WOMEN'S WAR WORK AS IT AFFECTED PUBLIC OPINION
"A land of settled Government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent."
The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them
serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of
employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than
this, it revolutionized men's minds and their conception of the sort of
work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable. It opened men's
eyes to the national waste involved in condemning women to forms of
work needing only very mediocre intelligence. It also opened their eyes
to the national as well as the personal value of the ordinary domestic
work of women, which has been in their hands for uncounted generations.
It ploughed up the hardened soil of ancient prejudice, dissolving it
and replacing it by a soil capable of fructifying the seeds of new
ideas. Not even the most inveterate of antisuffragists could have
ventured to say, after the experience gained by the war, what one of
them quoted on a previous page had said just before the war, to the
effect that, apart from breeding, women were of no national importance
whatever.
It made women themselves, as well as men, realize the great national
importance of women's ordinary domestic work. One example which went
the round of the Press will illustrate this. In a convalescent camp
of 2,820 men in the South of England the employment of women cooks
in the place of men caused a saving in one month of £900, and at the
same time the men were better and not worse fed. The saving was not
effected by cutting down the wages bill or by stinting the supplies,
but by the more skilful use of food-stuffs and the sensible expedient
of employing those who knew their job in the place of those who did
not. As an example, it may be mentioned that in many soldiers' camps,
employing men cooks, the tea, served out in ample quantities and of
excellent quality, was thrown away in consequence of the adoption of
the odious and filthy trick of boiling the water for it in the same
vessels, uncleansed, in which the meat for the mid-day dinner had been
boiled. The result was illustrative of bad work in general; the tea
was wasted, the men were disgruntled, and a general impression created
that Government property could be thrown away without doing any harm to
anyone.
John Bright used to say that the one good thing about war was that
it taught people geography. If he were living now he might very truly
say that it taught people political economy; that a nation grows rich
by producing, and not by destroying; that all waste is creative of
poverty. War even illuminates the abstruse and difficult subject of
foreign exchanges, and shows that no nation grows rich by printing
promises to pay on pieces of paper. War also teaches the supreme
national value of life, and illuminates Ruskin's saying, "There is no
wealth but life." It is a realization of this which has fundamentally
raised the position of women in every country which has come within the
radius of its great searchlights.
The actual steps by which the war raised the industrial status of
women from serfdom to freedom are not difficult to trace. In the
first eighteen months of the war more than five million young men
from every class, but mainly from the flower of the industrial
population, volunteered for military service. Before the end of the war
Great Britain was maintaining in the war more than eight and a half
million men.[6] This naturally left a shortage of labour in nearly
all industries, including agriculture. Naturally also there was,
simultaneously with this reduction in numbers of the men in industry, a
huge increase in the demand of our own Government and the Governments
of our Allies for arms and ammunition, cloth for uniforms, boots,
ships, hutments, food for the armies, optical glass, and every sort of
military equipment. Every man and woman who could work in the fields
or factories producing these things could get continuous employment at
wages higher than had ever before been paid. In September, 1915, after
fourteen months of war, the rate of unemployment registered at Labour
Exchanges was only ½ per cent., the lowest on record. The weekly sum
paid in wages had gone up by the end of October by £519,484. In March
of the same year what is known as the Treasury agreement with the Trade
Unionists came into existence, by which the trade unions consented, in
face of the national emergency, to suspend for the duration of the war
their rules and customs which prevented the employment of women in most
of the skilled trades. The Treasury, on its part, gave a solemn promise
not to use women as a reservoir of cheap labour, and agreed to give the
same wages for the same output, and, moreover, to restore by Act of
Parliament when the war was over the pre-war practices of trade unions,
which had severely limited the employment of women. Women themselves
were not in any way consulted when this agreement was arrived at. They
were, therefore, not parties to it; and suffragists generally, while
welcoming the breaking down of the barriers which prevented women
having a free choice in industry, even if this were only temporary,
felt that the restoration of pre-war practices by Act of Parliament
when the war was concluded would make the industrial position of women,
in a sense, worse than ever; for formerly, as they pointed out, women
were excluded from nearly all the best paid trades simply by the rules
of private societies: it was a different and a worse position to be
excluded from them by statute.
