Domestic war work

[Kellyellie98]

Hello everyone,

There's a gap in my knowledge with what work women did during WW1. The internet only seems to highlight factory work but I wondered more about domestic work. Shops surely had to continue running? What sort of work was available to women outside of factory, farming, and joining a service? 

 

[DavidOwen]

A quick look at FMP newspaper adverts for 1916 for jobs available for women shows there were plenty of opportunities being advertised.

[PRC]

2 hours ago, DavidOwen said:

A quick look at FMP newspaper adverts for 1916 for jobs available for women shows there were plenty of opportunities being advertised.

Lots of opportunities being advertised but not too many situations wanted on the same page. Given the likely higher earning power \ prestige \ comparative respect of many of the jobs created by the wartime economy then I suspect many of those situations vacant went unfulfilled. It wasn't just shopwork, although certainly with the bigger names like the Co-op women stepped up to even take on managerial roles in grocers, drapers & butchery stores, (and that's just the ones that I'm aware of through local newspaper reports). Many industries were replacing men with woman at the insistance of the military authorities - think tram and bus conductors, and later even some drivers. The railway engines and carriages could just as easily be cleaned by woman as men. Signalman and guards could also be replaced - an article titled "Women in the War"  in the Illustrated War News dated Wednesday 10 January 1917, featured these two women:-

Both images courtesy the British Newspaper Archive.

Many industries that traditionally employed women were also repurposed for a modern industrial war and in doing so expanded - cotton mills now produced cotton for uniforms and as the raw ingredient of gun cotton, key to the explosives used by much of the armed forces. Silk workers now made parachutes and more, and with an army marching on its' belly the food processing industry now had large fixed contracts rather than relying on a fickle domestic market - and one that required no expenditure on advertising. For Norwich it was pretty much the last hurrah of the local shoe industry - and one crippled (no pun intended) by a women only strike as they went looking for equality with the male workers. Post war was the start of a long story of decline.

Add in that the telephony system that Britain went to war with in August 1914 was nothing like the one in finished with, with a vast expansion in the number of exhanges and the associated public switchboards, along with a wider deployment in private companies and public concerns of their own switchboards all led to a boom in such work.

But I agree with @DavidOwen that newspapers are a good place to start, even if only applying a kind of reverse logic. Employers putting in for a call-up deferral for a key male employee while they tried a women replacement or because no suitably skilled women had applied  - often challenged by the military representative with examples of where this had worked - is one potential route to explore. Self-employed men who needed more time to train their wives to run the business in their absence or felt they couldn't manage it was another. Another insight, sadly, comes from the post-war reporting of men returning from service to find their jobs taken by women and with their former employer showing no inclination to re-instate them. Some of the subsequent protest marches turned riotous, and with the government spying bolsheviks everywhere were put down with a heavy hand, while leaning on employers to arbitrarily dismiss their female employees.

3 hours ago, Kellyellie98 said:

What sort of work was available to women outside of factory, farming, and joining a service?

Do you mean work on the home front or more specifically domestic servants?

Some "domestic" work no doubt remained - but I suspect much of it was on an industrial scale. The women, employed and volunteers, of the likes of the Red Cross Volunteer Aid Detachments were just as likely to be housemaids, storekeepers, cooks and laundresses as nurses and nursing auxilliaries. Other VAD members were employed as drivers  \ parcel assemblers and even sock knitters - a trawl through the Red Cross Volunteers database will expand on that https://vad.redcross.org.uk/

The expansion in military bases also created roles for women manning and running canteens and onbase shops.

I suspect a combination of absent menfolk and wartime inflation incentivised many women into the workforce - particularly married women and widows trying to get by on separation allowances and war widows pensions. I suspect they would not have been looking at low paid domestic work as a way to pay the rent or put food on the table. Although the origin of one incidence was sad - a coroners inquest on a small child scalded to death after pulling a pot of water down on top of themselves - I think from his remarks the coroner was most scandalized by the comments of the "well dressed" mother. Explaining she was pulling down her second shift of the day and had left her 13 year old daughter in charge, she stated that she now earned enough to pay income tax, something which her husband dead in the war had never done, and that the children enjoyed a better life than he could ever have provided them with - and given a choice she'd make the same decision again to leave the daughter in charge.

The influx of many workers into the centres of war industries also dramatically pushed up rents, which the allowances and pensions being paid by the armed forces failed to keep up with. This appears to have pushed significant numbers to move back in with parents \ extended family. The upside of this is readily available childcare.

