives had not participated in either initial discussions or the final agreements over dilution since the agreements were not for them but for the men they ‘replaced’.  All women were defined as replacements, and increasingly the word ‘dilution’ became a synonym for the introduction of women.  [Employment 23/1: Press coverage of women’s substitution] Pay was regulated by the Treasury Agreement of May 1915, introducing equal pay for dilutees in 1916, alongside conscription for men.  By 1916, pay was being decided by the sex of the worker and the gender of the job. Women ‘on men’s work’ got a minimum time rate of £1 for a 48-hour week, which protected learners and those on inadequate machines since they could not fix them themselves.  This commitment to ‘equal pay’ was entirely expedient.  It was not designed to attract women into war work or to recognise ‘worth’ but was solely intended to win over men's unions to dilution.  Nor, in practice, was it paid.  Employers were much more resistant fixing a minimum rate in 1917, for women ‘on women’s work’, since it cost them much more.

            Wartime work was affected by women’s own expectations.  Official histories of the Ministry of Munitions argued that war work attracted and kept women because of welfare, wages and patriotic fervour.  However state intervention in employment, equal pay and welfare provision were not mentioned in interviews.  Nor does the chronology bear this out.  More women entered the workforce before wages were protected than afterwards.  July 1916 saw the largest number of additional women entering the workforce – according to Labour Gazette.  However, there is no evidence that these were new workers, since severe shortages of labour in ‘traditional’ women’s trades indicate that many were old faces in new places.  What was new and took some time to bring about was the eviction of men.  In fact, it was only during the course of the year July 1916-June 1917 that women came near to half the workforce (see Table 1).

Table 1. Trends in female employment, 1914-18

[EMP.4.282. Standing Joint Committee of Women's Industrial Organisation, The position of women after the war, p. 4]

            Law protected women’s wages only in those industries defined as munitions industries; trade union power alone provided protection in those trades where dilution had been agreed upon by unions and management, like the boot and shoe trade or Co-operative Employees.  Furthermore the government did not begin to be a munitions producer in its own right, in the national factories, until late 1916. 

            Women first increased their share not in industry at all, nor in male jobs, but in clerical and commercial occupations.  By 1915, textile factories had begun to pick up trade lost in 1914 and take on more women as they diversified into serge and khaki.  By July 1916, both privately owned industries and arsenals were in full production and had expanded considerably.  That summer the largest number of new entrants to industry was to be found in textile factories (see Appendix 1) while the largest proportion of growth was in the government’s own armaments factories (see Table 2). [EMP.25/1-11]

            Women entered the workforce for different reasons.  Government posters exhorted, ‘Do your Bit, Replace a Man for the Front’ so that the life of the factory worker was portrayed as war service.  Government had attempted to see all women as a vast ‘reserve army of labour’, but women’s own experiences of work, locality and family role ensured no easy match between labour needs and supply.  Male unemployment encouraged many men to volunteer in 1914, as did ‘the culture of necessity’ before conscription. Women, conscious of low pay and harsh physical conditions at work, found travel and munitions work much more attractive.  However in engineering areas like outer London, Birmingham, Leeds and Clydeside, a large number of men in ‘reserved occupations’ as skilled engineers or shipbuilders earned high wages; their wives’ laborious domestic life was rendered more laborious by wartime shortages.  Their daughters, meanwhile, simply replaced domestic service with war service in their local factory.  Mobility of war service mimicked pre-war mobility of domestic service for young women.  Government encouragement made the workplace accessible gave the industrial environment respectability and encouraged a choice of industrial employment.  It did not create the underlying need for work [Employment 20: Employment exchanges, national service]. 

There were greater differences in attitude between women in the same workplace than pre- war, differences emphasised by the experience.  Management was inexperienced in the organisation of socially mixed groups of women but soon learnt to sort them by age, social class, and industrial knowledge.  Explosives work went to married women because they were considered sensible and ‘steady’; elsewhere it went to girls because of the suspected gynaecological hazards of chemicals work.  One-third had found work through the help of friends or relations, another third had simply turned up at the factory gates to be taken on, leaving only the final third to be supplied directly from government Labour Exchanges.  In Scotland, Ireland and Wales work involved more travel far from home, analogous to male military recruitment.

How many women workers who entered new jobs during the war were replacing a man?  Propaganda gave a misleading impression that women replaced men in factories wholesale.  Dilution officers toured the country demonstrating the ease with which skilled work could be reorganised for the unskilled.  They mounted exhibitions of photographs, machines, and women actually at work.  The Imperial War Museum’s large collection of photographs was partly a product of the new detailed attention to work processes that dilution encouraged.  The War Office produced 40,000 copies of handbooks on dilution. [Employment 24: Sept. 1916, booklets on Women’s War Work] The result was a developing iconography of the working woman which emphasised the novel, the exceptional, and the photogenic.  Often the pictures showed work that was not new but was only performed by women in some parts of the country, like pithead work.  The consequence, intentional or otherwise, was to emphasise discontinuity, since there was little to compare to women’s pre-war economic contributions.

Table 2. Number of women employed in July 1914 and July 1916

Source As Table 1.

            It is impossible to estimate how many married women worked for the first time.  The Ministry of Munitions described the state of labour supply in 1916, ‘Although the women who would normally be engaged in industrial work are now all fully occupied, there are large reserves of women, principally married, who have had previous industrial experience and who could be utilised in special circumstances’.  However, both oral evidence and the reports on factories contradict this impression as most married women with any industrial experience entered factory work as soon as openings were available.  Servicemen’s wives were frequently impoverished as separation allowances were low, and took time to come.  Much ‘new’ labour of the second half of the war came from young women entering employment for the first time.

            The unpublished official history of the Ministry of Munitions depicts the organisation of production as a clearly theorised, disciplined affair, especially the development of welfare. In practice, the welfare system did not even operate in every Ministry-run factory, let alone manufacture in general.  The dangers of TNT poisoning and cordite were both dealt with as problems of production, affecting output, rather than as an industrial disease.  However, reports by the Health of Munition Workers’ Committee did provide a large amount of valuable information about the significant output effects improvements in workers’ welfare could have, demonstrating clearly that good seating, lighting, washrooms, and canteens helped to keep output high, and encouraged workers.  Dr Janet Campbell concluded that much wartime work had been less injurious to health than domestic work and that posterity would be unaffected by the employment of women.  There were limited experiments with providing for pregnancy, breast-feeding and a lighter work-load, but only one factory, in Leeds, appears to have run a scheme for women to stay on while bearing their children.  Many factories had crèches, viewed as a short-term expedient to attract and keep workers.  Crèches do not seem to have been very popular in areas unused to them even though they were in areas where women already worked in factories in large numbers.

            Women’s reaction to the issue of welfare depended critically on the welfare on offer. Canteens were popular.  For many women, particularly older ones, it was the first full meal they could sit down and eat regularly.  Since welfare workers were employed primarily, ‘to ensure good time-keeping’, they could be seen either as humanising the factory, or, alternatively, as reflecting another face of management.  Trade unionist Mary Macarthur, said, ‘There is no word more hated among women workers of today than welfare’ but, until 1917, nearly all agitation among women was over issues of supervision and welfare, most commonly combined in demands to keep, or sack, welfare supervisors, which suggests that they valued welfare.

            Although employers lauded female docility, eagerness and dexterity during the introduction of dilutees in 1915-16, they as enthusiastically deplored their poor time-keeping, lack of commitment to work, and low productivity in 1918, assessing women’s war work for the Hills Committee (of the Ministry of Reconstruction) and the 1919 War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry.  [Employment 29/1, 70] During the war, women organised in trade unions in larger numbers.  Women’s trade union membership grew from 437,000 in 1914 to 1,209,000 in 1918 – much faster than their numbers in the workforce (see Appendix 1).  The confidence to organise, money to pay subscriptions and the need to prevent exploitation were all accentuated by war conditions but continued pre-war trends.

            The war ended before 1918 for some women, as demobilisations followed the 1917 closure of the Russian Front.  As Churchill, Minister of Munitions, said to his staff, ‘We have actually succeeded in discharging nearly a million persons, the bulk of whom did not want to go’.  War’s start had turned nearly all women into potential war workers, now nearly all women were assumed to have been war workers.  Married women, it was assumed, should revert to their previous occupation ‘in the home’.  The Hills Committee accepted that married women would continue to work and that they should not be prevented from doing so, although they added that women should be discouraged from doing work injurious to health – like fur pulling, rag picking and gut scraping on the grounds that, ‘The primary function of women in the state must be regarded, it is not enough to interfere with her service in bearing children..., but she must be safeguarded as home-maker for the nation’.  The report recommended exclusion from unhealthy trades, the award of mothers’ pensions, and equal pay.  Equality of pay was assumed to exclude women from manual work because employers would prefer employing men.  The policy of the Ministry of Labour discouraged married women’s employment by excluding them from occupational training, and denying ‘out-of-work donation’ as ‘not genuinely seeking work’ if they turned down employment because of domestic obligations.