In 1915, however, it was from every point of view of the first
importance to get the trade union embargo on women's labour removed;
and when it was removed, instantly evidence began to pour in of the
high productivity of women's work. It was almost ridiculous to watch
the amazement of the ordinary man when he saw how rapidly women
learned men's jobs, and how, by their patriotic zeal and entire
innocence of the trade union practice of ca' canny, their output
frequently exceeded, and exceeded largely, the output of men working
the same machinery for the same number of hours. The first evidence
which reached the public of the high efficiency of women's labour was
contained in an article in the trade journal _The Engineer_ of August
20th, 1915, the following passage from which is here quoted:
"There is a widespread idea that the only machines which women can
work are automatic or semi-automatic tools with which it is impossible
to make mistakes. This idea is being daily disproved in the factory
to which we have referred above, where some most delicate operations,
necessitating the exercise of great skill and high intelligence, are
being performed. We need only mention one case, but it will appeal
to every mechanical engineer. In a certain screwing operation it was
customary before the employment of women to rough the thread out with
the tool, and then to finish it off with taps. Some trouble having
arisen owing to the wearing of the taps, the women of their own
initiative did away with the second operation, and are now accurately
chasing out the threads to gauge with the tool alone. This is work of
which any mechanic might feel proud.... In fact, it may be stated with
absolute truth that women have shown themselves perfectly capable of
performing operations which have hitherto been exclusively carried out
by men."
Sir William Beardmore, then President of the Iron and Steel Institute,
and Chairman of the Parkhead Ironworks, Glasgow, spoke in his
presidential address of the high productivity of women's labour. He
quoted the case of a new machine introduced by his firm, of which it
was desired to test the utility. A good workman was induced with some
difficulty to try it and to lay aside, for the sake of the experiment,
the traditional restriction of output. The machine did well, but not
so well as the firm had been led to expect. Then another experiment
was made, that of putting women on the job. "Using the same machines,
and working the same number of hours, their output was more than
double that of the thoroughly trained mechanic." The newspapers about
this time began to be full of articles praising up to the skies the
"wonderful," "amazing," "extraordinary" mechanical capability of women.
The case was quoted of a woman, formerly a charwoman, who had been put
on to do gun breech work. Her job was to bore a hole ⅛ inch in diameter
dead true through 12 inches of solid steel. The test was the tally of
broken tools, and at the time of writing this woman, the former "char,"
had a clean slate. Every successive Minister of Munitions, and almost
every other Minister, spoke enthusiastically of the extraordinary value
to the nation of women's work. Mr. Lloyd George said: "Their work is
absolutely indispensable, and they themselves are extraordinarily
adaptable." And again: "I am anxious to bear testimony to the
tremendous part played by the women of England in this vital epoch of
human history." Mr. Montagu said in the House of Commons in his first
speech after becoming Minister of Munitions: "Women of every station,
with or without previous experience ... have proved themselves able to
undertake work which before the war was regarded solely as the province
of men, and often of skilled men alone. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that our armies have been saved and victory assured by the women
in the munition factories." Mr. Churchill confessed that without
the work of women it would have been impossible to win the war; and
also referred to the excellence of its quality, as well as the enormous
character of its volume.
[Illustration: PRO PATRIA: A TRIBUTE TO WOMAN'S WORK IN WAR-TIME.
(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)
_Punch_, January 26, 1916.]
[Facing page 112.
]
Lord Selborne, as Minister of Agriculture, gave unstinted praise to
women's work on farms, and said he had heard nothing but unqualified
praise of the hundreds of women thus employed.
All the foregoing we were able to reckon among the supporters of
women's political enfranchisement. But we began to be aware of a
new note among the voices that go to make up public opinion when we
discovered commercial and financial magnates, managers of railways and
other great industrial concerns, and old-fashioned country gentlemen
not hitherto connected in any way with our political aims, joining in
the chorus which was now loudly chanting the praises of women's work.
