‘The average woman wants a gun not a dishcloth!’
How convincing is this claim about female aspirations and activities in the Second World War?
By Eve Lloyd
Edited by Charlotte Donnelly and Georgia Wood
The Second World War has been popularised in collective British memory as a time when everyone in the country came together to bring the country to victory. Winston Churchill’s famous ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech and recent films such as Cristopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) have contributed to a sense of national pride in how our grandparents and great-grandparents’ generations participated whole-heartedly in the war effort normal citizens and soldiers. The construction of the ‘Home Front’ has likewise played no small role in encouraging the imagination of fearless British housewives brandishing rolling pins and shaking their fists at Dover if the German invasion had swept across to mainland Britain. Despite this somewhat thrilling notion that everyone in Britain was primed and ready to fight for king and country, the reality of the war fell short of this vision. The few women who were able to join the ‘armed’ forces were not allowed to wield any weaponry for fear of the damage that the image of women holding guns might impact on both male morale and the idealised version of femininity that had been built up in the decades before the outbreak of war. Women employed in the auxiliary services would often take on secretarial work to free up men for the front line on the continent. The very idea of women in uniform was so perturbing, they were actively encouraged to wear makeup and style their hair in such a way that would visually conform to their expected femininity, and so help the stability of the country at large at such a destabilising and devastating time as war.
In this essay, I will argue that while women were certainly encouraged to be part of the war effort, the average woman was restricted in the ways in which they could contribute. First, I will examine work patterns, showing that women’s wartime employment was meant to be for the duration, understood at the time to mean that women would return to the domestic sphere and traditional workplaces once the war was over. Second, I will show that women’s employment in the armed services was restricted, and that women were expected to take on secretarial jobs in order to free up men for the front line due to the gendered perceptions of combatant and non-combatant roles. Finally, I will show how popular memory has been warped to project an image of unity throughout wartime Britain, which is at odds with the reality of the gendered boundaries that were made explicit during the Second World War.
From the outbreak of the Second World War, it was clear that men would have to be conscripted into the armed forces en masse to accommodate the forces’ needs during the conflict. Despite the drastic gaps in industries that this created, the government were slow to act on conscripting women to fill in for the essential work of men who had gone to fight on the continent. Only in 1941 were women aged 18-41 required to register under the Registration of Employment Order, prompted because the voluntary scheme had ‘not produced enough workers for the ever-increasing demands of war’.1 This initial reluctance of both the government and women to join up and help in the war efforts, even on an industry level, suggests the average woman was not encouraged to pursue any patriotic sentiments to help their country at the beginning of the war. As the war progressed however, there was an increased realisation that women’s labour would be needed, even that it was their ‘patriotic duty […] to release men from industry, from military offices and workshops, to fight’, framing the labour shortages as an opportunity for women to support British men fighting abroad.2 The government thus reinforced the idea that their work ‘was men’s work, temporarily taken on by women to help in an emergency’, showing that the expectation was that female work would be required only for the duration of the war, after which women would be expected to go home and return to being wives and mothers.3 G.J. de Groot argues that it was ‘necessity [that] pushed the acceptable limits of women’s work outwards’, and so only in the context of total war could women who filled in for labour shortages hope to retain their newfound work – a far cry from the employment liberation of the Second World War preserved in popular memory.4
Women’s roles outside the Auxiliary services were not limited to filling men’s roles, however, as many women took part in volunteer work or continued their roles as mothers, caring for the next generation. Women in the ATS were given lectures on motherhood, ‘educated for the domesticity for which it was hoped they would return’ when the war ended.5 The very fact that women were educated for future domesticity alongside their wartime work shows the continued expectations being put on British women during the war and enforced the sense of stability in gender relations that needed to be upheld to ensure Britain’s invulnerability. Other roles women took on included work in the Women’s Volunteer Service (WVS), with nearly a million members ‘spread across all parts of the UK’ during its peak.6 The voluntary work was undertaken with patriotic intentions and provided services to women and children during the Blitz by ‘deploying traditionally feminine skills outside the home and thereby enhancing the self-esteem of its members’.7 This approach from the WVS shows the extent to which women’s war work was entwined with their identity as women, restricting them from performing some of the more dangerous tasks by reinforcing femininity throughout the course of the Second World War.
