Vocational courses for other lines of work were much more scattering. The London County Council carried on short emergency courses along the lines advised by the “Shops” and “Clerical Employments” committees to prepare women for retail groceries and for business. It also carried on a successful course in gardening for six months, but had to drop it because housing accommodations were not available. Classes in the shoe trade were opened at Leeds, Bristol and London, and in the manufacture of leather cases and equipment at London and Walsall. The Liverpool authorities began to teach women power machine operating and toy making, the last being a trade expected to grow in England with the cessation of German imports. A course which attracted considerable attention because it provided skilled work at comparatively high pay after two or three months’ training was the class in oxy-acetylene welding managed by “Women’s Service,” a private organization of women for war work. A few enlightened manufacturers also set up training classes, such as, for instance, a three weeks’ course for women solderers in tin box making. Women were not sent out as London bus conductors until they had several weeks of careful instruction in schools conducted by the companies. One steam railroad also provided a training course for women clerks and telegraphers. An interesting development in special training which accompanied the growth of welfare work in munition and other plants was the opening of several courses for would be “welfare supervisors” in a number of the newer universities. A fairly long list of training courses was given for London alone by the National Union of Women Workers, but examination of the list shows that only a few were special war courses, and that most of them covered professional work for the minority, and not industry or trade for the many.[97]
Some employers were said to prefer entirely untrained women to those who had gone through short emergency courses, because the latter were prone to overestimate the value of their training. But on the whole the classes were believed to give a much better start to the woman who realized that they left her, after all, still a beginner. But the keen demand for workers, the high wages and high cost of living were all unfavorable to the extension of formal training schemes. Some classes were closed after the first year of war for lack of pupils. Others were discontinued when the trade schools were taken over for training in munitions work. Whatever the value of the provisions for training, it is evident that the great majority of women learned their new tasks without any such help, entirely in the workshop.
CHAPTER VIII
Women and the Trade Unions
The war apparently proved a great stimulus to trade unionism among women workers in England. Prior to the war, as in other industrial countries, women workers were notoriously hard to organize, and formed but a small minority of trade union membership. In 1913 nearly 4,000,000 men and only 356,000 women were said to be members of English trade unions. Aside from the fact that before the war most women were found in unskilled and low paid occupations in which union organization had made but little progress even among men, the usual explanation of the difficulty of organizing them was that most of them were young and expected to marry within a few years and to withdraw from industry. The one exception to this condition was the cotton textile trade, in which a large proportion of the women belonged to labor unions. Out of the whole number of organized women, 257,000 were in the textile trades. As already indicated, many of the unions in the skilled trades would not admit women members and were unfavorable to any extension of their work.
Two special organizations were devoted to the promotion of trade unionism among women. The older, the Women’s Trade League, was made up mainly of affiliated societies and was formed with the idea that a place could be found for women in existing organizations. But in many trades where there were large numbers of women unions did not exist, or the men’s unions forbade the employment of women. The National Federation of Women Workers gave its attention to these occupations. Its membership was stated to be about 20,000 in 1913.
During the war the number of women trade unionists increased at an unprecedented rate. At the end of 1914 their number was officially reported as 472,000, at the corresponding period in 1915 as 521,000, and at the end of 1916, 1917 and 1918, respectively, as approximately 650,000, 930,000 and 1,224,000—an increase of nearly 160 per cent between 1914 and 1918. During the same period the number of male trade unionists increased about 45 per cent.[98] Out of 1,220 craft and trade unions, 837 had only male members, 347 included both men and women and 36 were composed wholly of women. The latter included some 95,000 members, and the largest of them were the National Federation of Women Workers and the National Federation of Women Teachers.
A report by the factory inspectors enumerated ten important trades, including several of the textiles, boots and shoes, furniture, cutlery, fancy leather goods and tobacco, in which the number of women unionists was 365 per cent greater in 1914 than in 1917, rising from 41,778 in 1914 to 152,814 in 1917. A small but interesting union was that made up of women oxy-acetylene welders, a skilled trade which women had entered for the first time during the war. Its membership was mainly made up of educated women who were active in securing “equal pay” for themselves. Detailed figures for seven individual trades are as follows:
NUMBER OF WOMEN
TRADE UNION MEMBERS[99]
| Industry | 1914 | 1917 |
|---|---|---|
| Woolen | 7,695 | 35,137 |
| Hosiery | 3,657 | 17,217 |
| Textile bleaching, dyeing, finishing | 7,260 | 22,527 |
| Boot and Shoe | 10,165 | ... |
| Tobacco | 1,992 | 2,225 |
| Solid leather case and fancy leather | negligible | 1,372 |
| Furniture | 300 | 15,236 |
Another development of trade unionism among women during the war was that for the first time in the so-called “mixed unions,” composed of both men and women members, a large number of women were elected as branch secretaries and local officials. This change was forced by the withdrawal of men for military service, but the new officers were reported to be “as a whole extremely satisfactory.”[100]