Their role is quite often associated with weeping, waiting, and
working, as wives, mothers, and sweethearts, but I think we’re all aware that women were
not the simple, or even dumb creatures they’re sometimes portrayed, simply waiting at home
blind to the real horrors of the war, and we should acknowledge that women were an important
part of the war effort in all of the warring nations.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the role of women in
the First World War.
They served as nurses, munitions factory workers, they sewed bandages, they sold war bonds,
they worked in shipyards, they were spies, and much more. In Britain, the Women’s Royal
Air Force was created, with women working as airplane mechanics.
As you may imagine, the traditional family structure was very often completely changed
by the war, as many women were forced into the workplace by the death of their husbands.
Other women were drafted into industry. If we look at Britain for a minute, we see that
during the war, 200,000 women took up posts in government departments, half a million
in private clerical positions, and another quarter of a million in agriculture. This
pales in comparison to the 700,000 women who worked in the munitions industry, which, let’s
be clear, was dangerous work. There were five million women working in Britain by January 1918.
Actually, in Britain during the war, roughly two million women replaced men at their jobs.
And just a quick look around Europe, you see that in Russia, the percentage of women in
the workforce jumped from a quarter to 43%, a million women joined the workforce in Austria,
and in France, where women were already a relatively large proportion of the workforce,
female employment jumped 20%. Germany, though, saw fewer women join the
workplace than other belligerents, largely due to pressure from trade unions. This meant
that all female labor had to come from volunteers, and it has been suggested that one contributing
factor in Germany’s loss in the war was their failure to maximize their potential
workforce by ignoring women, although they did force women in occupied areas into manual labor.
Now, when you picture an image of women from the war, especially if you’re a native English
speaker, it’s really the women employed in munitions factories, the munitionettes,
you probably picture first, and indeed they are the most visible faces of women workers
from the First World War.
Munitionettes produced 80% of the weapons and shells used by the British Army and daily
risked their lives working with poisonous substances without adequate protective clothing
or proper safety measures. Although this can be seen as a gauge of their will to sacrifice
everything for Britain it should be read, rather, that they were seen as cheap, easily
replaceable labor. They were sometimes known as canaries, for the yellow tint their skin
acquired from working with sulfur, and even public sympathy couldn’t help their working
situation- they only got roughly half men’s wages for the same work.
Now, during the war women were to be found mostly at the home front while a small minority
went close to the actual battlefronts, and a few even saw combat. To many, though, the
idea of women in combat was abhorrent. This was a traditionalist attitude, but even feminists
argued that women’s job was to not to bear arms, but to bear armies, and that engaging
in combat would undermine their argument that is was not only those who fought for their
nation, i.e. men, who had a right to vote. Remember, at this point women could not vote
in most of the world.
The only woman soldier who enlisted in the British Army managed it by passing herself
off as a man. Dorothy Lawrence, a 20-year-old journalist, joined the B.E.F. Tunneling Company
in 1915 using the alias Denis Smith. She revealed herself after only 10 days and had to endure
a somewhat comical questioning, as the authorities assumed she was a 'camp follower'- a prostitute-
a term she misunderstood.
She was forced to keep her adventure silent since the British Army feared ridicule, but
another Englishwoman, Flora Sandes, published a book on her experiences as a soldier in
the Serbian Army with a view to raising funds for her brothers in arms. Sandes was initially
an ambulance driver on the Eastern Front but managed to enlist with the Serbs, who by 1916
had already promoted her to sergeant major. She stayed on after the war with the Serbian
army, eventually becoming a major.
And how about the Russian Maria Bochkareva? A soldier in the Army since 1914, wounded
and decorated several times, Bochkareva convinced the revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky
in 1917 that a battalion made exclusively of women would shame men who refused to fight
into joining the armed forces. So she recruited 2,000 women out of which about 250 saw actual
combat on the Austrian Front fighting together with units of male soldiers. There are, actually,
stories of women in the Russian army throughout the war, but in the aftermath of the February
Revolution in 1917 an all female unit formed with government support: the Russian Women’s
Battalion of Death. Fantastic name.
Actual combat may have been generally restricted for women in all the warring nations, but
women were at the front often as nurses or as drivers, particularly of ambulances. Many
of these women were killed by enemy fire.
In Britain 80,000 women served in the three armed forces in organizations such as the
Women’s Royal Air Force Service, but were largely refused training with weapons. In
the US over 30,000 worked in the military, mostly in nursing corps, Army Signal Corps,
or as naval and marine yeoman.
Actually, when the United States entered the War it marked the first time in the history
of that country that regular Army and Navy military nurses served overseas—although
without rank—and the first time that women- not as nurses- were allowed to enlist in the
Navy and Marine Corps. A handful of women also served in the Coast Guard.
Women were also vital to war propaganda, portraying victims in posters and later films, but also
for recruiting purposes. One poster used in Ireland featured a women standing with a rifle
in front of a burning Belgium with the heading “Will you go or must I?” This was a common
theme- applying pressure on men to fight or else be unmanly. There were also Britain’s
white feather campaigns, where women gave feathers as symbols of cowardice to non-uniformed
men; the idea being to shame them into going to war.
And go they did, and as men left their jobs to fight, a vast new range of occupations
opened up for the women left behind. The extent to which these new opportunities survived
the war is debatable, though, and it’s now generally believed that the war didn’t have
a huge lasting effect on women’s employment. Still though, taking on a number of traditionally
male roles led to some big changes in attitude and in a lot of places was the final push
toward giving women the right to vote.
In Britain at the end of the war, 8.4 million were given the vote. These were women over
the age of 30. The Eligibility of Women Act was also passed at this time meaning that
some women could now be elected to Parliament. It would not be for another ten years though,
that voting rights would be on equal terms with British men with an age of 21. Germany,
Russia, and the new Republic of Poland all gave women suffrage in 1918, Austria in 1919,
and the USA in 1920. Women in France would have to wait until 1944.
In general, postwar, European women gained new social and economic options, and stronger
political voices, even if they were still viewed by most governments as mothers first.
Cultural change is a bit harder to gauge, but still, certain norms of Western middle-class
femininity all but disappeared, and women’s appearances before 1914 and after 1918 were
quite different, with many women now having shorter hair and wearing shorter skirts or
even trousers. New forms of social interaction between the sexes and across class lines became
possible, but expectations about family and domestic life as the main concern of women
remained unaltered.
So even with limitations there was still in many ways a brave new world opened up for
women by the First World War, but it came at an immense cost. I’m gonna actually wrap
this up here. This special episode could have been hours long and with immense detail, but
what I think we’ll do is in future have separate special episodes about more specific
roles women played in the war: the nursing, the munitions work, and of course the struggle
for suffrage to really put it all together and paint the big picture with the detail
that it deserves, since the role of women in the war is under appreciated, serving and
working- and dying- in dangerous conditions often without any acknowledgment, turning
their lives inside out and becoming bread winners in their own right, and of course,
grieving for the millions of lost husbands, fathers, and sons.
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