JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 465
In England,
women were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World
War (1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those
they replaced to go out to the front and die for their country. Thus the women seen here in the News Photo
Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working at spraying tar in the
streets of London,
were appreciated, and tolerated. For
women in England the War
blasted away the contrivances of formally scheduled employment: something like 12% of fall women in England were
working as servants and house cleaners.
Come the War, women were offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide
range and variety of work. The Civil
Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 in 1921, and trade
union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to 1,000,000 in 1918 (with men
showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the most part, though, employers
took advantage of the situation, and the women still generally earned less than
half of the salary as comparable male workers did (or the men they
replaced).
When the end of the War came,
so did the appreciation for the women replacement workers—there was bitter feelings
in the post-war period because of the weak British economy and a scarcity of
jobs. So the women who took the jobs of men
to help the country’s war effort and free up hundreds of thousands of men for
war service became an atavistic action, “taking” the jobs of men who had gone
out to fight for their country. This of course cost many women their jobs, but
the damage had already been deeply done to the pre-1914 British world of the
sexual politics of business-being-done, though it would take World war Ii to
really ingrain the appearance of women in the workforce into the national
psyche.
(Madonna of the tars, right)
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