Downs: War Work

Question 1

Before WWI, what were typical sectors for women’s employment?

Answer 1

Sectors of the economy traditionally reserved to them –
textiles, garment-making, domestic service.

Question 2

During WWI, women entered additional sectors of the economy. Which were prominent?

Answer 2

(1) shops and factories working on defence contracts (2) hospitals and support services for the armies (3) transport services (4) expanded government bureaucracies:

Question 3

Was the shift between sectors the only major change in women’s employment during WWI?

Answer 3

No. More women entered the workforce. “Additional female hands were recruited directly from the ranks of those working and middle-class women whose pre-war labours had been consecrated exclusively to ensuring the maintenance and well-being of their families.”

Question 4

What were some effects of this shift?

Answer 4

(1) Women’s private lives became a concern of the government, which had to account for their work supporting the war effort. The “last years of the war made painfully
clear just how vital women’s unpaid domestic services were to national well-being,” (2) This drove calls for equality as citizens and workers. Patriotic and voluntary sacrifice such as nursing or ambulance-driving on behalf of the nation at war thus testified to women’s aptitude for citizenship, while their capacity to produce, and even out-produce men, on the factory floor, in government offices, wherever the duties of war called them, constituted clear evidence that women deserved equal opportunities and equal pay.

Question 5

What was a tangible effect of this acknowledgement of women’s equality?

Answer 5

Partial female suffrage in Great Britain, granted in 1918 to women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications, was framed explicitly in recognition of women’s heroic labors on the home front.

Question 6

Post-war reconstruction would largely focus on efforts to restore the pre-war order at home and at work, with the exception of one country. Which?

Answer 6

The young Soviet Union.

Question 7

What was the first sector where women workers were required to assist the war effort?

Answer 7

“Peasant wives and daughters, and women agricultural workers more broadly, across continental Europe and Great Britain. For the war had broken out just when it was time to bring the harvest in.”

Question 8

Why did the toll on peasant women get harder as the war dragged on?

Answer 8

In August 1914, some 30 per cent of the active male labour force had been mobilised, but, by 1918, 63 per cent of the active male labour force was serving in the armed forces. As peasants enjoyed no exemptions from military service (unlike men employed in those sectors of the economy – transport, mining and metallurgy – deemed critical to winning the war), the percentage of male agricultural workers mobilised was even higher.

Question 9

In addition to the estimated 3.7 million male peasants who were mobilized, what else made farm life more difficult?

Answer 9

Horses and oxen were requisitioned from farms for service at the front.

Question 10

Is there evidence that women’s rural contributions enhanced the reputations of peasant women?

Answer 10

No. During the war they worked under the supervision of local old men or distant supervision from the front, and after the war, there was no notable shift in the rural sexual division of labour once the war had ended.

Question 11

What about women’s work in transport and other war-related industries?

Answer 11

“Women’s arrival in these industries coincided with a significant transformation in the organisation of labour away from artisanal modes of production, based on the skilled male worker, to a mass-production organisation that would carry the day in the most modern sectors after the war had ended. … While this meant that much of the work that women did during the war was unskilled and repetitive, … the wartime association of women with rapid mass-production techniques would ensure their future in the industry well beyond the Armistice.

And this was no small matter because, as a general rule, the wages women earned in war factories, though almost never as high as those of their male colleagues, were at least two, and often three times higher than those paid out in traditionally female sectors of the economy.

Question 12

What were some opportunities for middle-class women?

Answer 12

Since they could afford time off for training, they could rise to the position of forewoman, or of fully skilled tool room worker. Others applied as office workers in the growing industrial bureaucracies that mushroomed alongside the
new, highly rationalised mass-production process. Still others entered industry as pioneers in the fledgling profession of factory welfare supervision.

Question 13

What was factory welfare supervision?

Answer 13

Women welfare supervisors first appeared in Great Britain in the winter of 1915–16, in response to the Ministry of Munitions’ call to improve conditions in the war factories, especially for women workers.