            As far as the ‘working woman’ was concerned the ‘experience of war’ was ambiguous.  Women had demonstrated that they could do work requiring physical strength.  They had heaved coal, cleaned barrels and trains, driven trams; a group of women navies built a shipyard.  They had demonstrated dexterity and skill.  Women had used new techniques of arc welding, built aeroplanes and airships, and were employed on the sub-divided tasks of engineering.  Dilution was not achieved in the bastions of male trade unionism, the shipyards and the workshops where men made heavy artillery.  Women formed the majority of the workforce in fuses and cartridges, areas of women’s work before, but remained dependent on male tool-setters in work on shells. Despite frequent demands from workers and their organisations, very few women had been trained in industrial skills.  Individual women managed to learn to make their own tools and set their own machines, but could not continue to do so after the war.  Many women were ambivalent about war work, because it produced death-dealing objects.  The prize-winning essay in a factory magazine wrote, ‘Only the fact that I am using my life’s energy to destroy human souls gets on my nerves. Yet on the other hand, I'm doing what I can to bring this horrible affair to an end. But once the War is over, never in creation will I do the same thing again’ [Munitions, 24/15, page 83].

If ambivalent about war work, they were not ambivalent about factory work.  Many recalled war work as happy because of friendships, higher wages, amusements in the factory such as hair competitions, football matches, concerts and running jokes.  They would have welcomed a chance to continue to work in industry.  Many women war workers on munitions were reluctantly forced back into domestic service, although some lost the chance to train as specialist servants, and found later this was barred because they were too old, too work-roughened or viewed with suspicion as an ex-factory worker.  Some employers outside armaments learnt different lessons from them during the war.  Food production, light engineering, shoes and clothing expanded in the inter-war years using female labour, often organised by the same managerial group who had organised the war.  The activities of women organisers suggest increased self-confidence and a new perception of work.

The same is true of equal pay.  War wages are one of the issues on which published sources are least reliable.  The major source is the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, set up to propitiate striking transport workers who demanded equal pay in summer1918, and which concluded that most women had not in fact done men’s work.  When women took over a particular job from a man they achieved about two-thirds his level of output.  Evidence given by employers and managers was contradictory.  [Employment 70] The availability of labour, the number of hours worked and work organisation all differed in wartime.  Inexperience was frequently confused with gender.  Few witnesses compared women with the boys beside whom they worked, and if they did, it was only to deplore women’s lack of ambition.  Women on average earned less than men.  They received cost-of living bonuses lower and later.  Even women working at exactly the same tasks as men did not get equal earnings.  A few achieved equal pay rates through a Special Arbitration Tribunal for women's pay and conditions.  Most women on engineering processes had to pass on some of their wages to the skilled engineer who set their tools.  Earnings, though much higher than they had been before the war, averaged 30s. a week against 11s. 6d. pre-war, still only approximately half men’s.  Wages rose later in other industries.  Women demanded increased wages while women workers left in autumn 1917, (many to be recruited to work the land in the new Land Army).  Men supported these demands because they thought it would ensure fewer women employed after the war.

In addition, women’s war work did not affect women evenly.  Their experiences of work differed according to occupation, family responsibilities, previous work experience, education and locality.  Munitions work dominated the records and obscured both continuities and long-term change in other areas of women’s labour.  The rhetoric of war gives completeness to a period in which demand fluctuated and the relative power of women and their organisations changed.  The absence of training, of permanent alterations in the organisation of production, of any change in the relationships of power within the workforce or in relation to the employers ensured that women did not keep jobs defined as war work. 

The 1919 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Bill took jobs away from working-class women while middle-class women benefited from the Sex Disqualification Removals Act (for the professions).  Skilled women’s occupations like arc-welding were taken by men even when the technique was completely new.  The effect of war work was to demonstrate that women were capable of many tasks; it did not demonstrate that they should do them.  One female occupation changed by war was domestic service.  There were as many servants as before but service had changed; far fewer lived in or worked in large households.  Overall, women contributed a substantial amount to the wartime economy especially in mechanised mass production factories making munitions.  Munition workers got the most attention partly because there is so much more historical material for looking at their experience, partly because they received it at the time.  Manual work for women also evolved in peacetime as mass production in light industries, food and clothing expanded using the experience of war work.  The war had shown women capable of great sacrifice in the name of a wider community than the household, a ‘higher form of motherhood in the factory’.  Women themselves talk proudly of their war contribution to this day.  The war became like military service for men, a time out of a working life, distinct and different.

Appendix 1

Percentage of women in workforce, July 1914 and November 1918

Sectors are listed in order according to the percentage of women in the workforce in July 1914.

Source A. W. Kirkaldy (ed.), British Labour replacement and conciliation 1914-21.            London, 1921, Table XIII

Appendix 2    Index of trend in female employment July 1914-November 1918

No. of women employed November 1918        4,940,000

No. of women entering employment July 1914 to November 1918        1,663,000

a Tied ranks

b Minus values indicate movement out of sector

Source

See Appendix 1

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