Women at work

The government was forced to allow women to work in all sorts of jobs which most men (and some women) had previously thought unsuitable for them. They drove trams, buses, and ambulances, became policewomen, operated lathes, and made machine tools. The need for greater production to win the war meant that the woman's role as homemaker and childbearer was no longer considered to be her main duty. Now she was called on to work - though almost always at a lower rate than men for doing much the same job.

Women's wages in industry were, nonetheless, higher than they were in domestic service and the number of women employed as maids and servants in the homes of the wealthy dropped by 400,000 during the war. After the war, many of the young women employed in industry were forced back into domestic service, but work as a servant was now very much seen as a low status job. Women had grown used not just to better paid jobs but to more interesting ones also.

By the beginning of 1918 it was very difficult for the men who ran the country to argue aganist the right of women to vote. Their abilities and achievements were obvious. The Representation of the People Act in 1918 finally gave women the vote, but only if they were aged thirty or more. The government believed that only women of this age were mature enough to use their vote properly. Men, it was agreed, could be trusted to do this at the age of 21. The number of voters increased from 8 million to 21 million. The suffragettes had taken a big step towards equal voting rights for women but it was not until 1928 that women aged 21 and over got the same voting rights as men of that age.

Neil Demarco: Britain and the Great War; Oxford University Press, 1992/2000, page 42