Keeping the Home Front Moving
To fill the gap left by a generation of fighting men, more than a million women took the chance to join the workforce between 1914 and 1918. They worked across the economy - from tram drivers and train cleaners, to postal workers and police patrols. Watch the video clip below for some information about the home front and the role of women. If you don't have audio, use closed captioning.
Inside a World War I Factory
The wartime woman worker producing munitions for the front is among the most familiar visual legacies of the war. But conditions were poor and the work was arduous. Although figures were suppressed to keep morale high, accidents were common. An explosion at a TNT plant in Silvertown, East London, cost 73 people their lives and destroyed hundreds of nearby homes in January 1917.
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The Gender Gap
Though women often earned more than they had before the war, workers in munitions factories were still paid as little as half the wages of the men doing similar jobs. Factory work was often monotonous. Women often found themselves doing jobs that had been simplified into a series of unskilled tasks. The workers of one factory filled over 17 million shells in the four years of war. When productivity was all that mattered, there was no work/life balance. In order to keep pace with the demand from the front line, 12 hour shifts were common - and some women worked 13 days without a break.
What did WWI really do for women?
The war changed women's lives, and in some ways for the better. They showed society that they were able to do a 'mans job' and were intellectually more than capable of taking part in society. However, those gains could not be completely consolidated after the war was over; many women were forced from their jobs once the men returned and expected to go back into domestic life. Many women had earned the right to vote, but such things as going to university or working as politicians were still overwhelmingly the domain of men.