Along with the growth in numbers the kinds of work done by women in these lines continued to extend. On the railroads, to the women clerks, car cleaners and ticket collectors of the first months of war were added shop laborers, engine cleaners and porters. In several Scottish and a few English and Welsh cities, women became tram drivers as well as conductors. Cities employed not only women street cleaners and a larger number of women clerks and teachers but women in various capacities in power stations, sewage farms, gas works and parks, and as scavengers. A few official “policewomen” were appointed, and there were numerous women “patrols” or voluntary police. There were women lamp-lighters and women window cleaners, and the errand girl had practically replaced the errand boy.
While in July, 1917, according to the Labour Gazette, the number of women employed permanently on the land in Great Britain had increased by 26,000 or 32 per cent since July, 1914, the number of casual workers had increased 39,000 or 77 per cent during the same period. The total number of women employed in farm work in July, 1917, may therefore be estimated as 192,000, in addition to women relatives of farmers, who are seldom counted in the returns.
As indicated by the variety of occupations, both industrial and nonindustrial, in which their employment increased, the substitution of women for men went forward rapidly during the third year of war. The total number of “females substituted for male workers” amounted in July, 1917, to 1,354,000, exclusive of casual farm laborers, or to 1,392,000 if such laborers be included. In “government establishments” the number of women on men’s work was 9,120 times as great as the whole number of women employed in July, 1914; in “banking and finance” the number was 555 times as great; in “transport,” 437 times, and in “civil service” 152 times as great. About one working woman out of every three was replacing a man in July, 1917, in the occupations covered by the tables of the Labour Gazette.
The report of the “Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops” for 1916 gives an interesting description of the progress of substitution and of the work of women in heavy occupations formerly carried on exclusively by men. The Principal Lady Inspector, Miss Anderson, says, in part:
It appears that the one absolute limit to the replacement of men by women lies in those heavy occupations and processes where adaptation of plant or appliances can not be effected so as to bring them within the compass even of selected women, of physical capacity above the normal. Very surprising, however, is the outcome of careful selection, even in fairly heavy work, in rubber manufacture, paper mills, oil cake and seed crushing mills, shale oil works, shipyards, iron and tube works, chemical works, gas works and stacking of coal, tan yards, coarse ware and brick making, flour milling and other trades. “If they stick this, they will stick anything,” a manager is reported as saying of the grit and pluck of the women in a gas works in the recent severe weather.[47]
She adds, however, what may occur to many students of women’s work, that “it is permissible to wonder whether some of the surprise and admiration freely expressed in many quarters over new proofs of women’s physical capacity and endurance is not in part attributable to lack of knowledge or appreciation of the very heavy and strenuous nature of much of normal prewar work for women, domestic and industrial.”
Nevertheless, despite these increases, the amount of substitution varied widely between different trades and even between different firms in the same trade, and opportunities for replacement still existed. Often women had been more widely introduced into occupations like railway trucking, for which they did not appear well fitted, than into such work as electroplating, which seemed in every way suitable.
Women’s lack of trade training, their inferior strength, the special restrictions of the factory acts, moral objections to having men and women in the same workshop, and the need of increasing sanitary accommodations and providing women supervisors had been from the first alleged as objections to putting women in men’s places.[48] But the strongest obstacles were apparently trade union opposition, frequently expressed in restrictions in trade agreements, and the prejudice of employers. “The progress of substitution probably depends in many cases on the pressure exercised by military tribunals,” said the “Principal Lady Inspector of Factories,” early in 1917. “Employers will not experiment with women as long as they can get men, though once they do so they are pleased with the result.”[49]
Fourth Year of the War
In the words of the Chief Woman Factory Inspector, 1917-1918, the fourth year of the war, was as far as woman’s work was concerned “one mainly of settling down into the new fields of work which were so rapidly marked out in the three previous years.” Yet she enumerates several lines of work employing women for the first time during this year, among which were ship and marine engineering, blast furnaces and forge works, copper and spelter works, concrete and other construction work for factories and aerodromes, electric power stations and retorts of gas works. The entrance of women as unskilled laborers in iron and steel plants and chemical works was proceeding steadily in November, 1918.