Speaker A
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 as, simply waiting at home, blind to the real horrors of the war. We should acknowledge that women were an important part of the war effort in all of the warring nations. I'm Indie Nidel. 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 deaths 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 5 million women working in Britain by January 1918. Actually, in Britain during the war, roughly 2 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 in Germany had to come from volunteers, and it has been suggested that one contributing factor to 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. They 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 actually 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 not to bear arms but to bear armies, and that engaging in combat would undermine their argument that it 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 British Expeditionary Force tunneling company in 1915 using the alias Dennis 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 English woman, Flora Sans, published a book on her experiences as a soldier in the Serbian army with a view to raising funds for her brothers in arms. Sans 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 Boskova, a soldier in the army since 1914, wounded and decorated several times? Boskova 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 was formed with government support: the Russian Women's Battalion of Death. Great band name. Actual combat may have been generally restricted for women in all of the warring nations, but women were often at the front as nurses or drivers, particularly of ambulances. Many of these women were killed by enemy fire. In Britain, 880,000 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 U.S., over 30,000 worked in the military, mostly in nursing corps, army signal corps, or as naval and marine yeomen. 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 the Marine Corps. A handful of women also served in the U.S. 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 woman 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 women were given the right to 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 10 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 till 1944. In general, post-war 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 li...
