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Women's Work: Employment Opportunities and Economic Roles, 1918–1939*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Neal A. Ferguson
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Extract

Although there is an ever increasing amount of scholarship describing the individual and collective experiences of British women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been, as yet, little written on the period after 1914. It is not my purpose here to fill that void. Rather it is the aim of this essay to sketch in the most striking features of British women's economic position during the inter-war years. Two interrelated aspects will be stressed: the actual employment of women during the period and the extent of changes in women's traditional economic roles. This essay proceeds on the assumption that pre-war feminism and the increased employment of women during the war heightened women's economic expectations. In post-war Britain, new vistas seemed to be opening as indicated by a flood of legal changes affecting women and as discussed in the analyses of contemporary social commentators. The reality, however, was not altogether encouraging. Employment gains made during the war by skilled and unskilled women in industry evaporated within a few years after 1918. The position of professional women showed some improvement but did not achieve the levels of their earlier hopes. The economic dislocations of the twenties and thirties were in part responsible for the slowness of change, but just as importantly, the accepted economic roles of women underwent no fundamental alterations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 1975 , pp. 55 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1975

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was read at the Pacific Northwest Conference on British Studies at Pullman, Washington, April, 1974. The financial assistance of the Research Advisory Board, University of Nevada, Reno is gratefully acknowledged.

References

1 Marwick, Arthur, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1965)Google Scholar. Chapter three, discusses the impact of the war on British women but does not consider whether the war's impact was permanent or ephemeral; short discussions of women between the wars may be found in Mowat, C.L., Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (Chicago, 1955)Google Scholar. Chapter four; Graves, Robert and Hodge, Alan, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939 (London, 1940)Google Scholar. Chapters three and seven.

2 Studies of women's legal rights may be found in Graveson, R. H. and Crane, F. R., eds., A Century of Family Law, 1857-1957 (London, 1957)Google Scholar; and Reiss, Erna, Rights and Duties of Englishwomen: A Study in Law and Public Opinion (Manchester, 1934).Google Scholar

3 Divorce is discussed in Glass, David, “Divorce in England and Wales,” Sociological Review, XXVI (1934): 288–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGregor, Oliver Ross, Divorce in England (London, 1957)Google Scholar; examples of contemporary discussions of the social revolution are Clephane, Irene, Towards Sex Freedom (London, 1935)Google Scholar; Gates, G. Evelyn, et al eds., The Woman's Year Book, 1923-24 (London, 1924)Google Scholar; Haldane, Charlotte, Motherhood and Its Enemies (New York, 1928)Google Scholar; Hirschmann, Ida, “The Surplus of Women and the Declining Birthrate,” Sociological Review, XXVII (1935); 144–58Google Scholar; May, Geoffrey, The Social Control of Sexual Expression (London, 1930).Google Scholar

4 Two contemporary books that treat these events in detail are Cole, G.D.H., Trade Unionism and Munitions (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar; and Drake, Barbara, Women in the Engineering Trades (London, 1917), p. 355.Google Scholar

5 Strachey, Ray, “The Cause”: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (London, 1928), p. 355.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 371; Clephane, , Towards Sex Freedom, p. 200Google Scholar, makes ihe same point.

7 Woman's Year Book, pp. 326-27.

8 The statistics in this paragraph and for the table came from Parliamentary Papers, 1936–1937, XXVI, Cmd. 556, p. 882.Google Scholar

9 Parliamentary Papers, 1919, XXIX, Cmd. 67, p. 7.Google Scholar

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11 Woman's Year Book, p. 327.

12 Parliamentary Papers, 1913, LXXVIII, Cd. 7018, p. 321Google Scholar: 1936-37. XXVI, Cmd. 556, p. 882.

13 Ibid., p. 882.

14 They were admitted as a result of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, 1919, 9 & 10 Geo. V, cap. 71.Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., pp. 170-71.

19 Ibid., p. 174.

20 Haldane, , Motherhood and Its Enemies, p. 107Google Scholar; I have been unable to verily these figures. The categories used in the 1931 census are loo imprecise to allow any comparisons. Since Haldane was bitterly opposed to women taking up careers, feeling that the result would be the disintegration of British society and family, she might have had a tendency to overstate the numbers of women engaged in careers in chartered professions.

21 Ibid., p. 107.

22 Martindale, Hilda, Women Servants of the State, 1820-1938 (London, 1938), p. 75.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 82; see other committee reports in Parliamentary Papers, 1917–1918, VIII, Cd. 8657, p. 119Google Scholar; 1918, VII, Cd. 9074, p. 567; 1919, XXIX, Cmd. 199, p. 153.

24 Parliamentary Papers, 1919, XI, Cmd. 164, pp. 178–79.Google Scholar

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26 Ibid., p. 181.

27 Strachey, , The Cause, p. 380.Google Scholar

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30 Ibid., p. 173.

31 Parliamentary Papers, 1921, XXIII, Cmd. 1244, p. 661.Google Scholar

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40 Strachey, Oliver, “Married Women and Work,” Contemporary Review, CXLV (1934): 335.Google Scholar

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42 Parliamentary Papers, 1921, XIII, Cmd. 116, p. 63.Google Scholar

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44 Parliamentary Papers, 1945–1946, XI, Cmd. 6937, p. 876.Google Scholar