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Essay about the history of feminism
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Essay about the history of feminism
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Pat Barker's Regeneration
Pat Barker's Regeneration focuses on the troubled soldiers' mental status during World War One. Barker introduces the feelings soldiers had about the war and military's involvement with the war effort. While Regeneration mainly looks at the male perspective, Barker includes a small but important female presence. While Second Lieutenant Billy Prior breaks away from Craiglockhart War Hospital for an evening, he finds women at a cafe in the Edinburgh district (Barker 86). He comes to the understanding that the women are munitions workers. Women's involvement in war work in Regeneration shows the potential growth in women's independence, but at the expense of restrictions placed on men while they were on the front lines of battle.
Munition-ettes during World War One took the places of their husbands, fathers, and brothers in order for the men to take up positions in the armed services (Braybon 45). Women working in munitions factories were mainly of the lower class; yet, roughly 9 percent of women working in the factories came from the middle to upper classes (Robb 45). Munition-ettes held responsibilities for making and filling shells and cartridges along with other basic cleaning duties, driving, and intense labor ("Twentieth Century"). They acquired some engineering skills that helped them in producing various weapons ("Twentieth Century"). Munition-ettes took the deployed soldiers' places in the factories as a way to show their patriotism as well as to earn a better living than in domestic jobs.
Munition-ettes suffered the flaws in the system of gender bias when looking at equal pay: "many [women] left low-skill, low-wage jobs, especially in domestic service, for better paying skilled labor in ...
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...atriots or strictly worked to increase their economic status, all these women were a testimonial to the home front effort as well as the effort to further their independence.
Works Cited
Barker, Pat. Regeneration. New York: Plume, 1993.
Braybon, Gail. Women Workers in the First World War. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.
Robb, George. British Culture and the First World War. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
“Twentieth Century: Military The First World War 1914-18.” Dartford Town Archive. 13 April 2003
In order to understand how the world wars had such a significant change in how women were viewed in the workplace, we must first understand their experience in the workplace before the wars even started. Contrary to popular belief, women did in fact play a role in the workforce before World War I. In the early 1900s, the number of women in the workforce greatly increased. During this time, it is estimated that approximately one in five workers were women. This statistic is mainly due to industrialization, a period of significant economic expansion that took place from the 1870s to 1900 due to the process of mechanization. Mechanization is the use of machines to complete tasks formerly done by hand. As a result of both mec...
However, the overarching intent of this letter is to make sure women do not take on important jobs during the war because they are only fit to being mothers and wives. Finally, Document 7 shows the percentage of women in the workforce over a number of years. These statistics were polled directly before, during, and after World War I in France. As expected, there is a heightened number during the war, but the number drops lower after the war than it was before the war. This unpredicted decline can be blamed on the incredible animosity men have for any advance for
Pat Barker's riveting World War I novel Regeneration brilliantly exemplifies the effectiveness of fiction united with historical facts. While men aspired to gain glory from war and become heroes, Regeneration poignantly points out that not all of war was glorious. Rather, young soldiers found their aspirations prematurely aborted due to their bitter war experiences. The horrible mental and physical sicknesses, which plagued a number of soldiers, caused many men to withdraw from the battlefield. Feelings of guilt and shame haunted many soldiers as they found themselves removed from the heat of war. Men, however, were not the only individuals to experience such feelings during a time of historical upheaval. Women, too, found themselves at war at the dawn of a feminine revolution. One of the most contentious topics of the time was the practice of abortion, which comes to attention in chapter 17 on pages 202 and 203 of Barker's novel. Through Baker's ground-breaking novel, we learn how men and women alike discovered that in life, not all aspirations are realized; in fact, in times of conflict, women and men both face desperate situations, which have no definite solutions. Illustrated in Barker's novel by a young woman named Betty, and many broken soldiers, society's harsh judgments worsen the difficult circumstances already at hand.
When all the men were across the ocean fighting a war for world peace, the home front soon found itself in a shortage for workers. Before the war, women mostly depended on men for financial support. But with so many gone to battle, women had to go to work to support themselves. With patriotic spirit, women one by one stepped up to do a man's work with little pay, respect or recognition. Labor shortages provided a variety of jobs for women, who became street car conductors, railroad workers, and shipbuilders. Some women took over the farms, monitoring the crops and harvesting and taking care of livestock. Women, who had young children with nobody to help them, did what they could do to help too. They made such things for the soldiers overseas, such as flannel shirts, socks and scarves.
