World War 1 Working Women Essay

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The common idea that World War I changed the lives of women by giving them the freedom they lacked before the war is a misconception. Women did gain some rights after the war ended, but not nearly as many as people think they got. This idea that the First World War emancipated stems the new visibility of working women due to a shift in where women worked.
Before World War I women, mostly single working women, health jobs such as cleaning, teaching, working on the corner ship for a couple hours. Middle-class wives however for the most part didn’t work after marriage due to their role being in the house. In France and Germany millions of women were peasant farmers. During World War I, there was a shift in gender roles in the workforce. if they …show more content…

This was due to the shift of women taking on more masculine roles and stepping away from simply working in offices or confined in the home. They were now on the streets where they were working jobs including road sweepers, delivery van drivers, shop assistances. The new job opportunities that opened up for women in the civil service realm had increased by 1,751%; - as transporters increased by 544%, in the metal industry increased by 376%, and industries such as TNT manufacturing increased by 160%, [2]. This increase in women working in different fields does not mean that there was an influx of women leaving their homes to flood the workforce. The total number of waged women during the war didn’t increase by much, but it did increase by about one million people. This increase in numbers meant that the working-class women that were previously working as domestic servants found better jobs as factory workers such as helping manufacture TNT or becoming munitions workers. The middle-class and upper-class, for the most part, did not have much of a shift, there were very few volunteers from the upper-classes in the factories, [1]. So it was mainly working-class women that was gaining visibility and moving from their old jobs to better paying jobs that were originally held by

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