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[Illustration: THE MANUFACTURE OF 4.5-INCH CARTRIDGE CASES: OPERATING THE
DRAWING PRESS]
THE WOMAN'S PART
A Record of Munitions Work
by
L. K. YATES
New York
George H. Doran Company
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ADVENT OF WOMEN IN ENGINEERING TRADES 7
SHARING A COMMON TASK 9
DILUTION 11
HEROISM IN THE WORKSHOP 12
II. TRAINING THE MUNITION WORKER 14
THE QUINTESSENCE OF THE WORK 15
THE INSTRUCTIONAL FACTORY 17
FIRST STEPS IN INDUSTRIAL LIFE 18
III. AT WORK--I. 20
SHELLS AND SHELL CASES 21
IN THE FUSE-SHOP 23
CARTRIDGES AND BULLETS 25
IV. AT WORK--II. 28
THE MAKING OF AIRCRAFT 28
OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS 30
IN THE SHIPYARDS 33
V. COMFORT AND SAFETY 37
WELFARE SUPERVISION 37
PROTECTIVE CLOTHING 41
REST-ROOMS AND FIRST AID 42
WOMEN POLICE 43
VI. OUTSIDE WELFARE 45
RECREATION 45
MOTHERHOOD 47
THE FACTORY NURSERY 48
VII. GROWTH OF THE INDUSTRIAL CANTEEN 52
GENERAL PRINCIPLES 54
THE WORKER'S OASIS 55
VIII. HOUSING 57
BILLETING 58
TEMPORARY ACCOMMODATION 59
PERMANENT ACCOMMODATION 61
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE MANUFACTURE OF 4.5-INCH CARTRIDGE CASES:
OPERATING THE DRAWING PRESS _Frontispiece_
PAGE
TURNING THE COPPER BAND OF A 9.2-INCH HIGH-EXPLOSIVE SHELL 16
DRILLING SAFETY-PIN HOLE IN FUSE 16
INSPECTING AND GAUGING FUSES 17
TURNING THE OUTSIDE AND FORMING THE NOSE-END OF A 9.2-INCH
HIGH-EXPLOSIVE SHELL 17
ASSEMBLING FUSES 20
COOLING SHELL FORGINGS 20
OPERATING A LUMSDEN PLAIN GRINDER: RE-FORMING 8-INCH
HIGH-EXPLOSIVE CUTTERS 21
ENGRAVING METAL PARTS FOR COMPASSES 28
COLOURING AEROPLANE PLANES 28
CHIPPING AND GRINDING BLADES OF CAST IRON PROPELLER WITH
PORTABLE TOOLS 29
WOMAN ACTING AS MATE TO JOINER MAKING SEA-PLANE FLOATS 29
CUTTING FRAYED-EDGE TAPE 36
BRAZING TURBINE ROTOR SEGMENT 36
MOUNTING CARDS FOR DRY COMPASSES 37
TREADLE POLISHING-MACHINES, FOR SMOOTHING LENSES 37
SLITTING AND ROUGHING OPTICAL GLASS 44
VIEW OF CANTEEN KITCHEN 44
WEIGHING FERRO CHROME FOR ANALYSIS 45
BALSAMING LENSES 52
MAKING INSTRUMENT SCALES 53
PAINTING A SHIP'S SIDE IN DRY DOCK 60
GENERAL VIEW OF WOMEN AT WORK ON AIRCRAFT FABRIC 61
THE CANTEEN 61
THE WOMAN'S PART
CHAPTER I: THE ADVENT OF WOMEN IN ENGINEERING TRADES
SHARING A COMMON TASK--DILUTION--HEROISM IN THE WORKSHOP
In a period of titanic events it is difficult to characterize a single
group of happenings as of special significance, yet at the end of the war
it is likely that Great Britain will look back to the transformation of
her home industries for war purposes as one of the greatest feats she has
ever accomplished. The arousing of a nation to fight to the death for the
principle of Liberty is doubtless one of the most stirring of spectacles
in the human drama; it has repeated itself throughout history; but it has
been left to this century to witness in the midst of such an upheaval the
complete reorganization of a nation's industry, built up slowly and
painfully by a modern civilization for its material support and utility.
Before the outbreak of hostilities Great Britain was supplying the world
with the products of her workshops, but these products were mainly those
needed by nations at peace. The coal mines of Northumberland, the
foundries of the Midlands, the cotton mills of Lancashire were aiding vast
populations in their daily human struggle, but the demand of 1914 for vast
requirements for war purposes found Great Britain unprepared. The
instantaneous rearrangement of industries for war purposes, possible to
Germany by reason of forty years of stealthy war preparations, was out of
the question for a nation that neither contemplated nor prepared for a
European conflagration. Eight or nine months had to elapse before the
people of Great Britain were aroused to the realities of modern warfare.
