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At the outbreak of hostilities, a few of the most far-sighted employers, contemplating a shortage of labor 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 men folk 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 traveled 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 colors. 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 humor. 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 labor 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 labor 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.
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