Women in the auxiliary services were exposed to even more challenging restrictions on the work they were allowed to carry out. Strong resistance was encountered by women who did want to contribute militarily to the war, particularly when it came to home defence. The Home Guard felt the need to protect perceptions of its masculinity, already in question because of the age and status of the male members, who were too old or young to be called to the front line, or who had essential work in occupations such as butchers or dockworkers.8 To counter their initial ban from the Home Guard, the Women’s Home Defence was set up as ‘an explicitly combatant organisation’, which was – for all intents and purposes – illegal, constituting a private army.9 Intent on reinforcing gender boundaries, the government allowed women to join the Home Guard from April 1943, with the idea that ‘they would not wear uniforms […] were not to receive weapons training’ and ‘were emphatically not to defend their homes with hand grenades and revolvers’.10 Women may have been eager to join the Home Guard and to offer themselves as part of the final line of defence, but the government only allowed them to participate ‘grudgingly’ and ‘accepted [women] as auxiliaries placed firmly behind the lines as non-combatant women’.11 Thus, even though some women did prove themselves to be willing to fight on an equal footing as men during the Second World War, they were prevented from doing so by a government that was too scared of the implications of women wielding weaponry, and the morale of men already in a service which was deemed not to ‘conform to the same standards of masculinity as the regular forces’.12 Britain needed to be robust in the event of a full-scale German invasion, and women’s armed involvement did not fit into that ideal. Women embodied the femininity of the home, not the masculinity of defence and combat.
In other auxiliary services, women found themselves marginalised and doing the work of secretaries and administrators to help free up spaces for men to be on the front line. Many women were motivated to join; not out of a sense of patriotic duty, but because the pay was much better than their pre-war jobs, and they wanted to have an ‘escape from dreary lives’.13
In mixed Anti-Aircraft batteries, women ‘challenged the female combat taboo’ as they ‘participate[d] for the first time in operations’, showing that there was at least some scope for women to have combatant involvement.14 The women employed here however were primarily from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), which came to mean that ‘different codes underlined the fact that women gunners were not real soldiers’, thus undermining their military experience and contribution by holding them to different standards than their male counterparts.15 Women occupying uniformed roles was problematic for the government, and so establishing differences between male and female service personnel meant the gender boundaries could be more boldly drawn. This is most obvious in ‘the ban on women using weapons, maintained through women’s services’, which showed a clear distinction between the masculine, combatant roles taken up by men during the Second World War, and the non-combatant, feminine roles which women were expected to fill.16 Gubar’s conclusion that the war taught women that ‘they must relinquish any dreams they may have had about joining forces with men’ is demonstrated to ring true throughout the Second World War with regards to women’s involvement in the auxiliary services and the roles they were allowed to play even when in uniform.17
The Second World War is often thought of as a moment of liberation for women in the twentieth century, with the chaos of war opening new opportunities for women which they would not have had during peacetime. Gender boundaries were nevertheless fiercely enforced and protected. Male pride came before female progress, with the aim of ensuring British stability during an otherwise destructive period. Posters in ARP recruitment campaigns were ‘highly gendered in their address to men, attempting to emphasize the masculine nature of the work’, while similar posters recruiting women ‘often played down the gendered identity of potential female recruits’.18 One poster in a male recruitment campaign (Figure 1) shows a man in a baker boy hat – a traditional garment of the English working-class – with the phrase: ‘here’s a man’s job’, plastered beneath his smiling face. It suggests the potential for camaraderie for men who volunteered for the ARP. This contrasts a female-targeted recruitment poster (Figure 2), which depicts a woman in black and white with a blank expression, as if to convey the seriousness of the future role women would play in the services. The women’s recruitment poster is also one from the WVS, illustrating the typically upper-middle-class nature of the women who might apply for this role, in contrast to the working-class men expected for the intensive labour of men’s voluntary work. Wartime discourse on uniforms claimed that they ‘denied femininity and enabled women to impersonate masculinity’, illustrating the extent to which the Second World War stoked fears about the blurred boundaries of masculinity and femininity.19 By attacking uniforms when women wore them, a precedent was set to also attack the women who wore them. This undermined the efforts of women in uniformed work, despite their attempts to support the war effort in whatever limited ways they were allowed.