It was then only that a large public became aware that the Herculean
struggle was not merely a conflict between armies and navies, but between
British science and German science, between British chemists and German
chemists, between British workshops and the workshops of Germany. The
realization of these facts led to the creation of the Ministry of
Munitions in May 1915 and the rapid rearrangement of industries and
industrial conditions. Before the war, three National factories in Great
Britain were sufficient to fulfil the demand for output for possible war
purposes; to-day, there are more than 150 National factories and over
5,000 Controlled Establishments, scattered up and down the country, all
producing munitions of war. The whole of the North Country and the whole
of the Midlands have, in fact, become a vast arsenal.
Standing on an eminence in the North, one may by day watch ascending the
smoke of from 400 to 500 munition factories, and by night at many a point
in the Midland counties one may survey an encircling zone of flames as
they belch forth from the chimneys of the engineering works of war. The
vast majority of these workshops had previously to the war never produced
a gun, a shell, or a cartridge. To-day, makers of agricultural and textile
machinery are engaged on munitions, producers of lead pencils are turning
out shrapnel; a manufacturer of gramophones is producing fuses; a court
jeweller is engaged in the manufacture of optical instruments; a maker of
cream separators has now an output of primers. Nor is this all. New
industries have been started and languishing trades have been revived.
The work of reorganization has been prodigious, and when the history of
Britain's share in the war comes to be written in the leisured days of
peace, it is unlikely that the record will transmit to a future generation
how much effort it has taken to produce the preponderance in munitions now
achieved. With the huge task of securing an adequate supply of raw
material has gone hand in hand the production of a sufficiency of suitable
machinery and machine tools, the equipment of laboratories for chemical
research, the erection, or adaptation, of accommodation in which to house
the new 'plant', and the supply of a continuous stream of suitable labour.
In face of the growing needs of the Navy and Army this labour question has
been a crucial test; it is a testimony to the 'will to win' of the whole
people that the problem from the outset has found its solution. As soon as
the importance of the demand for munitions workers was widely understood,
a supply of labour has continuously streamed into the factory gates. There
are now 2,000,000 persons employed in munitions industries--exclusive of
Admiralty work--of which one-third are women.
The advent of the women in the engineering shops and their success in a
group of fresh trades may be accounted as an omen of deep significance.
Women in this country have, it is true, taken their place in factory life
from the moment that machinery swept away the spinning-wheel from the
domestic hearth, and it is more often the woman mill-hand, or factory
'lass', who is the wealthier partner in many a Lancashire home. Women
before the war, to be sure, took part in factory life where such
commodities as textiles, clothing, food, household goods, &c., were
produced, but by consensus of opinion--feminine as well as masculine--her
presence in Engineering Works, save on mere routine work, or on a few
delicate processes, was considered in the pre-war period as unsuitable and
undesirable.
_Sharing a Common Task_
At the outbreak of hostilities, a few of the most far-sighted employers,
contemplating a shortage of labour through the recruitment of men for
military service, hazarded the opinion that women might be employed on all
kinds of simple repetition work in the Engineering Shops. Further than
that even the optimist did not go. There was also no indication that women
would be willing to adventure into a world where long hours and night-work
prevailed, from which evils they were protected in the days of peace by
stringent Factory Acts. Events have proved that the women of Great Britain
are as ready as their menfolk to sacrifice comfort and personal
convenience to the demands of a great cause, and as soon as it was made
known that their services were required, they came forward in their
hundreds of thousands.
They have come from the office and the shop, from domestic service and the
dressmaker's room, from the High Schools and the Colleges, and from the
quietude of the stately homes of the leisured rich. They have travelled
from far-off corners in the United Kingdom as well as from homesteads in
Australia and New Zealand, and from lonely farms in South Africa and
Canada. Every stratum of society has provided its share of willing women
workers eager from one cause or another to 'do their bit'.
Even in the early days of the advent of women in the munitions shops, I
have seen working together, side by side, the daughter of an earl, a
shopkeeper's widow, a graduate from Girton, a domestic servant and a young
woman from a lonely farm in Rhodesia, whose husband had joined the
colours. Social status, so stiff a barrier in this country in pre-war
days, was forgotten in the factory, as in the trenches, and they were all
working together as happily as the members of a united family.
