Women of WWIRead the follow information and fill out the

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Propaganda used to gain interest and participation.

• Propaganda tended to depict women as guardians of the home, their gentle nature and vulnerability making them both objects of men’s affections and victims of the enemy’s barbarous acts, and yet also as resilient, active participants in the war effort.  Women served as reminders of the necessity of the fight and of the companionship that awaited soldiers upon their return.

• Those who refused to do so, propagandists argued, would face accusation and recrimination (‘What did YOU do in the Great War, Daddy?’) and would be spurned by sweethearts. Propaganda urging women to ‘wait, weep, and be worthy’ accompanied direct appeals to mobilize.

• Campaigns exhorted them to nurse injured servicemen, temporarily take up untraditional occupations, and to manufacture arms for the front. Numerous publications valorized ‘our adaptable women’, now farmers, station-masters, stokers, railway greasers, bricklayers, carpenters, butchers, brewers, and chimney sweeps. 

Propaganda Depicting Women

Women’s work in WWI

During WWI (1914-1918), large numbers of women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war. New jobs were also created as part of the war effort, for example in munitions factories.  The high demand for weapons resulted in the munitions factories becoming the largest single employer of women during 1918. Though there was initial resistance to hiring women for what was seen as ‘men’s work’, the introduction of conscription  in 1916 made the need for women workers urgent. Around this time, the government began coordinating the employment of women through campaigns and recruitment drives.

Women in Battle • During the war women were to be found mostly at the home front while a minority went close to the actual fronts where the war was being fought, some even into combat.

• The only woman soldier enlisted in the British Army managed the feat by passing herself off as a man.  Dorothy Lawrence, a 20-year-old ambitious journalist, joined in 1915 the B.E.F. Tunnelling Company using the alias Denis Smith, aided by some sympathetic men.  She gave herself in after only 10 days worried about the safety of these men and had to endure an absurd interrogatory, as the authorities assumed she was a 'camp follower', that is to say, a prostitute, a term she misunderstood.

While Dorothy Lawrence was forced to keep her adventure silent, as the British Army very much feared the ridicule it would plunge them into, another Englishwoman, Flora Sandes, published a book on her experiences as a soldier in the Serbian Army in 1916, 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.Supposedly, Sandes was accepted by the Serbs as the personification of British war aid, a symbolic value also attached though in another sense to no doubt the most famous female combatant of the Great War: 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 grown diffident about the war into fighting.She recruited 2,000 women out of which about 250 saw actual combat on the Austrian Front fighting together with units of male soldiers.  In contrast, the Cossack Maria Yurlova, active in Armenia against the Turkish Army, saw her participation in the war rather as an adventure, though it cost her in the end a severe breakdown.

Despite these exceptions the Governments involved in the war did as much as possible to prevent women's enlisting and participation in combat out of patriarchal principles.

Women change roles due to WWI

• This led to women working in areas of work that were formerly  reserved for men,  for example as railway guards and ticket collectors, buses and tram conductors, postal workers, police, firefighters and as bank ‘tellers’ and clerks. Some women also worked heavy or precision machinery in engineering, led cart horses on farms, and worked in the civil service and factories.

By 1917 munitions factories, which primarily employed women workers, produced 80% of the weapons and shells used by the British Army. Known as ‘canaries’ because they had to handle  TNT (the chemical compound trinitrotoluene that is used as an explosive agent in munitions) which caused their skin to turn yellow, these women risked their lives working with poisonous substances without adequate protective clothing or the required safety measures. Around 400 women died from overexposure to TNT during WWI.

Women, wages and rights• Women’s employment rates increased during WWI, from

23.6% of the working age population  in 1914 to between 37.7% and 46.7% in 1918. It is difficult to get exact estimates because domestic workers were excluded from these figures and many women moved from domestic service into the jobs created due to the war effort. The employment of married women increased sharply – accounting for nearly 40% of all women workers by 1918

• But because women were paid less than men, there was a worry that employers would continue to employ women in these jobs even when the men returned from the war. This did not happen; either the women were sacked to make way for the returning soldiers or women remained working alongside men but at lower wage rates. But even before the end of the war, many women refused to accept lower pay for what in most cases was the same work as had been done previously by men.

• The wage issues plus overall inequality led to Women demanding more opportunities in society and voting rights. Women became empowered to move away from domestic work and become independent citizens with the same rights as men.

Vera BrittainWar Red Cross Nurse, Writer, Women’s activist

• “Perhaps ... To R.A.L.

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,And I shall see that still the skies are blue,And feel one more I do not live in vain,Although bereft of you.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet,Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,And crimson roses once again be fair,And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,Although You are not there.

But though kind Time may many joys renew,There is one greatest joy I shall not knowAgain, because my heart for loss of YouWas broken, long ago.” ― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth