school education for training in fitting and turning. The educated
women had also a good effect upon conditions. Bad employers were
restrained by their intelligence and independence from taking
advantage of their more helpless companions, and good employers
and welfare officers found them a useful channel of communication
with the staffs when introducing health services, canteens etc.
It is also probably partly due to them that the number of women
trade unionists doubled during the war. The figures are said to be
350,000 for 1914 and 660,000 for 1918, but they only pretend to being
estimates, and it is probable, owing to the tendency of women to
enter their names after a meeting and then to lose all interest and
pay no further subscriptions, that they are a good deal too high.
Women of a superior general training were found especially useful
in instructing, commanding and supervising other women who had
often in the past resented the elevation to authority of one of
themselves. In the women's services and the land army this aspect
of their work was of the first importance. On ,the land, particularly,
their comparative acquaintance with the country, and their relative
indifference to dark and loneliness, persuaded the town recruits to
endure the terrors and discomforts of winter, while vestiges of
feudal feeling gave them authority with the country women. In
fact, wherever the work ceased to be purely physical, and more and
more as it took on an intellectual quality the extent of a woman's
education was found to determine her aptitude for learning and
performing new work. The university women especially, in spite of
the fact that those available for war-work were still largely of a
uniform type that which had been preparing itself for the teaching
profession found that their training immensely increased their
comparative value in almost every direction, even where their
instruction had not led up to, or especially fitted them for, their
war duties. It is hardly surprising, however, that the best work of all
from a technical point of view was done by those who had been
specifically trained for the jobs they undertook, like the women physi-
cians and surgeons and the women employed on scientific research
in the National Physical and Chemical Laboratories. It is more to be
wondered at that so much could be done by women and girls divorced
from familiar surroundings, and set to adapt themselves to entirely
novel systems of ideas, and to compress the training time of years
allotted to men into a few months or weeks. Not even the at-
mosphere of the army can have been so foreign to the new soldiers-
who as a rule had some notion of its main structure and had often
experienced some form of communal existence as were industrial
and even commercial life to the girls who entered them from their
day schools and their middle-class homes. And yet they adapted
themselves to these new values, not only from duty, but with an
enthusiasm and a quickness which seemed to ^how that the labour,
and the variety and the tension, were congenial to their natures.
Quality of Work. It is not possible here to attempt a final esti-
mate of the qualities their work revealed, but testimony seems
to agree on certain points. Above all they were conscientious;
they were devoted. As long as they retained interest in their work
they endured degrading conditions through monotonous periods of
overstrain without apparently accumulating the resentment which
from time to time flared out among their male colleagues; instead
their health suffered. This tenacity was perhaps due to their
stronger imaginative hold on the purpose to which they were giving
themselves up. In relation to their environment, on the other
hand, they were docile and lacked imagination; as a body they
acquiesced in the conditions they found and made no concerted
effort to change them. When they felt that the life was intolerable
they left it, and the active combative temper of the men roused no
response in them. As individuals they were less disciplined than men,
less calculable, less impressed by traditions and institutions, giving
an effect, for all their high spirits and quickness of tongue, of greater
detachment. In the mass they were difficult to organize, elusive,
fatalistic, sceptical and inarticulate. If they did combine they were
faithful to their leaders, whom they preferred of a sensible and
reasoning rather than of an idealistic type. Policy too, to obtain
their approval, must be direct, concrete, and likely to produce an
immediate effect. They were fortunate in their representatives,
and the knowledge, ability and public spirit of the women trade-
union officials secured for them an influence to which the numerical
proportion of organized women would not have entitled them.
Women might well have been proud to support societies to which
they owed so much. But they seem as a rule to have left them when
they left munitions work. They went back each to her private anx-
ieties and hardships, showing no desire to continue banded together
either to protect their interests or to continue their relationship, and
seeking no outlet for the sense of injustice which some of them felt.
A few of the ex-service women formed clubs and groups under the
leadership of their old officers, but not the hundreds of thousands of
munition workers, clerks and civil servants whose service took a
more democratic form.
Effect on Industry. It was not without difficulty that trade and
industry were adjusted to fit these feminine millions. From the
winter of 1914 the Government had been anxious to extend the
use of women for the production of munitions, and in the summer of
1915 agreements were signed with the engineering unions which re-
moved in theory the main barrier to their employment on men's
work in the metal trades; but it was not until the spring of 1916 that
substitution made any real headway. The employers had first to be
convinced that they would not cause more trouble than they were
worth, the factories had to be prepared for them, the work adjusted
to suit their strength and skill, and, hardest of all, the men in each
shop persuaded not only to submit to their presence but to cooperate
actively in helping them to learn and to carry on their work. The
women themselves meanwhile had to be trained. From July 1915
onward the Ministry of Munitions, in conjunction with the Board
of Education, was teaching women with great success in technical
schools and instructional workshops for the first year, simple
repetition work on shells and fuzes; later, work on aeroplanes and
for positions as tool-setters, inspectors or charge hands; and, finally,
the really skilled work of fitting and turning.
