Women Freed By War

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31101, 2 July 1966, Page 4

Women Freed By War

(Reviewed by M.F.L.P.) Women on the Warpath: The story of the women of the First World War. By David Mitchell 1966. Jonathan Cape. To get this book in perspective, the reader needs to be reminded that women in general have always taken a prominent part in the economy but that women in particular (especially in Britain) —that is of a certain class—who formerly were actively employed in the organisation of their homes, spinning and weaving, producing the family clothes, furnishings, bedlinen etc., cultivating and supervising the cultivation of their gardens and using the produce of the farm and fields for food, storing herbs and attending to the still-room, and a host of other jobs, were deprived of these occupations in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial and agricultural changes. They now found themselves with very little to do and indeed, as Mr Mitchell points out, the ideal woman of convention was not supposed to work; her freedom from serious activity was the symbol of status. When Florence Nightingale cried, "Give us back our suffering,” what she was asking for, in fact, was a job of work to do. She described “the accumulation of nervous energy which has had nothing to do all day makes women feel every night, when they go to bed, as if they were going mad; and they are obliged to be long in bed in the morning to let it evaporate.” The ideal of gentility poisoned many lives. Girls were shut up in a vacuum of knitting and good works and polite conversation. Idle females wanted to work and it was this desire which lay partly at the back of the suffrage movement. But even some of the most enlightened men did not understand this. John Ruskin restricted women’s sphere to understanding and perhaps helping the work of men. Rev. Frederick Maurice, a founder of

Christian Socialism, was willing to open clases for governesses, even to agitate mildly about sweated female workers but he drew the line when women set their sights on the professions. (What would he have thought of his descendant, Professor Joan Robinson! Most men were, however, extremely hostile. The older Universities resisted to a very late date the entry of women and even fought legal battles to withhold medical degrees from them. The “Lancet” insisted that women’s sphere in medicine should be limited to carrying out the orders of male doctors. The Birmingham Education Authority was forced to stop employing women to teach small boys on the pretext that it encouraged immorality. The barriers to the employment of women in salaried occupations were formidable. It took a world war to blast a sizable hole in male prejudices. There were, of course, about five million women in England earning their living when war broke out in 1914 and their numbers were now to be added to by thousands more who seized the opportunities with both hands. As the author says, London became the Mecca for women volunteers, eager to make themselves useful and escape the boredom of routine middle—and upper-class lives. The leaders of the suffragette movement shelved the struggle and women worked on many fronts. They organised hospitals and convalescent homes and asylums for Belgian refugees: they founded leagues to promote recruiting and some went abroad and did astonishing jobs in France and Serbia. The amazing story of Mrs Knocker and Marie Chisholm is told in a lively chapter headed “Valkyries' in Knickerbockers.” Ladies of title went to work in munition factories. The book tells the story of one who gave a dinner party to celebrate her first month of work. The guests numbered a Duchess,

the wife of a Cabinet Minister and —piece de resistance —a working woman who was introduced as “Mabel, my mate in the shop.” Women performed extraordinary feats. Lady Isabella St. John, told that her son was missing, presumed killed, went off to the front to find him. She succeeded but was dismayed by his reaction. He begged her to return home immediately. His reputation, his promotion depended on it. Most women were, however, more successful in penetrating the men’s world and there can be little doubt that their heroic struggles in the war won for them not only the vote and representation in Parliament but a measure of fairer treatment at work. On the whole, too, their lives from 1914 to 1918 were much more satisfying than they had been before. The one major tragedy in the book is that of Miss Douglas-Pennant, daughter of Lord Penrhyn, who was dismissed as Commandant of the W.R.A.F. Her friends tried in vain to get the case reopened. The view of many still is that she was most unjustly treated.