The labor shortage that occurred as men entered the military propelled a large increase in women’s entrance into employment during the war. Men's return to the civilian workforce at the end of the war caused the sudden drop to prewar levels. The cause of the sudden decline during post-war years of women in the paid workforce is unclear. Many questions are left unanswered: What brought women into the war industry, and what caused them to leave?
The women during the war felt an obligation to assist in one form or another. Many stayed at home to watch over the children, while others felt a more direct or indirect approach was necessary. Amongst the most common path women took to support the war, many "served as clerks...filled the ammunition cartridges and artillery shells with powder at armories, laboring at this dangerous and exacting task for low wages. Both sides utilized women in these capacities (Volo 170)." Women that stayed away from battlefields supported their respected armies by taking the jobs that men left behind. They were the grease in the gears of war, the individuals working behind the scenes so that the men would be prepared, ready to fight with functioning weapons and operational gear.
Before the war, some women worked in their homes caring for their children and tending after their homes and gardens. Others did do some more labor, such as working in factories, being telephone operators and in rare cases nurses. These were the normal jobs at the time and they required little to some labor. When the war started up little did they know the women’s work industry was going to be forever changed and viewed differently. In 1914 women started making guns, ammunition, and more in the munitions factories. The munitions factories were huge buildings where hundreds of women would work and sweat all day. In the factories they filled various munitions such as cartridges, bombs, screening...
The massive number of women who worked in factories and other workplaces were crucial to the war effort because they manufactured almost all of the m...
Firstly, the work women did when men left for the war, was very crucial and led to the Allied win. Demand of food and munitions overseas was not being fulfilled because farmers and factory workers went to France for the war. Work wasn't getting done and as a ...
During the World War II women's role were focused on one thing, taking over what used to be the roles of men. Although jobs such as being a nurse, a teacher or working in the textile department swing and making clothes were still essentially classified as the typical “woman's job”, the war provided them not so much a gateway but a wider job opportunity to work in different fields. Such as in munitions factories, earning the name Munitionettes and working in the Armed Forces. In the munitions factories the women worked in all manner of production ranging from making ammunition to uniforms to aircrafts. They counted bullets which were sent to the soldiers at war, they mended aircrafts used by pilots during the war to shoot down enemies like birds in the sky.
The second example that proves that why WWII was an era full of hardships was the female experience. “At first, war industries feared that most women lacked the necessary stamina for factory work and were reluctant to hire them...women earned only about 60 percent as much as men doing the same jobs” (Danzer 565). Before the war, only a minority of women held occupations, of which were traditionally female like, sales and clerical work (Goff 456). Despite fulfilling the exact jobs and enduring just as much effort as men, women’s contribution to the workforce was still hindered after WWII, as they were paid less, despite doing the same jobs as men. (Danzer 592).
Women now did important jobs to help the men which transformed gender relations for many countries after the war (“Origins and Impact of World War I.”). Many women worked in factories producing weapons for the war. This was a dangerous yet important job that caused many to die from the weapons they were making malfunctioning
in the trenches with so much time to just sit and think, it is only
Seventy percent of women might not think they are discriminated in the workplace, but remaining thirty percent are discriminated against in the workplace by wage (Bryce par. 1). Some women might think they don’t feel like they are discriminated by employer because they make a high salary and satisfy their role when compare to lower wage people. The federal law of The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits against wage discrimination based on sex. Despite that law, women’s average earning is 78 cents when men earn a dollar (“Paycheck” par.1-2). Although the wage gap between women and men is reduced, it shows that the progress is still slow. The same credentials, full-time in the field, such as men, women must still work all around year for less money. According to bureau of labor statistic show the women who worked as full time median salary jobs had usual $719 for the
Today in the United States, men make more than women in various sectors, including education and other trades favoring women workers. The gap gets bigger when comparing the wages earned by men to those of women in jobs favoring men workers such as construction or other physically demanding jobs. Women are less likely to work those jobs, therefor; men have the advantage of having more experience and get paid better. In addition, employers would rather hire a man instead of a woman because they believe that a man will be able to sustain the difficulty of the job and work longer hours which crate a disadvantage for women because they are unable to gain experience and become skilled in that certain field. Gender pay gap based on this information is explained as the result of the discrimination of employers toward the feminine sex in terms of pay, which discourage them to work certain jobs leading to create a bigger gap due to the lack of