Women in the First World War

The war changed women’s lives in every belligerent country, though less lastingly than many believed at the time. When millions of men went to the front, women replaced them in munitions factories, on trams, in offices and on the land, ran homes and farms, nursed the wounded, and in the second half of the war even joined auxiliary military services. It was they who stood in queues for bread and potatoes and felt the hunger of the home front most keenly. After the armistice many of them lost their jobs, but in Britain, Germany, Poland and other countries women received the vote for the first time.

The war comes home

Mobilisation in the summer of 1914 took millions of men from their homes. France called up nearly three million men in the first weeks of August and, according to the historian Peggy Bette, 8 million over the whole war, or 60 per cent of economically active men. It was much the same in Germany and Russia. Overnight, many families lost their main breadwinner. All the belligerent states therefore introduced separation allowances for soldiers’ families, paid directly to their dependants. In Germany, by the end of 1915, an estimated 4 million families were receiving them.

The allowances were rarely enough, and in the first months of the war many women lost their jobs in the chaos the war caused in the economy. In France, on 7 August 1914, Prime Minister René Viviani called on peasant women to finish the harvest and prepare the fields for the next crops. According to Bette, 3,200,000 female farm workers and farmers’ wives took the place of three million farmers called up into the army, often without their draught animals, which the army had requisitioned. Soldiers’ wives, mothers and sisters wrote them letters and sent parcels of food and warm clothing. This correspondence was one of the few links between the front and home.

Work

The most visible change was women working in jobs that had until then been men’s. Women drove trams and buses, delivered milk, worked in banks and offices as clerks and typists, and even joined the police. In Britain the number of women in paid work rose by 400,000 in the first year of the war alone. In Germany, at the end of 1915, nearly 14,000 women worked on the trams, and one in five of them was the wife of a tram worker called up into the army. Many working women had earned wages before the war, but now they gladly left domestic service for the better pay and greater freedom of factory work.

In Britain, in the spring of 1915, the front ran short of shells and the factories ran short of hands. The new Ministry of Munitions under David Lloyd George needed women, and the Munitions of War Act suspended in the armaments works the trade union rules that had closed many jobs to them. On 17 July 1915 the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst led the women’s “Right to Serve” march through London, with tens of thousands of marchers. Women in the munitions factories ran machines and even welded. Those who worked with TNT had yellow skin and were called “canaries”. Poisoning and explosions in the factories injured and killed women workers. Woolwich Arsenal alone employed 25,000 women in 1918.

Women earned more than before, though usually less than men. The British trade unions agreed to take them on only on condition that they did part of a skilled man’s job, at a lower rate of pay, and left after the war. It was similar in other countries. In France, where Albert Thomas organised the armaments industry, the number of women in the munitions factories, known as “munitionnettes”, rose from 50,000 to 430,000 by 1918. In Russia the share of women in industry rose from 26 to 43 per cent between 1914 and 1917, and in Vienna after 1915 almost half of all metalworkers were women.

Fewest women went into the factories in Germany. The trade unions were opposed, pay was low, and the allowances let many women stay at home. When in December 1916 the Reichstag passed the Auxiliary Service Law, its duty to work applied only to men aged 17 to 60. The army called up almost 60 per cent of German farm labourers, and the government tried in vain to persuade women from the cities to work on the land. In Britain the women of the Women’s Land Army helped bring in the last two harvests of the war.

Nurses and doctors

Upper- and middle-class women went above all into nursing, which was seen as the most feminine of occupations. In France some 120,000 women became nurses, most of them as volunteers, often with the Red Cross. In Britain 90,000 British and Irish volunteers of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) had registered by 1918, working in hospitals at home and abroad. In Russia more than 31,000 “sisters of mercy” served, often in forward positions. The work was hard and dangerous: nurses died of disease, were killed when hospitals were bombed and drowned on torpedoed ships.

The Scottish doctor and suffragist Elsie Inglis offered the War Office, after the outbreak of war, hospitals staffed entirely by women, and was reportedly told to go home and sit still. So she founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which worked for the Allies. The first unit went to France in November 1914, and by the end of the war the organisation had sent out fourteen units, in which more than a thousand women served. In 1915 Inglis fought typhus in Serbia, stayed with the wounded during the conquest of Serbia and was taken prisoner, and later treated Serbs in Russia and on the Romanian front. She died of cancer on 26 November 1917, the day after returning to Britain.

