Laura

=Women in Factories=

What were the women's roles before the war?
__Political Factor:__
 * Before WWI Germany was a monarchy and thus no citizen had the right to vote
 * Russia was also a monarchy reigned by Tsar Nicholas II & England was also a monarchy
 * French women did not have the right to vote
 * Women in Finland already had the right to vote in 1906 and New Zealand granted women the vote in 1893(--> shows that women's right to vote was maybe inevitable despite WWI?)
 * Interestingly, a woman's right to vote was already introduced in 1869 in Wyoming. Nevertheless, they only elected the first female governor in 1925

__Economic Factor:__
 * Large numbers of working class women had worked in factories before and during their married lives and an equally large number worked from home in the ‘sweated’ industries, most notably clothes making.
 * Middle and upper-class women were compelled to leave any job held on marriage and then devoting themselves to bearing and raising children and keeping home for their husbands, unless widowhood, illness or separation forced them back into the workforce.
 * Most working women in the USA were in lower-paid jobs such as cleaning,dressmaking and secretarial work.
 * In Germany, women partly already worked in the 18th century due to industrialization

__Social Factor:__
 * In the USA, middle-class women, like those in Britain, were expected to lead restricted lives. They had to wear very restrictive clothes and behave politely. They were expected not to wear make-up and their relationships with men were strictly controlled. They had to have a chaperone with them when they went out with a boyfriend and were expected not to take part in sport or to smoke in public. In most states they could not vote and most women were expected to be housewives.
 * The Suffrage movement was already introduced in 1865 by John Stuart Miller, a British philosopher, political economist, and member of Parliament
 * In Prussia (Germany), compulsory school attendance for both boys and girls was introduced in 1717, very slowly leading to the emancipation of women
 * Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in 1903

What changed during the war?
__Economic Factor:__
 * Women produced war goods
 * When the USA joined the war in 1917, some women were taken into the war industries, giving them experience of skilled factory work for the first time.
 * The German government recruited workers in 1917 by offering higher pay and factory housing
 * Some served near the front line nursing corps or in the women's armed services
 * Some took over their husbands' job, and became blacksmiths, paper-hangers and grave-diggers. Others took up non-manual traders where women had been rarely employed before the war, such as ambulance drivers and managers. Banks and offices employed women tellers and clerks to do jobs usually reserved for men.
 * Women in France worked at all levels of every trade, running machines, loading ships, handling shells, control and inspection jobs and delicate machine-calibration.
 * Within weeks of the declaration of war, women were enrolling as Red Cross medical assistants and 'sisters of mercy'
 * Christopher Addison, who succeeded David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, estimated in June 1917 that about 80% of all weapons and shells were being produced by women
 * In Britain, the number of women employed increased from 3,224,600 in July 1914 to 4,814,600 in January 1918. Nearly 200,000 women were employed in government departments, with half a million becoming clerical workers in private offices. The greatest increase of women workers was in engineering. Over 700,000 of those women worked in the highly dangerous munitions industry. Whereas in 1914 there were 212,000 women working in the munitions industry, by the end of the war it had increased to 950,000.

__Social Factor:__
 * Those who worked at home, volunteered for work in infirmaries for wounded soldiers, which were set up privately --> the Women's Medical Institute in Petrograd set up one themselves as did the feminist League of Equal Rights
 * For women in Vienna, queueing, scrounging and hunting for food and fuel, the war did not bring much freedom, especially as elderly fathers or young sons took charge where possible

__Political Factor:__
 * Political movement towards women's suffrage began during the war and in 1918, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed an act granting the vote to: women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British universities.

What happened after the war?
__Economic Factor:__
 * The war revolutionised the industrial position of women - it found them serfs and left them free.' (said by Millicent Fawcett, leading feminist, founder of Newnham College Cambridge and president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies from 1897 to 1918)
 * In France, government policy resulted in women making up 25% of the personnel in war factories - a total of 1.6 million female employees.
 * The number of women employed in German engineering, chemical and metal works was six times greater than that before the war.
 * In Russia, the war emergency opened up a range of new opportunities for women, such as being in the nursing and medical professions
 * The only permanent changes in France were in certain important professions, such as accountancy, law and medicine, and even here, the numbers of new female entrants were very small.
 * The USA's economy was booming in the 1920s as new industries and new methods of production were developed. This development was possible due to the one-way trade with Britain and France during the first World War. The country was able to exploit its vast resources of raw materials to produce steel, chemicals, glass and machinery. Telephones, radios, vacuum cleaners and washing machines were mass-produced.
 * In urban areas in the USA more women took on jobs - particularly middle-class women. They took on jobs created by the new industries and consequently there were 10 million women in jobs in 1929, 24% more than in 1920.
 * In Germany, the war left 600,000 widows, thus the state had to spend about one-third of its budget in war pensions