In all the Government schools trained 45,000 women, and very
large numbers were trained by those private firms who preferred to
give their own instruction. Under both methods it was found that
they were good material, and that the period required before they
could be fitted into their niches in the new schemes of mass produc-
tion was shorter than anyone had thought possible. But the teach-
ing of the women was the least of the trouble. To the last a certain
number of employers were hostile to their introduction, and by more
or less overt collusion with their staffs could make it impracticable
or unsuccessful. Where this was the case the only weapon of the
Government was to create a shortage of labour in their works by
removing their War Munitions Volunteers and adopting similar
coercive measures. This could not always be done in the face of the
representations which the firm were nearly always able to secure
from the Supply Department with whom their contract was made,
that upon its instant fulfilment depended the issue of the war.
Employers anxious to support the Government as a rule found the
carrying on of their work under war conditions sufficiently harassing
with a competent male staff: they could not be expected to welcome
a change which meant providing special new accommodation a
much more troublesome matter than might be supposed in town fac-
tories where every inch of space was already needed ; reconsidering
each one of the methods to which they were accustomed, and
antagonizing their staffs, in order to bring in labour certain to be
relatively inefficient for the time, and of unknown potential efficiency.
Their grounds of objection were substantial and their position
strong, and it is to the credit of industry that some of the larger
firms forestalled the Government in their introduction of women's
labour. To effect this it had been necessary to bring the bulk of the
work all of which in some firms had hitherto been carried on entirely
by skilled men within the average capacity of untried and almost
unskilled persons. Of the three grades into which it could be roughly
divided skilled, semi-skilled (which included the repetition work),
and unskilled and labouring work the last required the most ad-
1050
WOMEN'S EMPLOYMENT
justment and was the least easy to adjust. Every device that was
possible was provided, regardless of expense, to minimize the strength
required in lifting, hauling, loading, stoking, scraping boilers, and
the specially hot and heavy work done in foundries and retort-
houses, chemical works and tanneries. At the end of it all, the em-
ployment of women on this work was costly and ineffectual. Three
women were needed on an average to do the job of two men, and at
special points one man's work would occupy two or even *hree
women, while the hardest jobs had now to be performed continuously,
instead of as part only of their task, by the remaining men.
On repetition work the sweeping changes that were made were
due not so much to the sex of the new operators as to war conditions.
The subdivision practised was the natural result of mass production,
and has remained where mass production has remained, though men
have replaced women at the machines. The fool-proof devices were
a protection against the lack of experience of the dilutees, whether
men or women, and they too have survived as a means of decreasing
worry and improving output.
On neither of these grades, where they already existed as such, did
the men make serious opposition to the coming of women. The
general unions to which most of them belonged were not before the
war the centralized and powerful bodies they are now ; they had been
able to establish few privileges, and their men were at the mercy of
the recruiting officers. They therefore treated the matter as one of
individual feeling rather than of labour policy, and were entitled
to more gratitude than they received from their country for the un-
selfish way in which most of them helped the women who were to
fill their places and make it possible for them to be spared for the
army. It was the splitting up of the skilled work, and the consequent
reduction of many of its parts to a semi-skilled rank, which produced
the bitter opposition which increased rather than diminished as the
war went on. This was due in some degree to mass production but
more to the shortness of the training which was all the urgency of the
times allowed. The strength of the women was insufficient for labour-
ing work, but by the end of the war it became clear that they did not
lack the intelligence and character necessary for the acquirement of
an exacting technique. What follows is the official verdict of the
Ministry of Munitions:
" Many women might become skilled mechanics, given the
necessary training and experience. But these were precluded by the
conditions under which munitions were manufactured. Intensive
training sufficed to meet the emergency of the moment, but it was
no substitute for a thorough apprenticeship; and the (male) ap-
prentices who were up-graded under schemes of dilution suffered
like others from premature specialization. Subject to this limita-
tion, there were few branches of skilled work which some women did
not execute with success. They made tools and gauges to the finest
limits, they set up complex automatics, they machined and fitted
the most delicate mechanisms, they inspected the rifling of guns and
mastered the use of the micrometer and vernier, they conducted
scientific tests in the laboratory, they acted as charge hands and
forewomen."