Edith Cavell, the English matron of a nursing school in Brussels, took a different path. When the Germans occupied the city, her clinic treated the wounded of all armies, while she hid British and French soldiers and helped them escape to neutral Holland. On 12 October 1915 the Germans shot her. The execution of a woman, and a nurse at that, shocked the world and gave Allied propaganda one of the most powerful symbols of the war. The Dutch dancer Mata Hari, whom the French shot in 1917 for spying for Germany, was remembered quite differently.

The most famous scientist of the age, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, put X-rays at the service of the French army. An X-ray let a surgeon find a bullet or a shell fragment in a wounded man’s body before he began to operate. In the autumn of 1914 she set out with her daughter Irène in the first X-ray car for the hospitals behind the front. By the end of the war she had organised a fleet of some 20 cars, which the soldiers called “little Curies”, and some 200 permanent radiology rooms in hospitals. From 1916 she trained women as radiology technicians, about 150 according to the most commonly cited figures.

In uniform

No state conscripted women into its army, but in the second half of the war the armies began to take them into auxiliary services. In Britain the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was formed in 1917. Women served in it as clerks, drivers, cooks and canteen workers, to free men to fight at the front. More than 57,000 women served in it between January 1917 and November 1918. In 1918 the navy and the newly formed RAF also set up women’s auxiliary services. The Women’s Royal Air Force numbered more than 15 thousand women in the summer of 1918. Women in uniform were paid less than the men they replaced, and they took no part in combat.

Only Russia fielded women’s combat units in any numbers. After the February Revolution, as the army was falling apart, War Minister Alexander Kerensky agreed to the creation of the women’s battalion of death of Maria Bochkareva, a peasant woman who had enlisted as a private in 1914. The women were meant to shame soldiers who no longer wanted to fight. The battalion went into action in July 1917 near Krewo, in an attack meant to support the Kerensky Offensive, but other units did not come to its aid. According to the historian Laurie Stoff, there were about 5000 women in Russian units, in an army of millions. Part of another women’s battalion, formed in the capital, defended the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in November.

The home front

On the home front women fought a daily battle for food. The British naval blockade cut Germany off from overseas food, and on 22 February 1915 Berliners received their first bread cards. In the winter of 1916–1917 potatoes ran out and swedes took their place. During the turnip winter the daily ration fell to about a thousand calories. People queued, ate in soup kitchens and looked for food on the black market, while women in the cities grew vegetables on allotments. Child mortality rose by half during the war. The German Historical Museum estimates the number of victims of hunger and malnutrition in Germany at about 700 thousand.

Queues became a political issue. In Britain, in the winter of 1917 to 1918, people in poor districts stood for hours outside shops, until on 25 February 1918 meat, butter and margarine went on ration in London. In Petrograd women sometimes stood all night in queues outside bakeries, and on 8 March 1917, International Women’s Day, women workers took to the streets demanding bread. So began the February Revolution, which forced the Tsar to abdicate. As early as 1915, in Glasgow, women, among them soldiers’ wives, forced the government through a rent strike to pass a law limiting rents across the whole country.

It was hardest in the occupied territories. Łódź, cut off from the Russian market and raw materials, suffered hunger from the first winter of the war, and workers lost their jobs and their livelihoods. In 1916 the ration cards gave the people of Łódź between 750 and 1000 calories a day, and the population of the city and its suburbs fell from about 600 thousand to about 370 thousand. In Warsaw, two months after the Germans marched in, cards for bread and flour were introduced in October 1915.

The vote

The war hastened the granting of the vote to women. In Britain both of the big suffrage organisations sided with the state in August 1914, and many former opponents concluded that after such a war women could no longer be denied the vote. On 6 February 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to some 8.4 million women who were over 30 and met the occupation qualification or were married to men who did. The age limit was set so high so that women would not make up a majority of voters, and so most women war workers still could not vote. British women went to the polls for the first time on 14 December 1918, and won the vote on equal terms with men only in 1928.

