The tremendous movement of women into industry and the shifting from low paid to high paid occupations have given a foundation for a permanent improvement in the economic status of women, and it is hoped that their new independence and interest in public affairs will survive postwar adjustments and remain as a permanent asset. The physical endurance of many of the women doing war work was a matter of constant comment. But the increase in the tuberculosis death rates suggests that the final results of intensive and difficult work have not yet been determined. However, certain definite effects of war work upon the health, home life and personality of women and children should be noted.

Health of Women War Workers

Definite investigations of the health of women workers were mainly confined to the munitions industry and were made by the Health of Munition Workers Committee. The general conclusion of the committee that by the latter months of 1915 the health of the munition makers, both men and women, had been injured through overwork, has been much quoted in the United States:

Taking the country as a whole, the committee are bound to record their impression that the munition workers in general have been allowed to reach a state of reduced efficiency and lowered health which might have been avoided without reduction of output by attention to the details of daily and weekly rests.

The committee’s statements about female workers alone were of similar tenor:

The conclusions of the factory inspectors in 1915 as to the health of women munition makers and the results of later investigation under the auspices of the committee reiterate similar though perhaps slightly more favorable conclusions. “Reports of inspectors from all parts of the country” did not show that, as yet, the strain of long hours had caused “any serious breakdown among the workers,” though there were “indications of fatigue of a less serious kind.” “Individual workers confess to feeling tired and to becoming ‘stale’; there are complaints of bad time keeping, and there is a general tendency towards a reduction of hours.”[252]

Two examinations of the health of large numbers of women munition workers were made for the Health of Munition Workers Committee, the first in 1915-1916 and the second in 1917. The first covered 1,326 women in eleven factories and the second 1,183 women in eight factories. In both examinations nearly 60 per cent of the women were pronounced “healthy,” about a third showed evidences of slight fatigue and only the small remainder exhibited signs of “marked fatigue.”[253]

But these results were not believed to show the full burden of overwork, since much was unrecognizable and since those worst affected tended to drop out. The examination could only detect “definite and obvious fatigue”, amounting almost to sickness. The physical defects most frequently observed included indigestion, serious dental decay, nervous irritability, headache, anemia and female disorders. These were found in about a quarter of the women examined, but it is not stated whether any of them were supposed to result from the employment.

In the manufacture of fuses, where fine processes involving close attention were in use, some evidences of eye strain were found. In one factory 64 per cent of the women in the fuse department had eye defects, while only 19 per cent of those cutting shells by machine were similarly affected.[254]

Another hazard to the overfatigued woman worker is suggested by the increase in industrial accidents under the stress of long hours. With a twelve hour day and seventy-five hour week, accidents to women were two and a half times as frequent in one munition factory as when the shifts were reduced to ten hours. At another shell factory, when the working hours of men and women were equalized, lengthening the women’s week nine and three quarters hours and reducing the men’s nine and a quarter, the ratio of women’s to men’s accidents rose 19 per cent for the day shift and 61 per cent for the night shift.

Factors likely to be injurious to health included the frequent twelve hour shifts and the premium bonus system of payment. There were numerous complaints of the strain of twelve hour shifts, which usually entailed ten and a half hours of actual work. Particularly in the case of married women with children the strain of these hours appeared to be excessive. The factory inspectors stated in 1915 that especially at night the twelve hour shift “for any length of time for women ... is undoubtedly trying, and permissible only for war emergencies with careful make-weights in the way of good food and welfare arrangements.”[255] The last hours of the twelve hour night shift were often found to yield but little additional output.

Such a judgment is not surprising when the nature of the work frequently done by women munition makers is considered. To be sure, such work as filling shells with explosive mixtures was easy and semi-automatic; but other tasks, for example, examining and gauging, although light, took much attention and exactness; and some work, such as turning shells, was comparatively heavy. In lifting shells in and out of the lathe women were obliged to stretch over the machine, which involved a considerable strain on the arms with the heavier shells. For shells over 40-50 pounds, special lifting apparatus was generally provided, or a male laborer used to lift the shell, but women, in their haste to proceed, sometimes failed to wait for help. A number of compensation cases have arisen in which women were seriously injured by heavy lifting. Yet a woman physician who had medical supervision of several thousand workers from April, 1916, to November, 1918, decided that if women were chosen with care they could perform without risk operations formerly thought beyond their powers. The employes in question were expected to lift shells up to sixty pounds without special appliances, but women with pelvic or abdominal defects were not allowed to enter this work.[256] Ten and a half hours, however, of the heavier work might prove to be a serious strain.

