WORKERS
War work has probably received more attention than any other aspect of women's wartime experience. The employment of women in the wartime industries drew attention to the female worker as never before.
The independent wage-earner, the woman who stepped into a man's shoes — whether she be a tram conductor, a welder or a ‘munitionette' — came to represent a new kind of female identity which would be both liberating (for women) and threatening (to men). Women workers symbolised the otherness of wartime in the transgression of gender boundaries. As workers, women were to be found in large numbers in hitherto male spaces — on the factory floor, at the wheel of a lorry or on the foot-plate of a tram. They even began to resemble men in their practical clothing of dungarees and overalls. And yet, despite the fact that it was almost universally recognised that women's labour was essential to the war effort, there existed a tension between this pragmatic understanding and concerns about woman's role as mother. It was these concerns that helped to counter demands for permanent change at the war's end.Assessments of women's work experiences have formed the basis for far-reaching claims about the impact of the war on women's lives. For some historians, war work liberated women from the constraints of Victorian femininity and demonstrated to others that women were capable of carrying out ‘men's jobs'. Others have argued that the war at best offered only limited progress, and at worst fuelled gender tensions that were to continue into the postwar years promoting a backlash against the woman worker. All are agreed, though, that the war years saw a significant shift in the kinds of jobs undertaken by women. On the other hand, it is clear that this structural change was not accompanied by a massive rise in the proportion of women in employment during the course of the war, nor did it result in a rise in the status of the woman worker.
In Germany, for example, the percentage of women in paid work remained remarkably steady at around 35 per cent. There was some movement of women into traditionally male sectors of employment, but the vast majority were simply moving from other forms of work, that is there was no mass recruitment of ‘war wives' or formerly non-working women.38 In Bavaria, for instance, more than 40 per cent of female workers in the war industries had been factory workers before 1914; 28 per cent had not been previously employed but this figure included women just leaving education. Germany did not seriously begin to recruit women to munitions work until 1916. In Britain, where women constituted 38 per cent of the labour force in 1918 compared with 24 per cent in 1914, the movement of women workers away from domestic service and into a variety of employments was the most notable development early on. And in the first instance it was white-collar and service jobs that accommodated these women (accounting for 23 per cent of women entering employment since 1914), with munitions work some way behind with 14 per cent.39 The most feminised sectors of the economy in 1918 were much the same as they had been in 1914: the clothing and textile trades, manufacturing, and teaching and nursing.40 Many of the so-called new workers had previously been hidden in home work and the sweated trades, unnoticed and unrecognised; that is, they had been workers but invisible. Perhaps the greatest quantitative contribution of female workers to the war economy occurred in Russia, where the proportion of women in the workforce increased from 26 per cent at the beginning of the war to 43 per cent at its end. Yet in terms of patterns of employment and experiences of work, the position of Russian women workers was comparable to the situation farther west.41At the war's outset women experienced high levels of unemployment as sectors deemed marginal to war production shed labour and domestic servants were let go in the name of releasing working-class girls for service to the nation.
The consumer industries employing large numbers of female workers also declined. In August 1914, Louise Deletang, a Parisian seamstress, wrote in her diary that ‘everywhere, there is a ceaseless chase for work... so many factories and boutiques have closed.'42 The situation was no better for German women textile workers for whom survival was difficult in the absence of a male earner. Hence the scenes in Berlin in September 1914 on the occasion of work being made available to experienced seamstresses. ‘The number of people applying for this work was unbelievable... The army of women and girls grew from hour to hour and filled the wide pavement... we saw between 7 to 8000 people standing there.'43 By 1915—16, though, as serious labour shortages began to impact upon the war economy, women were brought in to fill industrial and public service jobs vacated by men sent to the front, and more especially they were employed en masse in munitions factories. Moreover, within certain sectors the kinds of jobs undertaken by women expanded. Women replaced men as weavers in the textile industry for example, and in the agricultural sector they virtually replaced men altogether. ‘I had to do all the tasks the men used to do', recalled one Italian woman. ‘I even had to unload the wheat, spread the wheatsheaves, help to thresh when the machine came around', all jobs traditionally undertaken by men.44 Clearly the term ‘war work' is something of a misnomer since so many women workers were doing jobs such as work in offices and transport not directly in the service of the war. But the demands of a war economy ensured that all female workers were assured that their work was in the national interest. By stepping into a man's shoes they were freeing him for the armed forces; by making armaments they were doing their bit to defeat the enemy.War work was conceived of by governments and by some feminists as a woman's patriotic duty. ‘Sex has nothing to do with patriotism or with the spirit of service', remarked the veteran suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst (1858—1928) in the summer of 1915.
