Susan Grayzel — “Women’s War Work: Remunerative, Voluntary and Familial”
Susan Grayzel, “Women’s War Work: Remunerative, Voluntary and Familial” in Women and the First World War (2001), 27-50 (588-602).
Understanding the role women played in the ammunition factories and elsewhere on the “home front” of WWI is crucial to a complete understanding of how relationships between men and women changed in the 20th century. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the first world war propelled the Western world on a trajectory that led it to its current position. This is true even though many things went “back to normal” after the end of the war. Still, the seed had been planted and the old molds broken.
Grayzel explores this and other changes in the lives of women during the war.
Some quotes from the text:
“One of the more visible changes in women’s lives during the war came with their entrance into a wide range of occupations, some of which had never before included women.” (27)
“Women entered not only wartime factories, but also banks and places of business and government as clerks, typists, and secretaires. They were found running trams and buses, deleiving milk, and even joinly newly-created armed forces auxiliaries and become police officiers” (27)
[often they would work in the same filed of occupation as their husband who went away to war, but not always.]
“In Britain, the decision to institute conscription in 1916 followed the creation of a National Register in August 1915, recording the age, sex, and occupation of all men and women between the ages of 16 and 65.” (28)
“[Women] became important figures of wartime propoganda.”
“In either case, the question of pay became a heated one; if women earned less than men for the same job, they undercut male employment. On the other hand, paying men and women equally seemed far too radical and, some argued, unfair since male workers were undoubtedly superior. As a compromise, womena nd men were paid the same for piece work, but not for time rates.” (30)
Employment for women within medicie grew during the war bothe because of the expansion and prefessionalisation of nursing servies and of new opportunites for medical training and for women doctors” (37).
“the wartime world required this service from women, but the postwar world was not always sure what to do with the women who had performed it.” (41)