The Tragic, Heroic Women of World War I - The Daily Beast

The Tragic, Heroic Women of World War I - The Daily Beast

 

The
Great War was a mixed blessing for British women, opening up the
workplace to them as never before, even as it slaughtered their husbands
and boyfriends.<p>I was wear­ing my best dress, best shoes, and
my hair was braid­ed with rib­bon. At four years old, I was only going
to have tea with a neigh­bor, so I might have seemed a lit­tle
over­dressed—but my moth­er was well aware that the neigh­bor’s last
inti­mate expe­ri­ence of child­hood was her own in Edwar­dian
Eng­land.<p>In 1959, I was the only child in our ham­let, so I was
in some demand among the ladies of a cer­tain age who lived alone,
hav­ing never mar­ried. I would sit at table with my boiled egg and
toast, or a small cheese and cucum­ber sand­wich and a scone with
but­ter and jam, and I would answer their ques­tions. And because I was a
curi­ous child, I had ques­tions of my own. Each of those women had a
sepia pho­to­graph on the man­tel­piece, of a young man in uni­form. And
I remem­ber the answer, when I asked about the man. “Oh, that was my
sweet­heart. He died in the Great War.”<p>I already knew about
this “great war” because I’d been told that my grand­fa­ther’s ail­ments
were all due to the same event. Grand­dad had been wound­ed,
shell-shocked, and gassed at the Bat­tle of the Somme in 1916, and it
was my ques­tions about him that ignit­ed a life­long inter­est in the
effects of war and its after­math—in par­tic­u­lar, the changes wrought
by that con­flict on the lives of women.<p>A young woman in
pre-World War I Britain would like­ly expect her life to fol­low that of
her moth­er and grand­moth­er. Depend­ing on her “sta­tion” in life,
she might work in a fac­to­ry, in domes­tic ser­vice, a shop, or in an
office. If she were from the mid­dle or upper class­es, she would remain
at home until mar­riage, hope­ful­ly before the age of 21. Women’s
lives were as restrict­ed as their cloth­ing, though Britain’s
suf­fragettes were con­sid­ered the most vocif­er­ous. Then war was
declared in 1914. By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, a
British woman aged 16-32 stood only a one-in-ten chance of mar­riage.
The 1921 cen­sus revealed that there were two mil­lion “sur­plus” women
of mar­riage­able age, a sta­tis­tic that led to pub­li­ca­tion of a
pam­phlet, “The Prob­lem of the Sur­plus Women.” That might appear
amus­ing, but a gen­er­a­tion had endured a dev­as­tat­ing human
tragedy.<p>By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, a British
woman aged 16-32 stood only a one-in-ten chance of marriage …

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/29/the-tragic-heroic-women-of-world-war-i.html