A very interesting and important article on Women in Industry will be
found in the _Quarterly Review_, July, 1919, by Sir Lynden Macassey,
Chairman of the National Tribunal on Women's Wages, Chairman of the
Clyde Dilution Commission, and a member of the War Cabinet Committee on
Women in Industry. In this _Quarterly_ article, among other significant
things, he says that by the end of the war "women had literally leapt
as agents of production, and by inherent economic powers and aptitude,
into a position of eminence in the economic world previously undreamt
of even by themselves" (p. 79). On another page he says that, "where
the work required constant alertness, a sure, deft touch, delicacy of
manipulation—in short, a combination of quick intelligence and manual
dexterity within a limited ambit—women were invariably superior to
men" (p. 81). I, for one, can never believe that any Act of Parliament
can thrust women back into the industrial morass in which they were
stifled before the war.
Lord Revelstoke, speaking as an expert on finance, said that the
tapping of the "new reservoir" of women's labour had saved the
financial situation by enabling the country to keep up the volume of
its exports. Even Lord Curzon, Chairman of the Antisuffrage League, and
Mr. Asquith, our chief political adversary, surprised us by joining
with Mr. Balfour in signing a letter to the Press containing a strong
appeal for funds for the extension of the buildings of the London
School of Medicine for Women. "Is Saul also among the prophets?" we
asked each other. Mr. Walter Long, at that date an opponent of our
enfranchisement, included women in his National Register Bill, saying
that women themselves had made an almost unanimous demand for this,
and he would look upon their exclusion "as a serious rebuff wholly
unjustifiable in face of the splendid services which they had rendered
already to the prosecution of the war." Mr. Walter Long, too, had
greatly delighted us at a meeting in Grosvenor House to promote the
employment of women on the land by exclaiming that, although the
movement was going on well, "yet there were still, unfortunately,
villages to be found where the women had become imbued with the idea
that woman's place is home." "That idea," he added, "must be met and
combated."
Even more extraordinary, however, were the signs which now began to be
seen of Mr. Asquith's change of view. This was first foreshadowed in
his words spoken in the House of Commons on the heroic death of Edith
Cavell in September, 1915. Referring to what that year had produced to
justify "faith in the manhood and womanhood of our people," he added,
speaking particularly of Miss Cavell: "She has taught the bravest man
amongst us a supreme lesson of courage; yes, and in this United Kingdom
and throughout the Dominions of the Crown there are thousands of such
women, _but a year ago we did not know it_." We suffragists rejoiced
in this change of tone. At the same time, we wondered where he could
have lived all his sixty odd years without discovering that courage
was not the exclusive attribute of the male sex. At this time—1916,
1917—conversions of important public men and of newspapers came in,
not by twos and threes, but by battalions. The Press became full of
wonderful instances of women's courage and capacity, and told of nurses
standing back from the lifeboats of a torpedoed ship, who, when the
word went forth, "Save the women first," gave the reply, "Fighting men
first; they are the country's greatest need." The Prefect of Constanza
was quoted, who saw the work of our women orderlies in connection with
the Scottish Women's Hospitals, and said: "It is extraordinary how
these women endure hardships; they refuse help, and carry the wounded
themselves. They work like navvies. No wonder England is a great
country if the women are like that." Another instance of the courage of
women which deeply affected public opinion was afforded at an inquest
on the bodies of the victims of an explosion at a shell factory in the
North of England. Twenty-six women had been killed, and about thirty
injured. The behaviour of the women was declared to be worthy of the
highest praise. "They displayed the greatest coolness and perfect
discipline, both in helping to remove the injured and in continuing to
carry on the work of the factory." It was announced in the Press that
Sir Douglas Haig would be asked to let the men at the front know of the
courage and spirit which animated their womenfolk at home. Our feeling
about all this was, not that women had changed, but that the public
attitude towards them and appreciation of them had changed.
[Illustration: _Man of the World_ (lighting up): "We'll 'ave to give it
'em, I expect, Chorlie!"