The other side of the coin, (again no pun intended), was that the sorts of households that might have employed domestic servants had an income level that meant they were now subject to high rates of taxes, while also feeling the effects of inflation. So some households might have gone without domestic staff, while others employed less - and that's even if they could fill all the positions.

Cheers,
Peter

Edited 13 December , 2023 by PRC
Typos

[Michelle Young]

In Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain talks about the problems in finding good domestic servants. 

[kenf48]

3 hours ago, Kellyellie98 said:

What sort of work was available to women outside of factory, farming, and joining a service? 

 

You may find these pamphlets free to download from TNA useful

Essentially instructions issued to Local Tribunals you will find one of the pamphlets discusses the substitution of women workers in various trades (thus allowing men to be be released for military service}

https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14091004

This table is cited in Deborah Thom 'Nice Girls and Rude Girls Women workers in World war 1', and was first published by the Standing Joint Committee of Women's Industrial Organisation The Position of Women after the War IWM.EMP.4.282

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Nice_Girls_and_Rude_Girls/DzQ1zAEACAAJ?hl=en

Sorry about the quality of the scan but I think you can just about follow the list of occupations or 'Economic Sectors'shown

Dr Thom discusses Trade Unionism amongst women workers and how at the end of the war the encouragement in official circles to promote 'mothers' and what was seen as 'traditional' female roles.  That said she argues that pre-war women were already heavily involved in the workplace as illustrated by the above table.

 

[Kellyellie98]

Brilliant, thank you everyone! That's a good start for me to look into. 

 

I'm really interested in women in the railways now, something I hadn't considered previously. I also didn't realise that tax, and living wages etc would shoot up too. Wasn't there also money taken from wages for the war effort? or was that a voluntary donation? 

[kenf48]

27 minutes ago, Kellyellie98 said:

Brilliant, thank you everyone! That's a good start for me to look into. 

 

I'm really interested in women in the railways now, something I hadn't considered previously. I also didn't realise that tax, and living wages etc would shoot up too. Wasn't there also money taken from wages for the war effort? or was that a voluntary donation? 

The IWM has many sections on women in the war e.g.https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/9-women-reveal-the-dangers-of-working-in-a-first-world-war-munitions-factory

and the railway museum details the work oof women on the railway https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/women-at-work-first-world-war/

In 1914 the rate of end of year inflation in the UK was less than 1%, by 1917 largely driven by wage inflation and shortages it was over 25%. When the war ended there was a prolonged period of deflation in the economy. In 1922 it stood at -14%.

The only money taken was in increased taxation and the effect of higher wages, as described by Peter, making more and more people tax payer with women and their older children earning what one newspaper referred to as 'a King's ransom'. Scandalised not least because they were earning far more than the men at the front.

I've not heard of a 'war tax' during the war people were encouraged to buy war or 'Victory Bonds', as this analysis shows women were involved in this which is not surprising given their men were at war and they were earning good money.

https://bankunderground.co.uk/2021/01/18/how-britain-paid-for-war-bond-holders-in-the-great-war-1914-32/

 

[seaJane]

One more secondary source: Kate Adie wrote a book,  Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. I don't know whether it's still in print, but it should be easy to get hold of from a library or second-hand.

 

Edited 14 December , 2023 by seaJane
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[FROGSMILE]

23 hours ago, Kellyellie98 said:

Hello everyone,

There's a gap in my knowledge with what work women did during WW1. The internet only seems to highlight factory work but I wondered more about domestic work. Shops surely had to continue running? What sort of work was available to women outside of factory, farming, and joining a service? 

 

Kelly the Imperial War Museum is often overlooked and yet it has one of the best collections of photographs and artwork showing women at work during WW1 and you can read some of the details here (note that red headings lead to further relevant detail): https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/a-closer-look-at-the-womens-work-collection

There is also a women’s section in “Voices of the First World War”: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-womens-war-services

See many of the collection of women’s work photographs here (it goes on for many pages): https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/search?query=Women+at+work+&pageSize=30&media-records=records-with-media&style=list&filters[webCategory][Photographs]=on&filters[themeString][British+War+Work+1914-1918]=on

In general I think that the degree of female war effort during WW1 has been woefully overshadowed by that during WW2, and yet these images tell a different story and have left me with the impression that the beginnings of women’s emancipation, as having paid work beyond mere drudgery and in their own right, truly began during WW1.  Sadly many of the advances were halted by the end of the war, and had to start all over again in WW2.  

Edited 14 December , 2023 by FROGSMILE