Had the war continued they would have been used upon this work
jn increasing numbers'. As things were, however, it was more econom-
ical, given the large output, to train them and the male dilutees with
them, to do one particular part of the complex job which a skilled
man had been accustomed to carry out, and whose more difficult
portions only were now left for him. Most of the work of a skilled
category given to women was actually work which had been treated
in this manner. For such subdivided tasks they were found perfectly
suitable, and the checks to their more extensive use were, in the
first place, the uneconomical rates of wages which the men's unions
had imposed as the price of dilution; and secondly, the almost des-
perate opposition with which their employment was met by the
skilled men. It was not only the employers who objected to giving
a woman the full rate of a skilled man when all she could do was one
among his many different jobs : the men actually working with them,
however much they agreed in principle with the system of the rate
for the job, could not bear with equanimity the sight of raw, un-
qualified women receiving wages almost equal to their own.
The obstructive policy pursued by the skilled unions was directed
as much against mass production in general as against women in
particular. They knew that the women must go after the war; but
they feared, not unnaturally, lest the new methods and processes
should stay, which meant working toward a state when the skilled
man who could not find employment in the tool-room, or as a super-
visor, or on experimental work, would find himself degraded to the
position of a machine-minder, with his privileges gone, the interest of
his life as a craftsman gone, his standard of living in danger, and
the prospect before him of becoming gradually merged in the masses
of the semi-skilled. Much of this had happened in America, and the
utterances of certain employers gave ground for thinking that in
England it was at least desired. In small sections of the metal trades
they could almost see it coming to pass. On sheet-metal work, for
instance, machines and processes were brought in by which women
and boys could perform rapidly and cheaply work which had been
slowly done by hand by skilled sheet-metal workers. The men were
released for the army and left knowing that their work would be
gone if ever they came back. It was no wonder that opposition was
felt at such a time to this acceleration of the process by which in-
dustry develops for the benefit perhaps of future generations but to
the hurt of those whose whole equipment for life is their suitability
to one of its changing industrial phases.
If this was the origin of the continued disputes that attended the
incoming of the women, they were embittered by the fact that
nothing was more vague, or varied more from district to district,
than workshop practice with regard to demarcation of work. Some
shops were entirely staffed by skilled men and apprentices ; others did
the same work with a few skilled men and a residuum of semi-skilled
machinists, unskilled men and boys. Claims were put forward by
the unions that work should be treated as skilled and carry the
skilled man's rate which would have covered half the work habit-
ually done by boys; and the employers on their side seemed to con-
sider that the slightest change in a job handed over to women
dropped it at once to the minimum labouring rate. These quarrels,
at first more or less local, so far from being settled were growing in
intensity when the Armistice removed their cause. They did not
begin until the autumn of 1915, when the introduction of women on
to certain machines in Glasgow opened the troubles on the Clyde.
As will have been gathered, permission to employ women on
men's work in the engineering trades had been gained at the price
of a wages settlement, intended not so much to benefit the women as
to protect the skilled man's rate. It maintained piece-prices and
stated that the skilled man's time-rate must be paid to women
undertaking a skilled man's work. These compacts, known as the
Shells and Fuzes Agreement and the Treasury Agreement, were
arrived at in March 1915 between the Government and the engineer-
ing unions, and it was hoped that dilution would immediately follow
upon them. Unfortunately they did not produce the results ex-
pected, and in July it was found necessary to supplement them by
statutory powers under the Munitions of War Act. In Sept. the
new Ministry, impelled by a pledge given by Mr. Lloyd George in
July that there should be no sweated labour in the munitions trades,
appointed a committee to settle the wages of the women, who were
by this time fast entering the metal trades. The committee, repre-
senting the Ministry, the trade and the women, recommended
the time-rate of i a week for women on men's work other than skilled
men's work. This rate, though finally nearly doubled by the awards
issued from time to time by the special Arbitration Tribunals to
which claims for increases were referred by the Ministry of Muni-
tions, remained the basis of their payment throughout the war, and
the standard by which wages were unavoidably fixed for other
classes of women. Thus women on munitions work other than
men's work came finally to a basis rate of 5jd. per hour. The i
rate was imposed on the National Factories already among the
largest employers of women and handed on as a recommendation
to private munitions firms, a method which was found inadequate to
ensure payment. It was therefore embodied in a Statutory Order,
binding upon all controlled establishments under Sec. 5 of the
Munitions of War Act. From that moment State regulation of the
wages of women on munitions work, under pressure from trade
unions representing both the women entering and the men displaced,
became more comprehensive every few months, until at the time of
the Armistice the Ministry of Munitions' orders covered about 2,000,-
000 women employed in 27 trades, and a similar number were cov-
ered by arrangements made with the Admiralty and the War Office.