Employers and former employees likewise often share a common task in the
workshops of the war. At Woolwich, for example, a lady of delicate
upbringing could, at one period, have been seen arriving at the Arsenal in
the early hours of each morning, accompanied by her former maid, both
being the while 'hands' in the employ of the State. It is well known in
certain circles how Lady Scott, the widow of the famous Antarctic
explorer, put aside all private interests to take up work in a munitions
factory, how Lady Gertrude Crawford became an official, supervising
women's work in shipyards, and how Lady Mary Hamilton (now Mrs. Kenyon
Slaney), the eldest daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and Miss Stella
Drummond, daughter of General Drummond, have won distinction as workers in
'advanced' processes of munitions production.
These are but a few distinguished names amongst a crowd of women of all
degrees of society who have achieved unexpected success in work to which
they were entirely unaccustomed. Amongst this nameless multitude,
attention has been called from time to time to the remarkable feats in the
engineering and chemical trades, in electrical works, and in the
shipyards, of kitchen-maids and of dressmakers, of governesses and
children's nurses.
The underlying motives, all actuated by war conditions, which have turned
the tide of women's work into new and unfamiliar occupations, are,
however, more diverse than is generally supposed. Unquestionably, the two
main driving forces have been patriotism and economic pressure, and of
these patriotism, the love of country, the pride of Empire, accounts for a
large proportion of women recruits. Yet there are other motives at work:
the old human forces of family love and self-sacrifice, pride, anger,
hatred, and even humour. I have questioned workers at the lathes and in
doping rooms, in Filling Factories, and in wood-workers' shops, and find
the mass of new labour in the munitions works is there from distinctive
individual reasons. It is only by the recognition of all these forces that
successful management of a new factor in the labour problem is possible.
An indication of the life-history of one or two individual munitions
workers may exemplify the point.
There is the case of a girl tool-setter in a factory near London. She is
the only child of an old Army family. When war broke out, she realized
that for the first time in many generations her family could send no
representative to fight the country's battles. Her father was an old man,
long past military age. The girl, although in much request at home, took
up work in a base hospital in France, but at the end of a year, when
broken down from over-strain, was ordered six months' rest in England.
Recovery followed in two months, and again, spurred by the thought of
inaction in a time of national peril, she entered a munitions factory as
an ordinary employee. After nine months' work she had only lost five
minutes' time.
Another factory worker is a mother of seven sons, proud-spirited,
efficient, and accustomed to rule her family. The seven sons enlisted and
she felt her claim to headship was endangered. She entered a munitions
factory and, to soothe her pride, sent weekly to each son a detailed
account of her industrial work. At length, the eldest son wrote that he
thought his mother was probably killing more Germans than any of the
family. Since then, she says, she has had peace of mind.
In another factory, in the West of England, there is an arduous munitions
maker who works tirelessly through the longest shifts. Before her entry
into the industrial world she was a stewardess on a passenger-ship. The
vessel was torpedoed by a German submarine, and she was one of the few
survivors. Daily she works off her hatred on a capstan lathe, hoping, as
she tells the visitors, some day to get equal with the unspeakable Huns.
Then there is a typical case of a wife who has learned some of life's
little ironies through her work on munitions production. Her husband, an
old sailor, worked for the same firm before the war. He used to come home
daily and complain of the hardness of his lot. It was 'a dog's life', he
constantly reiterated, and his wife was careful to make reparation at
home.
War broke out and the naval reserve man was recalled to sea. The firm were
put to it, in the labour shortage, for a substitute, and invited the
wife's aid. Having heard so much of the hardships of the work, she
refused, but after some persuasion agreed to give the job a trial. At the
end of a week, she surmised the task was not so hard as she contemplated;
after a month had passed she realized the position. The job had been a
capital excuse to ensure forgiveness for domestic short-comings. The wife
awaits her husband's return with a certain grim humour.
Having arrived in the engineering trades, actuated by whatever motives,
the woman munitions maker has more than justified the hopes of the pioneer
employers who sponsored her cause. As soon as organized labour agreed that
trade union rules and pre-war shop practice should be suspended for the
duration of the war, women were rapidly initiated in the simple repetition
processes of shell-making and shell-filling. Machinery was adapted to the
new-comers, and the skilled men workers were distributed amongst the
factories to undertake the jobs possible only to experienced hands.
_Dilution_
Thus, the principle of dilution, as old as Plato's _Republic_, which as a
theory was reintroduced to British students by Adam Smith, has widely come
into practice through the urgency of the war. Women have been successfully
introduced into a new group of occupations, men have been 'upgraded', so
that many semi-skilled men have become skilled; and the skilled men have
been allocated entirely to employment on skilled jobs.
