but it also arose from public ignorance of the share that women were already taking in industry before the war. There was no great industrial group which did not at that time already employ thousands of women; in the building trades there were 7,000, and in mines and quarries nearly the same number. The metal trades held 170,000 women; there were even some hundreds in the Admiralty dockyards. The great exceptions were the shipyards, underground work in the mines, iron and steel foundries and rolling-mills, various branches of engineering and whisky distill- ing. Other important services, like the railways, used them only for clerical work and cleaning, except of course in posts which could only admit of women, such as those of attendants in women's cloakrooms. Others reserved certain processes for men and gave the rest to women: others were women's trades: others again used men and women interchangeably.
The demarcation that existed between men's and women's work was as a rule definite and well recognized in the trades concerned. The very heaviest types of work were done by men, and so in most cases was work that required any high degree of skill. Such work, moreover, was almost certain to be the subject of trade-union restrictions which effectively prevented employers from using women on it. But these criteria, except at the ends of the scale, were not absolute. Women in many occupations for instance making chains or gramophone records were accus- tomed to handle very heavy tools or lift very heavy weights. Many would not trouble to acquire skill, or were denied the opportunity; but the bad organization of women and their low rates of pay tended to conceal the fact that they were often employed on jobs which a man would have considered at least as semi-skilled, while a few women up and down the country were turning out work which required a considerable technical endow- ment. The Ministry of Munitions, to take an extreme instance, found optical lenses being ground by women in London which they considered equal to the finest German lenses, and this had been going on for a dozen years. Very few women had such an opening, but all along the middle line, where the work was neither too heavy nor took too long to learn, there were trades and sec- tions of trades where the spheres of the two sexes overlapped, so that on certain parts of the work they were either used inter- changeably or one or the other according to district custom.
The best known examples of this are probably the cotton, woollen and worsted weavers, and the machinists in the Birming- ham brassware trade, clerks and shop-assistants. But in all such border-lands, as has been said, the tendency before the war was for the low-paid and restricted woman to replace the more mobile and unrestricted man. In most of these cases one type of labour or the other by no means always that actually used was probably more suited to the work and economically pref- erable; but even where employers were sensible of this, they found local customs and prejudices too strong to alter, and the problem was little thought about and never squarely faced.
During the World War. British industry, therefore, when the war came, was not compelled to start afresh with totally un- trained women workers. Less than a tenth of the 4,750,000 employed in Nov. 1918 in agricultural, commercial and industrial occupations, had been altogether ignorant when they entered on war work of at least the routine and discipline of an industrial life, and the majority had really useful experience. It is after all more difficult to learn to handle a power loom or a power-driven sewing machine than it is to change from one of these to a semi- automatic lathe. Employers stated that of the 3,000,000 women employed in industry alone 700,500 a number nearly equal to that of the new entrants into the same occupations were directly replacing men. This did not mean however that they were necessarily engaged on work that before 1914 had always been done by men. In many instances the work itself was new. Gas- masks, depth-charges and anti-aircraft devices, for example, had not been made in the same way, if at all, before 1914. Some- times the change made was only nominal, as when a shop full of girls who had been machining bicycle parts, was turned over to the manufacture of rifles, and the processes to be performed on the new object remained unaltered. Again the employment of
women on a particular job, though new to the factory in ques- tion or even to the district, might be customary in other parts of England or Scotland. The Midlands could show thousands of women pressing, stamping, drilling, milling, dressing castings, core-making, assembling, even working on capstan lathes, and some of these were turning out articles for use in war such as fuzes, adaptors and cartridge cases. Any of these processes, if performed in an engineering shop, was entirely forbidden to a woman or a girl. Finally, there were very great numbers of women who merely replaced men on duties which had formerly been undertaken by either men or women. Familiar examples of trades in which this occurred have already been given. It is not too much to say that the majority of the women war workers were employed on work familiar to their sex, and often not widely dissimilar except in the conditions under which it was done from their ordinary occupations.
There were, however, exceptions to this, so interesting that they obscured the true state of affairs. Women on buses, policewomen and landgirls, women teaching in boys' public schools, and perched on ladders washing windows, women in gas-works and steel foundries and marine-engineering shops produced a com- prehensive effect which was increased by the uniforms and work- ing-dresses they wore, and by the fact that many of the war- workers were drawn from social classes unused to connecting their women-folk with factory life. There were reasons, too, which led to the position being misrepresented. It was in the interest of each employer, anxious to retain the skeleton of his male staff, to emphasize the length to which he had already carried direct substitution, and the returns made by them were found to reflect this anxiety. Moreover, it was in some districts easier to attract women to work which they believed served the purpose of releasing a man for the Forces than to obtain them for uninspiring women's tasks, where the drudgery and hardship to be faced were not even tinted with glamour.
Numerically, the changes in the employment of women and girls took the following course. The outbreak of war produced immediate unemployment. By Sept. 1914 about 250,000 females (8-4% of those employed in Aug.) had already left their jobs. This was the lowest point. By Feb. 1915 only 1^5% of these were still without work; by April the figures showed a surplus of 2%, and by Oct. igrs the increase already amounted to 150,000. So far, however, it was still almost entirely in trades recognized as women's, or in work performed by both men and women. Of the 429,000 women and girls who entered the metal trades during the war, only 29,000 had entered by July 1915, though the effect of the Government's efforts to achieve dilution, which was made possible by the conferences held that summer, was shown by the fact that another 20,000 joined during the next three months.
By Oct. 1.917 the percentage of women and girls to the total number of workpeople employed in industry, commerce, agri- culture, transport and Government establishments had risen from 24% to 36% and nearly 1,500,000 women had been drawn into these occupations. By Nov. 1918 there was a 50% increase in the number of females employed in the same callings, repre- senting 1,750,000, though, as has been stated, the addition to the total number of employed women was only 1,000,000. This is accounted for by the fact that over half of the 750,000 which makes the difference were persons who had previously been employed as dressmakers or domestic servants, while the rest had been outworkers of other types who were drawn into muni- tions work either by patriotism or by the superior interest and rates of pay. At the same time very large transferences of labour were taking place within the framework of industry, for by no means all of the great trade groups shared in the general war expansion. Thus, while industry proper, on a balance of pros- perous and declining sections, showed an increase of just under 800,000, the figures for the textile trades fell by over 50,000, for paper and printing by 7,000, and for clothing by 56,000.
After the War. From Nov. 1918 the fall in numbers naturally begins, but up to July 1920 which is in some ways a better date for the purpose of comparison than Nov. 1920, though figures for that month will be found in the tables accompanying this
