Aside from munitions work, the principal evidence as to health conditions concerned women who were replacing men on outdoor work. Observers generally expressed surprise at the improvement in health and appetite which took place, even when the work was heavy. Fresh air, better wages and better food were believed to account for the gains in health. Some of the women who became railway porters found the work too heavy, however, and the nervous strain often proved excessive for women tram drivers.
A possible decline in health among women workers in general is suggested by the fact of a 6 per cent increase in the death rate from tuberculosis among women under forty-five which took place between 1914 and 1916. The Registrar General of Vital Statistics suggested that this occurred because—
Many thousands of women are now for the first time subjected to the workshop conditions which have probably tended so much to maintain the mortality of males at working ages in recent years. Young women of the most susceptible ages have thus been subject to risks of infection as well as of pulmonary disease predisposing to tubercle which they would have escaped in following their normal occupations; and both from this cause and from the effect of workshop conditions on women already infected a number of women have probably died who would have survived under peace conditions.
Special studies were made by the Health Insurance Medical Research Committee to test this hypothesis, and they felt, that “further evidence favoured its accuracy.”[262]
Summing up the none too comprehensive evidence on the effects of four years’ war work on the health of women workers, the War Cabinet Committee on women in industry did not feel that any extensive breakdown in health had occurred. Higher real wages often led to better nutrition and greater comfort, health supervision within the factory diminished preventable sickness and the nature of the work frequently stimulated the women’s interest and improved their health and physical capacity. Yet “it is undoubted that a considerable amount of fatigue and sickness has occurred.” The rise in the tuberculosis death rate was held to be significant. The strain was believed greatest among married women who had to carry the double burden of industrial work and domestic responsibilities. But on the whole the war demonstrated that women workers had a greater reserve of energy than they had been credited with and might safely enter “more varied and arduous occupations” than had been thought desirable before the war.
Effects of War Work
on Home Life
Unfortunately it seems probable that conditions of work in the munition centers have been such as to have a disintegrating effect on home life. Long working hours, frequent long train trips in addition to those hours, overcrowded houses, the increased employment of married women and of women at a distance from their homes have all contributed to this result.
Two quotations, one from official, the other from labor sources, illustrate the way in which home life was too often disrupted by munitions work. According to the first:
While the urgent necessity for women’s work remains, and while the mother’s time and the time of the elder girls is largely given to the making of munitions, the home and the younger children must inevitably suffer. Where home conditions are bad, as they frequently are, where a long working day is aggravated by long hours of traveling and where, in addition, housing accommodation is inadequate, family life is defaced beyond recognition.... Often far from offering a rest from the fatigue of the day, the home conditions offer but fresh aggravation. A day begun at 4 or even 3.30 a.m. for work at 6 a.m., followed by 14 hours in the factory and another 2 or 2½ hours on the journey back, may end at 10 or 10.30 p.m., in a home or lodging where the prevailing degree of overcrowding precludes all possibility of comfortable rest. In such conditions of confusion, pressure and overcrowding, home can have no existence.[263]
Beginning January, 1916, attention to the “welfare” of women workers outside the factory by the Ministry of Munitions no doubt often improved the conditions. But early in 1917 a committee of women labor leaders still felt that home life had in many cases been disorganized.