The result of war conditions has naturally been very marked in its effects on the health and well being of the women and children at home. The demand for the work of women ... has been such that a large number of married women have been pressed into industrial employment. This means, on the one hand, a certain neglect of the duty of keeping their homes, and on the other an extra and heavy burden on their strength in order to fulfil, however inadequately, some part of these necessary duties. The children, as well as the women, have suffered from these results.[264]
To be sure, in the first months of the war the increase in family income had often meant better food, but even this advantage tended to disappear with the rapid rise in prices and the actual scarcity of certain products which occurred from time to time.
Development of Personality
in Women War Workers
Nevertheless, surprising as it may seem in view of the harm which war work appears often to have done to home life and sometimes to health, the development of the woman industrial worker under it may prove to be one of the most important changes wrought by the conflict.
An interesting article in The New Statesman[265] suggested that “three years of war have been enough to effect an amazing transformation,” in the average factory woman, especially in the munition centers. They had gained an independence and an interest in impersonal affairs seldom found before the war. “They appear more alert, more critical of the conditions under which they work, more ready to make a stand against injustice than their prewar selves or their prototypes. They seem to have wider interests and more corporate feeling. They have a keener appetite for experience and pleasure and a tendency quite new to their class to protest against wrongs even before they become intolerable.” It is “not that an entire class has been reborn, but that the average factory woman is less helpless, and that the class is evolving its own leaders.” The writer ascribed the change in the main to a wider choice of employments, occasional gains in real wages, praise of the women’s value in war service, and their discontent with the operation of the munitions acts and other government measures:
Again, the brains of the girl worker have been sharpened by the discontent of her family. She is living in an atmosphere of discontent with almost all established things. There is discontent because of the high prices of milk and meat, because of the scarcity of potatoes, sugar, butter or margarine, because of the indigestible quality of the war bread, because of the increased railway fares and the big profits of many employers and contractors. There is discontent with the discipline of the army, with the humiliating position of brothers and husbands and sweethearts who are privates, with the inadequacy of army pensions and the delay in giving them. There is rage against the munitions act, against munitions tribunals and military tribunals. Every member of the family has his or her grievance. The father perhaps is a skilled engineer and is afraid that he is being robbed of the value of his skill by the process of dilution. The eldest son is in the army, and perhaps sends home tales of petty tyrannies, and minor, avoidable irritations. Another son, with incurable physical defects, is forced into the army and falls dangerously ill. One daughter goes to another town to work in a munitions factory, can not get a leaving certificate, and barely earns enough to pay for board and lodging. Thus the women of the family are being brought more than ever before into contact with questions of principles and rights. Questions of government administration are forced upon their notice. And in the factory the very men who used to tell them that trade unionism was no concern of theirs are urging them to organize for the protection of men workers as well as of themselves.... The woman worker who was formerly forbidden by her menfolk to interest herself in public questions is now assured by politicians, journalists, and the men who work at her side that her labor is one of the most vital elements in the national scheme of defence, and that after the war it is going to be one of the most formidable problems of reconstruction. Flattery and discontent have always been the soundest schoolmasters. The factory woman was a case of arrested development, and the war has given her a brief opportunity which she is using to come into line with men of her own class.
Though naturally more guarded in expression, the factory inspectors’ report for 1916 reflected a very similar opinion. The change was noted principally among women substitutes for men. There, especially in heavy work, “the acquisition of men’s rates of pay has had a peculiarly enheartening and stimulating effect.” On the northeast coast in particular, where prewar opportunities for women had been limited and their wages very low, their replacement of men in shipbuilding, munitions, chemicals and iron works had “revolutionized” the position of the woman worker.
“The national gain appears to me to be overwhelming,” it was stated further, “as against all risks of loss or disturbance, in the new self-confidence engendered in women by the very considerable proportion of cases where they are efficiently doing men’s work at men’s rates of pay. If this new valuation can be reflected on to their own special and often highly skilled and nationally indispensable occupations a renaissance may there be effected of far greater significance even than the immediate widening of women’s opportunities, great as that is. Undervaluation there in the past has been the bane of efficiency, and has meant a heavy loss to the nation.”[266]
p The principal effects of the war on the woman worker were strikingly reviewed by Dr. Marion Phillips, at a “conference of working class organizations,” held at Bradford in March, 1917. Dr. Phillips held that the roots of the change lay in the absence of millions of men from their homes on military service and in the fact that for the first time the demand for women workers was greater than the supply. As a result of military demands, wives were deprived of their “dearest and most intimate counsellors,” their husbands, and were obliged to form independent judgments, but gained thereby a “new grasp of experience, a widened outlook and greater confidence in their own judgment.”
The keen demand for women workers resulted in higher wages, greater opportunities for promotion and more openings in the skilled trades. Women learned their own value as workers and a growing desire for equality with male workers was manifested. Higher wages enabled women workers to obtain more food, and there was a general rise in their standard of living.