Once introduced to the munitions shops, women soon mastered the repetition
processes, such as 'turning', 'milling' and 'grinding', as well as the
simpler operations connected with shell-filling. The keenest amongst them
were then found fit for more 'advanced' work where accuracy, a nice
judgment, and deftness of manipulation are essential. Such are the
processes connected with tool and gauge-making, where the work must be
finished to within the finest limits--a fraction of the width of a human
hair; such are the requirements for the work of overlooking, or inspection
of output; and such are the many processes of aeroplane manufacture and
optical glass production, upon which women are being increasingly
employed.
They are also undertaking operations dependent on physical strength, which
in pre-war days would have been regarded as wholly unsuitable to female
capacity. War necessity has, however, killed old-time prejudice and has
proved how readily women adapt themselves to any task within their
physical powers. One may, for example, to-day watch women in the shipyards
of the North hard at work, chipping and cleaning the ships' decks,
repairing hulls, or laying electric wire on board H.M. battleships. High
up in the gantry cranes which move majestically across the vaulted factory
roof, one may see women sitting aloft guiding the movement of the huge
molten ingots; in the foundries, one may run across a woman smith; in the
aeroplane factories, women welders work be-goggled at the anvils.
An engineering shop is now sometimes staffed almost entirely by women
'hands', and it is no uncommon sight to find in the centre of the shop
women operators at work on the machines; at one end a group of women
tool-setters, and at another women gaugers who test the products of this
combined women's labour. In the packing-rooms the lustier types of women
may be seen dispatching finished shells, and on the factory platforms
gartered women in tunic suits push the loaded trollies to waiting
railway-trucks for conveyance to the front. One of the most surprising
revelations of the war in this country has, indeed, been the capacity of
women for engineering work, and to none has the discovery been more
surprising and more exhilarating than to the women themselves.
_Heroism in the Workshop_
The work has, in fact, called for personal qualities usually thought to be
abnormal in women. The women in the engineering shops have disproved any
such surmise. Where occasion has demanded physical courage from the
workers, the virtue has leaped forth from the average woman, as from the
average man. Where circumstances call for grit and endurance, there has
been no shirking in the factories by the majority of the operators of
either sex. The heroism of the battlefields has frequently been equalled
by the ordinary civilian in the factory, whether man or woman. Sometimes
incidents of women's courage in the works have been reported in the press
as matters for surprise. They are merely typical instances of the spirit
that animates the general mass of the workers in Great Britain.
A few examples may be added in illustration. On a recent occasion, a woman
lost the first finger and thumb of her left hand through the jamming of a
piece of metal in a press. After an absence of six weeks, she returned to
work and was soon getting an even greater output than before.
Another instance relates to a serious accident in an explosives factory,
when several women were killed and many were injured. Within a few days a
considerable number of the remaining female operators applied and were
accepted for positions in the Danger Zone at another factory. Another
incident is reported from some chemical works in the North. The key
controlling a valve fell off and dropped into a pit below, rendering the
woman in charge unable to control the steam. An accident seemed imminent
and the woman, in spite of the likelihood of dangerous results to herself,
got down to the pit, regained the key and averted disaster.
In a shipyard on the North-East coast, a woman of 23 years had been
engaged for some time in electric-wiring a large battleship. One day, when
working overhead, a drill came through from the deck, piercing her cotton
cap and entering her head. She was attended to in the firm's First Aid
room and sent home. To the surprise of every one concerned, she returned
to work at 6 a.m. on the following day, and laughingly remarked that she
was quite satisfied that it was better to lose a little hair than her
head.
In the trivial accidents which are, of course, of more frequent
occurrence, the women display similar calmness and will stand
unflinchingly while particles of grit, or metal, are removed from the
eyes, or while small wounds--often due to their own carelessness--are
dressed and bound. The endurance displayed during the early period of
munitions production, when holidays were voluntarily abandoned and work
continued through Sundays, and in many hours of overtime, was no less
remarkable in the women than in the men. Action is continuously taken by
the Ministry of Munitions to reduce the hours of overtime, to abolish
Sunday labour, and to promote the well-being of the workers, but without
the zeal and courage of the women munitions makers the valour of the
soldiers at the Front would often be in vain.
As the Premier remarked in a recent speech: 'I do not know what would have
happened to this land when the men had to go away fighting if the women
had not come forward and done their share of the work. It would have been
utterly impossible for us to have waged a successful war, had it not been
for the skill and ardour, enthusiasm and industry, which the women of the
country have thrown into the work of the war'.