How much did the First World War change the lives of women in Britain?

The Change Line NO CHANGE TOTAL CHANGE

Did the wartime changes to women’s lives continue into the peace? STAGE THREE Did the wartime changes to women’s lives continue into the peace? The vote Jobs Attitudes

1. The Vote “It would have been utterly impossible for us to have won the war had it not been for the skill, enthusuasm and industry which the women of this country have thrown into the war.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George, speaking in 1918 In 1918 the right to vote was given to: All men over 21. Women over the age of 30, who owned property or were married to a property-owner.

1928: All women over 21 could vote. Result 8 million women 13 million men -had the right to vote. Young women (like the girls who worked in the munitions factories), could not vote. 1928: All women over 21 could vote.

15 women Members of Parliament, 600 men. Change? 1931: 15 women Members of Parliament, 600 men.

2. Jobs When the men came home from the war they wanted their jobs back. A woman who had worked as a bus conductor in the war: “We asked if they could find us a job in the shed, where the buses are parked, or cleaning them. Anything. But no – it had to be men – well, that was natural, wasn’t it?” It was considered women’s patriotic duty to give up work: From the Southampton Times, 1918: “There is no reason to feel sympathetic towards the young woman who has been earning pocket money while the men have been fighting. Women are now required to return to their pots and pans.”

1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act. 2. Jobs 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act. Women could become lawyers, civil servants. Women could serve on juries.

Result Working class women found themselves barred from jobs they had done in the war. They could get jobs: As shop assistants. This often meant long hours: 70-80 hours a week. As servants. Pay was better than before the war: £50 a year.

Change 1910: 32% of women had jobs 1921: 31% of women had jobs

3. Attitudes Sir Herbert Austin, car manufacturer, 1933: “I don’t think a woman’s place is in industry. I think the men ought to be doing the work, not women.” Women were expected to stay and home and look after their husbands and children. The Women’s Institute movement encouraged this. There were 40 Women’s Institutes in 1916, 5,500 by 1937. The first Maternity and Child Welfare Clinics were set up 0.5% of girls stayed at school over the leaving age – 14. The government advised that girls should be given less homework than boys because they were expected to help with the housework.

Change? They might have lost their jobs, but the freedom which a bit of their own money and independence had brought, was not lost so easily: Robert Roberts, writing about Salford “Bold teenage girls, a type never met before, earning plenty of money, began to use face-cream. My elder sister Jenny, who had gone early in the war to better wages in engineering, used cosmetics secretly, until one evening the old man caught her with a whole bagful and threw it on the fire. Hadn’t his neighbour turned his daughters into the street for using this muck? Never again must she dare… Jenny stood unperturbed. ‘I either go on using it’, she said, ‘or you can turn me out.’”

Change? With the men away at war for some years, women had learned how to manage on their own, doing jobs and taking responsibilities which they had never had before. Robert Roberts, writing about Salford “With surprise, women discovered that husbands, home again, were far less the lords and masters of old, but more comrades to be lived with on something like level terms.”

Change? There was a shortage of young men: over 2.5 million had been killed or wounded. Irene Angell remembers: “There wasn’t anybody left. Those who did come home already had somebody. My sister was lucky, she got her friend’s brother, although he was twelve years older than she was. You really had to work hard to get a husband.” Irene found a job in an office and later fell in love with her boss. He had been the innocent party in a divorce some years earlier and wanted to marry Irene. She refused because divorce was a scandal.

short hair, short skirts Change? 1920s fashion: short hair, short skirts Reaction: “The tone of England is looser today than ever I can remember. The flagrant immodesty of the dress of many of our women is a snare and a menace more horrible than German submarines or aeroplanes.” The Bishop of Liverpool, 1920.