Moreover, long train journeys were frequently necessary, adding two or three hours to the time spent away from home. Out of seventy-five women whose working hours began at 6 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m., none had time for more than about seven and a half hours’ sleep, and many of them less than seven hours. Only nineteen of these women were over twenty years of age.

The premium bonus systems of payment, which became more and more common, provided increased rates for increased output. In some cases such systems were said to have proved “a strong temptation to injurious overexertion.” One example was that of a woman who had “won a ‘shift’ bonus by turning out 132 shells (nose-profiling) in one shift where the normal output was 100 shells, and had as a result, to remain in bed on the following day. When it was pointed out to her later that she had acted foolishly, her reply was that she knew but she ‘wasn’t going to be beat.’”[257]

As counteracting influences to these strains, several factors were brought forward. Improved pay, and the more nourishing food, better clothing and living conditions which women workers were often enabled to secure were mentioned by a number of authorities, including the Health of Munition Workers Committee, the factory inspectors, the Association for the Advancement of Science, and the War Cabinet Committee on women in industry. “The dietary was in most cases more ample and suitable than the workers had been used to previously,” said the investigators for the Health of Munition Workers Committee. It has been observed that many well paid women gave up the supposedly feminine habit of living on bread and tea for substantial meals of meat and vegetables. The British Association for the Advancement of Science noted a higher “physical and mental tone” due to the better standards permitted by higher wages. The health of low paid workers frequently improved after entering munitions work.[258] The improvements in factory sanitation encouraged by the Ministry of Munitions were likewise helpful in decreasing the risks to health, and the patriotic spirit of the women also received mention as a partial preventive of fatigue. “The excitement of doing ‘war work’ and making munitions added a zest and interest to the work which tended to lessen the fatigue experienced,” said the physicians who investigated the health of women munition workers for the Health of Munition Workers Committee.

Effects of Night Work

It is generally believed that the wisdom of forbidding night work by women has been clearly demonstrated by experience during the war. Women, especially married women, did not stand night work as well as men. The British Association for the Advancement of Science said, in April, 1916:

It would be well if the experience of those industries in which night work has become a temporary necessity could be made widely known. The adverse effects on output, not to mention the lowering of the health of the workers, should be a sufficient safeguard against any attempt permanently to remove the factory act restriction.[259]

The earlier investigations of the Health of Munition Workers Committee also confirmed the dangers of night work for women. In one factory visited at night fatigue was found to prevent many of the women from getting a meal at the rest period. In another “several women were lying, during the meal hour, beside their piles of heaped-up work, while others, later, were asleep beside their machines.”[260]

The night work in munition factories had once more emphasized, said the committee, the “half forgotten facts” about its injurious effects on women. “In a working class home the difficulty in obtaining rest by day is great; quiet can not be easily secured; and the mother of a family can not sleep while the claims of children and home are pressing upon her; the younger unmarried women are tempted to take the daylight hours for amusement or shopping; moreover, sleep is often interrupted in order that the midday meal may be shared.”[261]

It must be acknowledged, however, that in its later interim report the committee was somewhat less unfavorable to night work by women. While it was found that continuous night work reduced output, a group of women on alternate weeks of day and night work lost less time than when on continuous day work. The committee did not, to be sure, consider night work desirable, but inevitable during the war emergency as long as production must be increased to its highest point. Because they were especially likely to do housework during the day and to get very little sleep, the physicians who examined women munition workers believed night work to be “too heavy a burden for the average married women.”

Aside from munitions work, the principal evidence as to health conditions concerned women who were replacing men on outdoor work. Observers generally expressed surprise at the improvement in health and appetite which took place, even when the work was heavy. Fresh air, better wages and better food were believed to account for the gains in health. Some of the women who became railway porters found the work too heavy, however, and the nervous strain often proved excessive for women tram drivers.