Revolutions gave women the vote in Russia and in Germany. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which began on 25 November 1917, all citizens, women and men, aged 20 and over could vote. In Prussia, until 1908, women had been forbidden even to join political parties. On 12 November 1918, three days after the revolution in Berlin, the government of Friedrich Ebert announced equal, secret and universal elections for all men and women aged 20 and over. On 19 January 1919 German women voted nationwide for the first time, and 37 women entered the National Assembly, later 41 out of 423 members.

In Poland, on 28 November 1918, Józef Piłsudski signed the electoral law for the Legislative Sejm, under which a voter was “every citizen of the State regardless of sex” aged 21 or over. Polish women received full voting rights at once, both to vote and to stand, on the same terms as men. The law was drawn up by the government of Jędrzej Moraczewski, and the Lublin government had already promised women the vote. French women, despite their enormous contribution to the war effort, did not get the vote after the war.

Polish women in the war

Polish women lived through the war in three partitions, and their husbands and sons served in the armies of the partitioning powers on opposite sides of the front. Many of them worked in pro-independence organisations. In the Kingdom of Poland the most important was the Women’s League of War Readiness (PL), founded in Warsaw in April 1913. Its members gave lodgings to Piłsudski’s emissaries, hid “burnt” members of the POW, stored weapons and illegal publications, collected money for the Legions and looked after legionnaires’ families. By 1916 the League had several thousand members in branches across the Kingdom.

Women also served in the Legions. In the autumn of 1914 Aleksandra Szczerbińska, a former PPS fighter, took command of the women’s intelligence and courier unit of the First Brigade. According to the historian Marta Sikorska-Kowalska, 46 women served in it. The couriers crossed the front into the Kingdom, gathered information on Russian troop movements and carried weapons and reports for the Polish Military Organisation. Piłsudski wrote of the great merit of “my intelligence bureau, made up almost entirely of women”, thanks to which he had information on the enemy. Some women fought disguised as men, like Wanda Gertz, who served in the First Brigade in 1914–1916 as Kazimierz Żuchowicz.

For her work in the POW the Germans arrested Szczerbińska in Warsaw at the end of 1915 and held her in Pawiak prison, in the camp at Szczypiorno and in Lauban, until they released her in the autumn of 1916. Of the Polish women who worked for the war effort abroad, the most famous was Skłodowska-Curie. She also belonged to the General Committee for the Relief of War Victims in Poland, founded in Switzerland, which raised money around the world for the people of the ruined country.

After Piłsudski’s return to Warsaw, women’s organisations sent delegations to him. Among those who demanded political rights for women were Zofia Moraczewska and the doctor Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka. In the elections to the Legislative Sejm on 26 January 1919 Polish women voted for the first time, and eight women in all sat in the Sejm, under 2 per cent of the members. In December 1918 the Women’s Volunteer Legion was formed in Lviv, and it later took part in the defence of Lviv, Vilnius and Warsaw.

What remained after the war

After the armistice most women lost their wartime jobs. The munitions factories cut production, the auxiliary services were disbanded, and women in other occupations were pushed out to make room for returning soldiers. In France the Minister of Armament, Louis Loucheur, as early as November 1918 called on women in the war factories to return to “their former occupations”. In Britain women who refused work in domestic service lost their unemployment benefit, and the press portrayed former women war workers as selfish creatures taking bread from men and their families. At the same time many women remembered their wartime work as a time of independence, and in many countries they kept the vote.

Historians have long argued over whether the war liberated women. The British historian Arthur Marwick saw it as an acceleration of social change: the evidence was the limited vote of 1918, women’s new occupations and the liberated “flappers” of the twenties. Gail Braybon replied that the changes in women’s work had been intended from the start only “for the duration”. Margaret and Patrice Higonnet compared gender relations to a double helix: women took a step forward, but men at the same time moved into the even more prestigious role of soldiers, so the distance between the sexes did not change. The French historian Peggy Bette believes the war fixed traditional gender roles rather than bringing equality closer.

Susan Grayzel points out that the war gave many women new skills and the chance of a new relationship with the state, but the post-war world would not recognise their work as equal to men’s. In Poland the balance was different from the West, because the vote came together with independence. The March Constitution confirmed it in 1921.