Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

‘the door of The Doll’s House [as in Henrik Ibsen’s feminist play] opened – for the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation – and women to every other.’11 In other words, the tragedy of the First World War ended up empowering women in a way no one could have predicted.

      A global game of dominos began as countries resurrected long-dormant loyalties and alliances. Britain entered the war to support Belgium after Germany demanded free passage through it for its troops, according to its ‘Schlieffen Plan’ for a hypothetical European conflict. Although Britain was the only allied power to declare war on Germany rather than the other way round,12 it didn’t want a war. Nobody did. But European countries’ huge armies, amassed to provide security and preserve the peace, ‘carried the nations to war by their own weight’, in A. J. P. Taylor’s memorable phrase.13

      The size of Britain’s armed forces before 1914 was around 400,000 (compared to around 144,000 today), a figure the government initially thought satisfactory. It took the appointment of Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War to convince them that millions more men would be needed to defeat Germany. With the cabinet still opposed to conscription, Kitchener was placed in charge of voluntary recruitment and approved the use of his own image in propaganda posters, which played heavily on waverers’ guilt and made it socially unacceptable not to sign up. The famous ‘Lord Kitchener poster’, designed by Alfred Leete and featuring a moustachioed Kitchener pointing at viewers, his eyes locking with theirs, appeared in September 1914.

      Subsequent adverts deployed women as weapons. The ‘Women of Britain say “Go!”’ poster produced for the Imperial Maritime League at around the same time as Kitchener’s shows a mother clasping her two children to her as her husband marches away from their house. The woman stands not just for innocence, domesticity and morality, but for Britannia herself. As reports of rape and torture filtered through from Belgium and the other occupied territories, the necessity of defending Britannia at all costs seemed clear – and who better to do the defending than a husband?

      Graphic atrocity propaganda depicted German soldiers spearing babies and raping nuns. In one poster a demon-eyed German soldier treads on a woman’s corpse, blood dripping from his bayonet. Printed alongside it is an excerpt from what purports to be a British officer’s letter to The Times:

      We have got three girls in the trenches with us, who came to us for protection. One had no clothes on, having been outraged by the Germans. I have given her my shirt and divided my rations among them. In consequence I feel rather hungry … Another poor girl has just come in, having had both her breasts cut off. Luckily I caught the Uhlan [cavalryman] officer in the act, and with a rifle at 300 yards killed him. And now she is with us, but, poor girl, I am afraid she will die. She is very pretty, and only about 19, and only has her skirt on …

      A report by Viscount James Bryce’s Committee on Alleged German Outrages detailed German atrocities against Belgian women. ‘A witness gives a story, very circumstantial in its details, of how women were publicly raped in the market-place of the city, five young German officers assisting.’14 The accuracy of Bryce’s report was challenged after the Armistice, but there is no doubt that sexual violence against women in conflict zones is and was prevalent.

      However, Millicent Garrett Fawcett – instinctively pacifist but a practical patriot who thought the war would ultimately advance the feminist cause – objected to these stories, arguing that ‘it is surely no part of patriotism to stir up by speech or writing ungovernable rage and fury against the whole German people … After nearly 2,000 years of Christianity we have but imperfectly learned one of its lessons if we think we can drive out cruelty by cruelty.’15 She instructed her NUWSS to cease campaigning for suffrage and instead focus on sustaining the nation’s vital energies: supporting Infant Welfare Centres, fundraising and keeping the food supply chain intact – for example, ensuring that ripe fruit did not rot on trees for want of workers to pick it.

      While it suited the government to show women as passive, delicate creatures pining for their husbands, it was clear that with a third of the male labour force away fighting, they needed to roll up their sleeves and get to work doing ‘men’s jobs’. In March 1915, 80,000 women filled out a registration form declaring their willingness to do war work. Olive Schreiner, the South African writer and pacifist, observed cannily that ‘the nation which is the first to employ its women may be placed at a vast advantage over its fellows in time of war’.16 But ironically it was existing female workers – specifically working-class workers – who suffered most after the outbreak of war, as panicking wealthy households dismissed servants, and factories responded to drops in orders by laying off staff.

      In September 1914, just over 44 per cent of all female employees were out of work. To address the problem, a system of relief work was created in the form of the Queen Mary’s Work Fund, administered by the Central Committee for Women’s Employment and run by labour-movement stalwarts such as Margaret Bondfield and Marion Phillips. The workrooms run by the fund paid notoriously badly – around 10 shillings a week; Sylvia Pankhurst called them ‘Queen Mary’s Sweatshops’, though, as Gerry Holloway points out, ‘unemployed women were probably grateful for any work they could get’.17 There was also the Educated Woman’s War Emergency Training Fund – what a title! – which attempted to retrain women for clerical positions.

      But as the war progressed and munitions and textiles factories went into overdrive, thousands of working-class women used their own initiative to find jobs, or rather new jobs, as most of them would have earned a wage before, doing piecework at home if not in a factory or in service. (In July 1914 there were already 200,000 women employed in the metal and chemical trades.)18

      New soldiers needed new uniforms, and fast. Jane Cox from Mile End in London worked at Schneider’s, which manufactured caps for the military. The poisonous khaki dye brought her out in boils: Cox developed a large, painful one on her spine but no treatment was offered. ‘If you stopped to blow your nose you got the sack,’ she remembered. ‘You couldn’t go to the toilet. You really worked in those days.’19