A possible decline in health among women workers in general is suggested by the fact of a 6 per cent increase in the death rate from tuberculosis among women under forty-five which took place between 1914 and 1916. The Registrar General of Vital Statistics suggested that this occurred because—

Many thousands of women are now for the first time subjected to the workshop conditions which have probably tended so much to maintain the mortality of males at working ages in recent years. Young women of the most susceptible ages have thus been subject to risks of infection as well as of pulmonary disease predisposing to tubercle which they would have escaped in following their normal occupations; and both from this cause and from the effect of workshop conditions on women already infected a number of women have probably died who would have survived under peace conditions.

Special studies were made by the Health Insurance Medical Research Committee to test this hypothesis, and they felt, that “further evidence favoured its accuracy.”[262]

Summing up the none too comprehensive evidence on the effects of four years’ war work on the health of women workers, the War Cabinet Committee on women in industry did not feel that any extensive breakdown in health had occurred. Higher real wages often led to better nutrition and greater comfort, health supervision within the factory diminished preventable sickness and the nature of the work frequently stimulated the women’s interest and improved their health and physical capacity. Yet “it is undoubted that a considerable amount of fatigue and sickness has occurred.” The rise in the tuberculosis death rate was held to be significant. The strain was believed greatest among married women who had to carry the double burden of industrial work and domestic responsibilities. But on the whole the war demonstrated that women workers had a greater reserve of energy than they had been credited with and might safely enter “more varied and arduous occupations” than had been thought desirable before the war.

Effects of War Work
on Home Life

Unfortunately it seems probable that conditions of work in the munition centers have been such as to have a disintegrating effect on home life. Long working hours, frequent long train trips in addition to those hours, overcrowded houses, the increased employment of married women and of women at a distance from their homes have all contributed to this result.

Two quotations, one from official, the other from labor sources, illustrate the way in which home life was too often disrupted by munitions work. According to the first:

While the urgent necessity for women’s work remains, and while the mother’s time and the time of the elder girls is largely given to the making of munitions, the home and the younger children must inevitably suffer. Where home conditions are bad, as they frequently are, where a long working day is aggravated by long hours of traveling and where, in addition, housing accommodation is inadequate, family life is defaced beyond recognition.... Often far from offering a rest from the fatigue of the day, the home conditions offer but fresh aggravation. A day begun at 4 or even 3.30 a.m. for work at 6 a.m., followed by 14 hours in the factory and another 2 or 2½ hours on the journey back, may end at 10 or 10.30 p.m., in a home or lodging where the prevailing degree of overcrowding precludes all possibility of comfortable rest. In such conditions of confusion, pressure and overcrowding, home can have no existence.[263]

Beginning January, 1916, attention to the “welfare” of women workers outside the factory by the Ministry of Munitions no doubt often improved the conditions. But early in 1917 a committee of women labor leaders still felt that home life had in many cases been disorganized.

The result of war conditions has naturally been very marked in its effects on the health and well being of the women and children at home. The demand for the work of women ... has been such that a large number of married women have been pressed into industrial employment. This means, on the one hand, a certain neglect of the duty of keeping their homes, and on the other an extra and heavy burden on their strength in order to fulfil, however inadequately, some part of these necessary duties. The children, as well as the women, have suffered from these results.[264]

To be sure, in the first months of the war the increase in family income had often meant better food, but even this advantage tended to disappear with the rapid rise in prices and the actual scarcity of certain products which occurred from time to time.

Development of Personality
in Women War Workers

Nevertheless, surprising as it may seem in view of the harm which war work appears often to have done to home life and sometimes to health, the development of the woman industrial worker under it may prove to be one of the most important changes wrought by the conflict.

