Armistice they were acknowledged to constitute a serious prob- lem and a grave responsibility for the Government which had recruited them. Efforts were made to deal with those still juve- niles, but the large numbers who had reached the age of 18 during the course of the war were left outside them. At that date they were themselves very generally alarmed as to their industrial pros- pects, and it was agreed by all those watching the situation, includ- ing the trade-union officials, that if immediate training were offered under suitable conditions it would be possible to attract large numbers of them into domestic service, which was not only the one opening available but the direction in which their labours would be socially most beneficial. Schemes agreed to by the trade unions were put forward by the Ministries of Labour and Munitions, but the Treasury, though obliged to permit the payment of unemploy- ment donation to women in idleness, were unwilling to allow the relatively small additional payment which would have coupled it with productive training. A restricted scheme was finally set up which provided training in occupations which had been recognized as women's work prior to the war, and within the limits imposed it was very successful. It was not, however, able to reach the bulk of the women who most needed it or to provide a satisfactory flow of recruits for domestic service.
The other great class which entered wage-earning occupations as a result of the war were the women from secondary schools and universities, who had looked forward to leading idle lives, or to entering the teaching profession. They flowed rather into com- merce, finance, the Civil Service and the war services than into industry, but the comparatively small numbers who did enter the munitions factories exercised a disproportionate influence. It was they as a rule who made it possible to set up women foremen, super- visors, and charge hands, and it was generally those better educated women who were first placed on really skilled or technical work. The managing director of the one great marine-engineering shop which trained women to perform the whole of a skilled man's work done in that shop, i.e., to perform any operation of which their machines were capable, accepted only girls from the secondary schools. He stated that in his opinion this degree of intellectual training was essential if they were to learn the work in the time allowed about six months and said,too, that his men made far less objection to training them than women of the industrial type whom they regarded as potential black-legs. The Ministry of Munitions Training Department also laid great stress on the importance of general education, going so far as to select only girls with a secondary school education for training in fitting and turning. The educated women had also a good effect upon conditions. Bad employers were restrained by their intelligence and independence from taking advantage of their more helpless companions, and good employers and welfare officers found them a useful channel of communication with the staffs when introducing health services, canteens etc. It is also probably partly due to them that the number of women trade unionists doubled during the war. The figures are said to be 350,000 for 1914 and 660,000 for 1918, but they only pretend to being estimates, and it is probable, owing to the tendency of women to enter their names after a meeting and then to lose all interest and pay no further subscriptions, that they are a good deal too high.
Women of a superior general training were found especially useful in instructing, commanding and supervising other women who had often in the past resented the elevation to authority of one of themselves. In the women's services and the land army this aspect of their work was of the first importance. On ,the land, particularly, their comparative acquaintance with the country, and their relative indifference to dark and loneliness, persuaded the town recruits to endure the terrors and discomforts of winter, while vestiges of feudal feeling gave them authority with the country women. In fact, wherever the work ceased to be purely physical, and more and more as it took on an intellectual quality the extent of a woman's education was found to determine her aptitude for learning and performing new work. The university women especially, in spite of the fact that those available for war-work were still largely of a uniform type that which had been preparing itself for the teaching profession found that their training immensely increased their comparative value in almost every direction, even where their instruction had not led up to, or especially fitted them for, their war duties. It is hardly surprising, however, that the best work of all from a technical point of view was done by those who had been specifically trained for the jobs they undertook, like the women physi- cians and surgeons and the women employed on scientific research in the National Physical and Chemical Laboratories. It is more to be wondered at that so much could be done by women and girls divorced from familiar surroundings, and set to adapt themselves to entirely novel systems of ideas, and to compress the training time of years allotted to men into a few months or weeks. Not even the at- mosphere of the army can have been so foreign to the new soldiers- who as a rule had some notion of its main structure and had often experienced some form of communal existence as were industrial and even commercial life to the girls who entered them from their day schools and their middle-class homes. And yet they adapted themselves to these new values, not only from duty, but with an enthusiasm and a quickness which seemed to ^how that the labour, and the variety and the tension, were congenial to their natures.