‘Women are just as eager to work for the nation as men are.' This was at a time when industry was desperate for workers to fulfil its contracts in the wake of the recruitment of Kitchener's volunteers and a munitions crisis.45 For the president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the state's dependence on women workers was a prime opportunity to show that women were ‘worthy of citizenship'. German feminists adopted a similar line, advocating compulsory war service for women to complement the military service for men, but unlike their British counterparts, feminists such as Gertrud Baumer (1873—1954) and Helene Lange emphasised women's special contribution in the field of welfare and social work which might be put to the service of the state. However, despite feminists' endorsement of patriotic service there is little evidence to suggest women flooded into the labour market motivated by patriotic fervour and a desire to serve their nation, let alone an expectation of political rights, with the exception perhaps of those amongst the wealthier classes who, in any case, preferred nursing to munitions work. Neither did legislation, where it was enacted, have any significant effect. German women proved remarkably resistant to the government's attempts to recruit them for auxiliary service, and when they did respond they preferred to do office work at home or to become ‘rear-echelon helpers' behind the lines rather than to become munitions workers, largely on account of the better pay and the opportunities for greater independence.46 Women worked during wartime because they had to. With their fathers and husbands away and government allowances inadequate to support a family, women needed to earn an income.State propaganda valorised women workers, but attitudes of male workers and trade unionists were far less favourable, particularly in the skilled trades of traditional industries. Evidence from Britain, Germany and Russia shows that fears of substitution of male by female workers conditioned responses to women drafted into the engineering and shipbuilding industries.
Nowhere was the stand-off between employers and the state on one side and trade unions on the other more protracted than on Clydeside near Glasgow. In order to enable women to fill jobs in the engineering and shipbuilding industries a process known as dilution of skill was introduced, the breaking down of skilled tasks into a number of smaller ‘unskilled’ ones, therefore enabling unskilled and untrained women to be employed on lower rates of pay. Male workers and their unions, perhaps correctly, saw this as a threat to traditional bastions of male employment which would result in an erosion of skilled trades and rates of pay at the war’s end. In Germany, male workers offered similar resistance to the introduction of female co-workers in their reluctance to participate in the training of women. ‘As trainers, men frequently make no effort to teach female replacement labour, whose competition they fear in the coming time of peace’, remarked the Nuremberg War office in respect of mechanical engineering.47 Women found themselves patronised by their foremen who were reluctant to accept that a fresh approach could be advantageous. ‘Engineering mankind is possessed of the unshakeable opinion that no woman can have the mechanical sense’, observed a British munitions worker.If one of us asks humbly why such and such an alteration is not made to prevent this or that drawback to a machine, she is told, with a superior smile, that a man has worked her machine before her for years, and that therefore if there were any improvement possible it would have been made. As long as we do exactly what we are told and do not attempt to use our brains, we give entire satisfaction... Any swerving from the easy path prepared for us by our males arouses the most scathing contempt in their manly bosoms.48
In Russia too, despite the Bolshevik entreaty to all workers, male and female, to work side by side in order to achieve the advancement of women, male workers showed a reluctance to accept women on equal terms.
Huge numbers of women were employed in Russia’s war industries but they were overwhelmingly concentrated in jobs designated as unskilled and thus paid less. The breadwinner ideology which had been so pervasive duringthe nineteenth century was hard to break down even in the extraordinary circumstances of wartime.49
Like the mill girl of the early industrial imagination who was perceived as disrupting notions of femininity, so the munitionette was constructed as a symbol of gender instabilities during wartime. Munitions workers were portrayed as predominantly young, single and working class, who revelled in the independence their wages gave them, and who had little thought of patriotic duty. They were prone to extravagance, amusement and inappropriate behaviour in wartime, and their practical clothing, coarse banter and their desire for equal wages prompted some to comment on the masculinisation of war workers. One young soldier pleaded with his fiancee: ‘whatever you do, don't go in Munitions or anything in that line — just fill a woman's position and remain a woman — don't develop into one of those “things” that are doing men's work.'50 When one looks at women these days', remarked a German government representative in 1917, ‘one has to look closely in order to tell whether one is looking at a woman or a man.'51 But of course there was no question of female war workers actually being treated as men, despite the fact that many of them were indeed breadwinners and heads of household. The perception that their role was temporary and subsidiary continued to determine the position of women workers in the war industries, a situation condemned by the British socialist and suffrage activist Sylvia Pankhurst (1882—1960). In addition to fair wages and satisfactory working conditions she further demanded that ‘women who are enlisted as recruits in the National War Service shall have the Vote at once.'52 Working women may have looked like men to some onlookers, and their work may have been regarded as a patriotic duty, but they were not treated like patriotic men; that is, they were still not regarded as equal citizens.