__Social Factor:__
 * In France, Theodore Zeldin suggests, the war 'did not make all that much difference to the women'. A higher proportion (40%) than elsewhere in Europe had already been working outside the home. Nevertheless, this figure increased during the war and in 1917 women led the way in striking for better pay and conditions. --> Afterwards, however, women's employment declined and husbands who returned from the front could still by law expect obedience from their wives.
 * In Germany, although the female workforce had increased by 46 % during the war, the women did not question the Demobilisation Committee's demand that women should give up their positions to returning soldiers and 'devote themselves to their former duties of taking care of the home and having children'.
 * All over Europe the most obvious sign of change was in the appearance of women: they looked different in the shorter skirts and bobbed hairstyles which had proved so much more practical in factories, at the front and on the farm. It was now acceptable for a young woman to go out to the cinema or dance-hall with a boyfriend or with girlfriends.
 * Working in munitions industry was extremely dangerous and consequently resulted in many accidents, leading to over 200 deaths in Britain alone. Others suffered health problems such as TNT poisoning because of the dangerous chemicals the women were using
 * In the USA, sex had still been a taboo subject in the generation before the war. After the war it became a major concern of tabloid newspapers, Hollywood films, and everyday conversation. Scott Fitzgerald, one of a celebrated new group of young American writers who had served in the First World war, said:"None of te mothers had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed". On top of that, contraceptive advice was openly available for the first time and Sex outside marriage was much more common than in the past.
 * Through the 1920s they shared the liberating effects of the car, and their domestic work was made easier by new electrical goods such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Women smoked and drank in public, kissed in public, went out with men, without a chaperone and wore more daring clothes.
 * Even women in the USA who did not earn their own money were increasingly seen as the ones who took decisions about whether to buy new items for the home. There is evidence that women's role in choosing cars triggered Ford, in 1925, to make them available in other colours than black. Nevertheless, women were still paid less than men, even when they did the same job. One of the reasons women's employment increased when men's did not was that women were cheaper employees.
 * J. T. Patterson stated in his book, 'America in the Twentieth Century', :"Though a few young upper middle-class women in the cities talked about throwing off the older conventions [...] most women such to more traditional attitudes concerning 'their place'.. most middle - class women concentrated on managing the home...Their daughters, far from taking to the streets against sexual discrimination, were more likely to prepare for careers as mothers and housewives."

__Political Factor:__
 * Women in France, where there had been no widespread suffrage movement, did not gain the right to vote until 1944.
 * German women gained equal voting rights in 1919
 * Bessel argues that politics remained a 'male realm' because of the dominance of the 'front generation', who were responsible for bringing to power the 'militantly anti-feminist' Nazi Party. --> even though the Weimar Republic gave women more rights and allowed emancipation to a certain extent, Hitler reversed these alterations once he was powerful enough, expecting women to stay at home and take care of the children
 * According to Deborah Tom, in England 'war had not challenged the sexual division of labour or the notion of the male bread-winner. These roles were only suspended for the duration and then only in some households.'
 * England: All women had the vote within ten years and 'women's attitudes and aspirations had changed in the direction of increased self-confidence and willingness to stand up for themselves'
 * The changes DURING the war were largely accepted by both men and women as they believed the changes in women's role to be temporary and that normality would be restored once the war came to an end. However, it was undeniable that in all of Europe women had demonstrated abilities that they had had little opportunity to demonstrate before the war, and this was greatly reflected in the change in attitude towards women's political rights in all the four Great Powers.
 * In the USA, women got the vote in all states. Nevertheless, women were not given access to political power. Political parties wanted women's votes, but they didn't particularly want women as political candidates as they considered them 'unelectable'.

Three Useful Weblinks

 * Book: "The First World War 1914-18" by Vyvyen Brendon p.135 - 137 --> this section informs the reader about the impacts of WWI on women (during and after the war) from different countries
 * Book: "The First World War" by Ian Cawood and David McKinnon - Bell p.62 - 74 --> informs about the impacts on women in the long run as well as during WWI --> provides statistics and analysis on whether the war actually transformed the position of women in society
 * Link 3, with summary of why useful