More disturbing perhaps is the insistence on a wartime consensus, which stands completely at odds with the vilification of women who did not conform to the perfect vision of the wartime housewife doing her bit for her country. The war was regarded as ‘perhaps the only period in the whole of British history during which the British people came together as a metaphysical entity’, supposedly having ‘transcended’ usual divisions of class, race, gender, and self-interest.20 This popularised ideal of a truly united Britain ignores the importance of gendered identities throughout the war as a ‘key indicator of continuities and stabilities in the wartime nation’, which also sought to divide and distinguish women apart from men in their wartime service.21 Throughout the war, it was made clear that ‘men were recruited for the work of killing, and women to ‘back them up’’, and any woman failing to provide this service was subject to scrutiny from the press, the government, and likely from her own friends and neighbours.22 This is perhaps most clearly seen in Sonya Rose’s investigation of British women’s wartime relationships with black American soldiers, in which she shows how ‘gender and […] sexual morality’ came to distinguish ‘which individuals are fit to claim the rights and carry out the responsibility of citizenship’.23 By tying women’s morality to their right to citizenship, women who stood outside their gender expectations were transformed into internal enemies, thus putting them outside social acceptability. It was this abandonment of women outside societal expectations that excluded many women from doing what they could to help the war effort, while also making it socially unacceptable for her to adopt the identity of the brash, woman soldier fighting outside the boundaries of her gender.
The idea that all British people came together under one consensus during the Second World War is unrealistic and has greatly clouded popular memory and history of the war. Perhaps most warped by these ideals of national solidarity is the emphasis on women as another layer of fighters for the nation, occupying the Home Front with as much militaristic vigour as their male counterparts did in Europe. Instead, women were marginalised and expected to keep within the boundaries of their established feminine sphere. In wartime work, most women were expected to do monotonous menial tasks that would not threaten male jobs once the war was over. While job opportunities and experiences for women did expand in auxiliary services, traditional feminine roles of care and clerical work remained, with women restricted from the more masculine jobs of handling weaponry and physically defending themselves and their country. Finally, the idea of a united Britain was at odds with the way women were marginalised and vilified if they did not conform to moral standards. At every step, women were restricted from participating in the war on an even footing with men. Even if most women had wanted a gun, they were never given the opportunity.
Figure 1: ‘Here’s a Man’s job!’ recruitment poster for the ARP, Fosh and Cross Ltd, London (printer), Imperial War Museum Second World War Collection
Figure 2: ‘ARP Looks to You’, Women on the Home Front 1939-1945, Imperial War Museum Poster Collection
Notes
1 Ann Day, “The Forgotten ‘Mateys’: Women Workers in Portsmouth Dockyard, England, 1939-45”, Women’s History Review, 7/3 (1998), p. 365.
2 Penny Summerfield, “They didn’t want women back in that job!’: The Second World War and the construction of gendered work histories”, Labour History Review, 63/1 (1998), pp. 86 – 7. 3 Summerfield, “They didn’t want women”, p. 87.
4 G.J. de Groot, “I Love the Scent of Cordite in Your Hair’: Gender Dynamics in Mixed Anti-Aircraft Batteries during the Second World War”, History, 92 (January 1997), p. 73.
5 Lucy Noakes, “War and Peace”, in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowski (ed.), Women in Twentieth Century Britain: Social, Cultural and Political Change (Routledge: London, 2001), p. 310. 6 James Hinton, “Voluntarism and the Welfare/Warfare State: Women’s Voluntary Services in the 1940s”, Twentieth Century British History, 9 (1998), p. 278.
77 Hinton, “Voluntarism”, p. 280.
8 Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, “Women in the firing line: the home guard and the defence of gender boundaries in Britain in the second world war”, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), p. 238.
9 Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, “Women in the firing-line”, p. 235 – 6.
10 Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, “Women in the firing-line”, p. 238.
11 Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, “Women in the firing-line”, p. 251.
12 Summerfield and Peniston-Bird, “Women in the firing-line”, p. 238.
13 de Groot, “I Love the Scent of Cordite”, p.91.
14 de Groot, “I Love the Scent of Cordite”, p. 74.
15 de Groot, “I Love the Scent of Cordite”, p. 86.
16 Lucy Noakes, ‘‘Serve to Save’: Gender, Citizenship and Civil Defence in Britain 1937-1941’, Journal of Contemporary History Vol.47 (OCTOBER 2012), p. 310.
17 Susan Gubar, “This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun”: World War II and the Blitz on Women”, in M. Higonnet and J. Jenson (eds.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 256.
18 Noakes, “Serve to Save”, pp. 745 – 6.
19 Penny Summerfield, “Gender and War in the Twentieth Century”, The International History Review, 19 (February 1997), p. 7.
20 Jose Harris, “War and Social History: Britain and the Home Front during the Second World War”, Contemporary European History, 1 (March 1992), p. 17.
21 Noakes, “Serve to Save”, p. 752.
22 Summerfield, “Gender and War”, p. 5.
23 Sonya Rose, “Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain”, The American Historical Review, 103 (October 1998), p. 1162.
Bibliography
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