Question 14

Why was it necessary to improve conditions in the war factories, especially for women workers?

Answer 14

To ensure an uninterrupted flow of weapons to the front. ‘But workers’ bodies being human flesh and blood need
more than iron and steel, and cannot work efficiently without the oil of human kindness and consideration.’

Question 15

Why were middle and upper class women selected for factory welfare supervision?

Answer 15

They would be women ‘accustomed … by habit and by social position … to supervising … inferiors’

Question 16

What was two differences between the French and British factory welfare supervision programs?

Answer 16

In Britain, they were created by the Ministry of Munitions, and the appointments were class-based. The French Ministry of Armaments played no role in underwriting the school, structuring its curriculum or placing its graduates; the enterprise remained a private one to the end, and
welfare supervisors were directly responsible to the industrialists who hired and paid them. Candidates had to be in possession of a nursing diploma, as one of their roles was to ensure maternal health and assure the women about childcare there.

Question 17

While times were difficult in Britain and France, was it worse elsewhere?

Answer 17

Yes. The “gradual collapse of the German, Italian,
Austro-Hungarian and Russian consumer economies in the face of ever more dire food supply problems would ensure that these questions affected civilian society as a whole: in the context of widespread hunger, revolution, defeat and civil war in Russia; in the context of a wholesale collapse of the consumer goods market (and the partial collapse of the money economy more generally) in Germany and Austria-Hungary; and in the context of widespread hunger, massive social protest and deepening social polarisation in the case of Italy.”

Question 18

Why was it difficult to recruit women for the German armament factories?

Answer 18

(1) The owners preferred to seek deferments for their male workers. (2) The unions kept women’s wages low, so they had less incentive to work there (3) By 1917, with the economy collapsing, the first priority was “Keeping a watchful eye on supplies, fighting for goods, queuing up for hours on end, … scavenging the nearby countryside for turnips, a bit of lard, wood for fuel, a few extra ears of corn gleaned from already harvested fields; raising goats, ducks or rabbits while cultivating a small garden plot near one’s city apartment. … where wages stopped being a meaningful way in which to secure one’s livelihood.”

Question 19

Where did starvation contribute to a crisis in state legitimacy?

Answer 19

Italy and Russia. “It was precisely the wartime politicisation of everyday life’s most essential element – food – that neither the Russian nor the Italian wartime state would ever come to grips with in any materially or politically meaningful way. In these two states efforts to equalise the burdens of suffering and sacrifice via rationing, price controls, allocations to soldiers’ families or systems of collective feeding were so piecemeal and ineffective as to be utterly unconvincing. Indeed, their inability to ensure the basic survival of their populations contributed to a profound crisis of state legitimacy, which would end in the downfall of the tsarist regime in Russia, and in social protest so widespread and so violent that by the war’s end Italy seemed on the brink of civil war.”

Question 20

Of the four states most affected by the blockade, which did the best job of appearing to “equalise (somewhat) the burden of sacrifice and convince the population, at least temporarily, of the state’s concern with their well-being,”

Answer 20

Germany and Austria-Hungary did the best, Italy and Russia did the worst.

Question 21

How did private social services expand?

Answer 21

Before the war, they were targeted at the most destitute. Now they had to serve millions.

Question 22

Bottom Line?

Answer 22

Home is not only a site of consumption but a site of production as well: the production of human capabilities. In other words, ‘domestic labor, though not recognized as work because not paid for, is as necessary to the economy as the waged sort. For the workforce needs to be fed, clothed, cleaned for, comforted, as does its progeny, the workforce of the future.’

The partial monetarisation of such services during the war, via allowances paid to soldiers’ wives, food rationing, collective feeding and the expanding network of social services at work and in municipalities, would leave its imprint in a range of ways – not all of them progressive and emancipatory – on the workplace, and on post-war welfare and social protection across all combatant nations.