Quality of Work. It is not possible here to attempt a final esti- mate of the qualities their work revealed, but testimony seems to agree on certain points. Above all they were conscientious; they were devoted. As long as they retained interest in their work they endured degrading conditions through monotonous periods of overstrain without apparently accumulating the resentment which from time to time flared out among their male colleagues; instead their health suffered. This tenacity was perhaps due to their stronger imaginative hold on the purpose to which they were giving themselves up. In relation to their environment, on the other hand, they were docile and lacked imagination; as a body they acquiesced in the conditions they found and made no concerted effort to change them. When they felt that the life was intolerable they left it, and the active combative temper of the men roused no response in them. As individuals they were less disciplined than men, less calculable, less impressed by traditions and institutions, giving an effect, for all their high spirits and quickness of tongue, of greater detachment. In the mass they were difficult to organize, elusive, fatalistic, sceptical and inarticulate. If they did combine they were faithful to their leaders, whom they preferred of a sensible and reasoning rather than of an idealistic type. Policy too, to obtain their approval, must be direct, concrete, and likely to produce an immediate effect. They were fortunate in their representatives, and the knowledge, ability and public spirit of the women trade- union officials secured for them an influence to which the numerical proportion of organized women would not have entitled them. Women might well have been proud to support societies to which they owed so much. But they seem as a rule to have left them when they left munitions work. They went back each to her private anx- ieties and hardships, showing no desire to continue banded together either to protect their interests or to continue their relationship, and seeking no outlet for the sense of injustice which some of them felt. A few of the ex-service women formed clubs and groups under the leadership of their old officers, but not the hundreds of thousands of munition workers, clerks and civil servants whose service took a more democratic form.
Effect on Industry. It was not without difficulty that trade and industry were adjusted to fit these feminine millions. From the winter of 1914 the Government had been anxious to extend the use of women for the production of munitions, and in the summer of 1915 agreements were signed with the engineering unions which re- moved in theory the main barrier to their employment on men's work in the metal trades; but it was not until the spring of 1916 that substitution made any real headway. The employers had first to be convinced that they would not cause more trouble than they were worth, the factories had to be prepared for them, the work adjusted to suit their strength and skill, and, hardest of all, the men in each shop persuaded not only to submit to their presence but to cooperate actively in helping them to learn and to carry on their work. The women themselves meanwhile had to be trained. From July 1915 onward the Ministry of Munitions, in conjunction with the Board of Education, was teaching women with great success in technical schools and instructional workshops for the first year, simple repetition work on shells and fuzes; later, work on aeroplanes and for positions as tool-setters, inspectors or charge hands; and, finally, the really skilled work of fitting and turning.
In all the Government schools trained 45,000 women, and very large numbers were trained by those private firms who preferred to give their own instruction. Under both methods it was found that they were good material, and that the period required before they could be fitted into their niches in the new schemes of mass produc- tion was shorter than anyone had thought possible. But the teach- ing of the women was the least of the trouble. To the last a certain number of employers were hostile to their introduction, and by more or less overt collusion with their staffs could make it impracticable or unsuccessful. Where this was the case the only weapon of the Government was to create a shortage of labour in their works by removing their War Munitions Volunteers and adopting similar coercive measures. This could not always be done in the face of the representations which the firm were nearly always able to secure from the Supply Department with whom their contract was made, that upon its instant fulfilment depended the issue of the war. Employers anxious to support the Government as a rule found the carrying on of their work under war conditions sufficiently harassing with a competent male staff: they could not be expected to welcome a change which meant providing special new accommodation a much more troublesome matter than might be supposed in town fac- tories where every inch of space was already needed ; reconsidering each one of the methods to which they were accustomed, and antagonizing their staffs, in order to bring in labour certain to be relatively inefficient for the time, and of unknown potential efficiency. Their grounds of objection were substantial and their position strong, and it is to the credit of industry that some of the larger firms forestalled the Government in their introduction of women's labour. To effect this it had been necessary to bring the bulk of the work all of which in some firms had hitherto been carried on entirely by skilled men within the average capacity of untried and almost unskilled persons. Of the three grades into which it could be roughly divided skilled, semi-skilled (which included the repetition work), and unskilled and labouring work the last required the most ad-