The work of dealing with women's wages was then taken over by
the Ministry of Labour in accordance with the provisions of the
Wages (Temporary) Regulation Act, which lapsed only in the
autumn of 1920, leaving the general level of women's rates in the
trades affected at about three times the very inadequate amounts
1 is. to I2s. on an average that had been usual before the war.
This regulation was the price of dilution, and it was only natural
therefore that men anxious to oppose dilution should pick endless
quarrels with the interpretation placed upon the wording of the
agreements and pledges by the Government departments concerned,
and also with their carrying put of their own orders. Into the
details of these controversies it is not possible to enter here the
whole subject is covered by the report of the War Cabinet Commit-
tee on Industry which sat to consider the question, as well as to
deliberate on the theoretical problems of women's wages. On the
whole it may be said that the real basis of the men's charges was
their objection to dilution and not any important dereliction on the
part of the Government. Until the end of 1920 the women in the
industries which had been engaged on war work were adequately
protected, and they themselves realized this, and showed that they
did so by the steadiness and docility with which they continued to
work in the face of incitements to unrest. From first to last the
time lost by strikes among women on munitions work was negligible,
and only one case was brought to light where they were really re-
stricting output.
While this was going on in the munitions trades proper which
included among others shipbuilding, engineering, electrical en-
gineering, ordnance and aircraft work, wire-rope, cables, hemp-rope,
tubes, iron and steel manufacture, scientific and optical instrument
making, and the manufacture of explosives, chemicals, rubber,
asbestos, packing-cases, and tin boxes the recruiting crisis which
took place in the winter of 1915 forced other trades to take steps to
denude themselves of men and carry on with women's labour. This
was done as a rule under national agreements between the unions in
WOMEN'S EMPLOYMENT
1051
a trade and the employers, and it was generally made clear that the
work handed over to women would be relinquished by them at the
end of the war. They also dealt as a rule with wages, laying down
rates which equalled in some cases though not as a rule in industries
where women were expected to be admitted to truly skilled work
the whole man's rate. For instance, women on men's work on the
railways or on process work in the seed-crushing mills, started at the
man's minimum rate, but most of the agreements provided roughly
for equivalent pay for equivalent work. Allusions were also made
to the conditions under which the work was to be done and to
measures designed to protect the women from injury to their health.
These agreements were concluded without much friction and were
carried out as a rule in a generous spirit.
Agricultural Work.-''The other great industry where the in-
troduction of women caused trouble was agriculture. In spite of
the efforts and the efficient organization of the Women's Land Army,
and in spite of the satisfactory work acknowledged to be done by the
women, the increase in their numbers during the whole war was only
33,000 less than 50% on the 1914 figures of 80,000. To these must
be added some of the women entered under the head of casual labour,
but it is not a good turnover for a trade employing so large a number
of men. The cause was partly the obstinate refusal of the farmers
to employ women which in itself rose in part from their dislike of
parting with labour often consisting of their relatives and always
more closely tied to them than the town workman can be to his
employer and partly to the fact that work on the land did not
prove attractive to women. The country women were not of the
temperament which embraces novelties, and the town women dis-
liked being billeted among the hostile farmers, and also the discom-
forts of a country winter. In the few districts where the custom
survives of women working on the land, such as Eversham, a district
of small-holdings, there was further discouragement from the
country women, who disliked the introduction of " dressed-up "
strangers into the fields where they were accustomed to work in their
ordinary long clumsy skirts. It was finally found necessary for the
land army to cover the country with an organization which would
keep in touch with practically all its members, to provide boots and
outfits for recruits, to arrange for camps where women could live
together, and in short to abandon the view that women could be
expected to go on the land as self-sufficing units. As an army an
alien force imported into the countryside it was found possible
to introduce them to all the lighter and much of the more skilled
work of agriculture with excellent results, but it is probable that
only after two generations of such employment would the industry
be prepared to admit that the experiment had been made and had
proved successful.
The Civil Service. In the army, navy and the air force the pro-
longed resistance with which the idea of employing women was met
for so long came entirely from the employing or official side. By
their male colleagues they were received not only with acquiescence
but with pleasure, and as they had obviously to live in segregated
units they were not grudged their inevitable proportion of re-
sponsible and well-paid posts. Into the Civil Service, on the other
hand, they were early welcomed ; but, once there, only a very few
individuals from among the 162,000 recruits, who included numbers
of women with university degrees, were given any opportunity
of earning any salary that any man might have envied, or of rising
to any work superior to that of secretaries and clerks. Where they
were found in such positions it was almost invariably either as super-
visors of the women staffs or because the work of their branch re-
lated to women and the appointment had been made as a concession
to public opinion, as in the case of the women in the Ministry of