Pat Barker's Regeneration

1100 Words3 Pages

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 ...

... middle of paper ...

...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 <http://www.dartfordarchive.org.uk/20th_century/military_ww1.shtml>.

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