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  • The Guardian

    Women and the first world war: a taste of freedom

    For many women on the home front, the war years became a springboard to liberation. But with peace came the backlash
    by Sheila Rowbotham Nov 11, 2018 6 minutes
    A female worker gauges shells in a munitions factory during the first world war. Composite: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

    Between 1914 and 1918, the lives of millions of women in Britain were overturned by the first world war. Its impact reached into every aspect of existence, from the dramatic to the humdrum.

    Former domestic servants became window cleaners, gas fitters and crane drivers. They moved into the munitions factories, where their faces turned yellow and their hair green from the chemicals. They braved explosions and poisonous substances to serve their country – and to earn higher pay.

    Well over 100,000 volunteered for the Women’s Land Army, ruffling the gender norms of rural Britain. Others enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps or the Women’s Royal Air Force as mechanics and drivers, cleaning, working in canteens or doing clerical work.

    As wartime food shortages, rising prices and rents brought distress to poor families, the government marched into the kitchen with advice on bean fritters and barley rissoles. Manufacturers came up with a technological fix for middle-class housewives, tussling with “the servant problem”. In an advertisement in the in 1917, the Suction Cleaner

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