(Reproduced by special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_.)
_Punch_, November 30, 1910]
[Facing page 116.
]
Among the conversions to suffrage views at this time, none were
more valuable to us than those of which we had evidence in the
Press. Our old friends the _Manchester Guardian_, the _Daily News_,
the _Aberdeen Free Press_, the _Nation_, the _New Statesman_, etc.,
stood by us, and were more valued than ever; but we welcomed new
recruits in _The Times_, the _Daily Mail_, the _Globe_, the _Evening
News_, and _Observer_. Miss Violet Markham, once a chief among the
antisuffragists, was known to have withdrawn her opposition. Her war
work had brought her in contact with some of our most active societies,
and she was understood to have said that she would never in future say
anything against suffragists. Her conversion may be assumed to have
been fairly complete, as she consented to stand as a Liberal candidate
for the Mansfield Division of Nottinghamshire at the General Election
in December, 1918. One of our chief opponents in the Press was reported
to have said: "The women were wonderful! Their adaptability, freshness
of mind, and organizing skill were magnificent. Men were making too
great a mess of the world, and needed helpers without their own
prejudices, idleness, and self-indulgence."
The conversion of other well-known public men, formerly our opponents,
became known about this time. Among these may be mentioned Lord Derby
and his brother, Sir Arthur Stanley, Chairman of the British Red Cross
and St. John of Jerusalem Nursing Association; Lord Faber, Mr. Winston
Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sir Croydon Marks. Two former
antisuffragists, both Members of Parliament, one a Liberal and the
other a Conservative, may be quoted as representative of what was going
on in men's minds. The Liberal, who had hitherto pleaded militancy
as an excuse for his antisuffragism, said at the annual meeting of
Liberals in his constituency: "Any party which did not realize that
the women had made good their cause by their services where they had
formerly spoilt it by their threats must be blind"; and he held there
should be no widening of the franchise for men without bringing in
women on the same terms. The Conservative said simply: "I have always
been an antisuffragist, but the women have served their country so
magnificently that after this I shall support giving them the vote."
It is very significant that, while these wholesale conversions were
taking place in this country, thus preparing the way for a sweeping
victory for women's suffrage in the House of Commons, a similar change,
brought about by similar causes, had already, in 1916, taken place in
Canada. In that year a great suffrage movement swept over Canada, like
a mighty wind, from the West to the East. One after another, Alberta,
Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia enfranchised their women.
In British Columbia, a referendum (only men voting) showed a majority
of more than two to one for women's franchise, and the soldiers'
vote, which came in later, only swelled the large majority. Ontario
followed. The late Sir Wilfred Laurier, once Liberal Premier, announced
his conversion. He had for years been an important opponent.
The Nova Scotia legislature passed a Women's Suffrage Bill without
opposition; and in May, 1917, Sir Robert Borden announced his intention
to introduce a women's suffrage measure for the whole of Canada, thus
giving women the federal vote. This intention was faithfully carried
into effect in time for women to vote at the General Election, which
was held in 1917. The Province of Alberta, in the meantime, had
bettered its own record by returning a lady, Miss Roberta Catherine
MacAdams, to its Legislative Assembly. An interesting feature of her
election was that she was chosen entirely by men who were performing
military service in Europe. There were twenty men candidates and one
woman, and Miss MacAdams was elected. Thus the whole Empire seemed by
one impulse to be moving in the direction of women's enfranchisement.
About this time a professional man of wide outlook and long experience
wrote:
"One of the greatest benefits which I look for from the war is that
women will come by their own. The tribute to the efficiency of women's
work now being paid by managers of railways and munition works—many
of them unwilling witnesses—are most hopeful signs. After this it
seems impossible that women should be denied their fair share in the
national councils. This opens a wide vista of other resulting reforms,
which almost makes one wish to be young again, so that one might see
what will happen in the next fifty years."
Women did come by their own, not quite directly, but through "the
verdurous gloom and winding mossy ways" of the parliamentary wrangle
over the Special Register Bill and the Speaker's conference to be
described in the next chapter.