An interesting article in The New Statesman[265] suggested that “three years of war have been enough to effect an amazing transformation,” in the average factory woman, especially in the munition centers. They had gained an independence and an interest in impersonal affairs seldom found before the war. “They appear more alert, more critical of the conditions under which they work, more ready to make a stand against injustice than their prewar selves or their prototypes. They seem to have wider interests and more corporate feeling. They have a keener appetite for experience and pleasure and a tendency quite new to their class to protest against wrongs even before they become intolerable.” It is “not that an entire class has been reborn, but that the average factory woman is less helpless, and that the class is evolving its own leaders.” The writer ascribed the change in the main to a wider choice of employments, occasional gains in real wages, praise of the women’s value in war service, and their discontent with the operation of the munitions acts and other government measures:

Again, the brains of the girl worker have been sharpened by the discontent of her family. She is living in an atmosphere of discontent with almost all established things. There is discontent because of the high prices of milk and meat, because of the scarcity of potatoes, sugar, butter or margarine, because of the indigestible quality of the war bread, because of the increased railway fares and the big profits of many employers and contractors. There is discontent with the discipline of the army, with the humiliating position of brothers and husbands and sweethearts who are privates, with the inadequacy of army pensions and the delay in giving them. There is rage against the munitions act, against munitions tribunals and military tribunals. Every member of the family has his or her grievance. The father perhaps is a skilled engineer and is afraid that he is being robbed of the value of his skill by the process of dilution. The eldest son is in the army, and perhaps sends home tales of petty tyrannies, and minor, avoidable irritations. Another son, with incurable physical defects, is forced into the army and falls dangerously ill. One daughter goes to another town to work in a munitions factory, can not get a leaving certificate, and barely earns enough to pay for board and lodging. Thus the women of the family are being brought more than ever before into contact with questions of principles and rights. Questions of government administration are forced upon their notice. And in the factory the very men who used to tell them that trade unionism was no concern of theirs are urging them to organize for the protection of men workers as well as of themselves.... The woman worker who was formerly forbidden by her menfolk to interest herself in public questions is now assured by politicians, journalists, and the men who work at her side that her labor is one of the most vital elements in the national scheme of defence, and that after the war it is going to be one of the most formidable problems of reconstruction. Flattery and discontent have always been the soundest schoolmasters. The factory woman was a case of arrested development, and the war has given her a brief opportunity which she is using to come into line with men of her own class.

Though naturally more guarded in expression, the factory inspectors’ report for 1916 reflected a very similar opinion. The change was noted principally among women substitutes for men. There, especially in heavy work, “the acquisition of men’s rates of pay has had a peculiarly enheartening and stimulating effect.” On the northeast coast in particular, where prewar opportunities for women had been limited and their wages very low, their replacement of men in shipbuilding, munitions, chemicals and iron works had “revolutionized” the position of the woman worker.

“The national gain appears to me to be overwhelming,” it was stated further, “as against all risks of loss or disturbance, in the new self-confidence engendered in women by the very considerable proportion of cases where they are efficiently doing men’s work at men’s rates of pay. If this new valuation can be reflected on to their own special and often highly skilled and nationally indispensable occupations a renaissance may there be effected of far greater significance even than the immediate widening of women’s opportunities, great as that is. Undervaluation there in the past has been the bane of efficiency, and has meant a heavy loss to the nation.”[266]

p The principal effects of the war on the woman worker were strikingly reviewed by Dr. Marion Phillips, at a “conference of working class organizations,” held at Bradford in March, 1917. Dr. Phillips held that the roots of the change lay in the absence of millions of men from their homes on military service and in the fact that for the first time the demand for women workers was greater than the supply. As a result of military demands, wives were deprived of their “dearest and most intimate counsellors,” their husbands, and were obliged to form independent judgments, but gained thereby a “new grasp of experience, a widened outlook and greater confidence in their own judgment.”

The keen demand for women workers resulted in higher wages, greater opportunities for promotion and more openings in the skilled trades. Women learned their own value as workers and a growing desire for equality with male workers was manifested. Higher wages enabled women workers to obtain more food, and there was a general rise in their standard of living.

On the other hand, Dr. Phillips notes as unfortunate results on women workers, the increase in hours, night work and frequent entrance into unsuitable occupations which overtaxed their strength. There had been a great influx into industry of women with young children, and a “general dispersion and scattering of home groups.” Many young women lived in munition centers in hostels or lodgings away from the restraining influence of family and friends. It was claimed that this system encouraged too militaristic a discipline and unfortunate interferences with the private life of the worker by employers and “welfare supervisors.” But it is reassuring to see that Dr. Phillips, who is not likely to underestimate the evils produced by the war, gives as her final judgment that “the good effects were infinitely more important than the bad ones.”