Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Women were seen as subsidiary; they would ‘free a man for the forces’ by taking over the desk jobs and petty duties that prevented our brave boys from doing the work
they
were naturally suited for. Women were to be allowed to choose between industry and the auxiliary services. War bureaucracy offered them the same ‘clean’, ‘feminine’ and ‘respectable’ jobs that the pre-war business girls had enjoyed. And above all they would continue to tend, care and feed – as nurses, land girls, cooks, storewomen, orderlies and cleaners. Seamlessly, the authorities upheld the sexual status quo, while encouraging the notion that every woman could do her bit for King and country. Even when the need for women to work on anti-aircraft batteries became urgent (by 1942 there would be more women deployed on air defence than men) they retained their official ‘non-combatant’ status. The AA women were, however, permitted to die or be wounded alongside their male comrades, and frequently did. But they were not granted the same service medals as the men, and were paid a third less. The vocabulary of feminism was still largely conspicuous by its absence from all discussions of female participation.
On 18 December 1941 the National Service (No. 2) Act was passed, making conscription for women legal. Voluntarism was abandoned. It was now a matter of time before each and every ‘mobile’ woman in the country was called upon for war duties. When it came to the point, the government had little difficulty persuading the British people that women’s conscription was a necessity. ‘
In the end
… the operation went wonderfully smoothly,’ remembered Mary Grieve, editor of
Woman
magazine. Everyone was happy – women too. Surveyed, 97 per cent of them agreed ‘emphatically’ that women should do war work.
By the end of that year, even before conscription started to take effect properly, there were just over 200,000 members of the three women’s services, more than five times the number for 1939 (36,100). The figures would peak in 1943 at a total of nearly half a million. The total numbers of working women would also peak that year, at seven and a half million. Since the beginning of the war, an additional million and a half women had joined the ‘essential’ industries.
The effect of conscription on female morale was to raise their sense of self-worth immeasurably. Men were removed from all the jobs that women could do as well, and the only limit on a woman’s contribution was her physical strength. The sacred myth of the housewifely angel as a full-time unpaid drudge was conclusively exposed by Bevin’s new law. Soon after it was passed
Edith Summerskill,
the feminist and Labour MP, wrote in
The
Fortnightly
magazine:
The periodic upheaval occasioned by war reveals that women have individualities of their own and are not merely adjuncts of men. They have aspirations and ambitions which become apparent in war time, because only then can they enjoy a real freedom to achieve at least some part of their heart’s desire …
The freedom which women are enjoying today will spell the doom of home life as enjoyed by the male who is lord and master immediately he enters his own front door.
Many women now found that their wartime activities offered an emancipation unimagined by their mothers and, by halfway through the war, the occasional mutterings about female independence to be heard among the ranks in the late 1930s were becoming a chorus. ‘
Most of us felt
that [conscription] was only right and were glad to be regarded as equally liable as men for the defence of our country,’ was Frances Faviell’s view. Mass Observation continued to harvest the views of women at this time. One of their interviewees was recorded rejoicing in her new-found liberty as a working woman: ‘
For a housewife
who’s been a cabbage for fifteen years, you feel you’ve got out of the cage and you’re free … It’s all so different, such a change from dusting. I think the war has made a lot of difference to housewives. I don’t think they’ll want to go back to the old narrow life.’ Meanwhile
Monica Littleboy’s experiences
in the Land Army, the WAAFs and the FANYs were transforming her from a shy teenager into a confident woman: ‘I was never without somewhere to go or someone to escort me. I had come out of myself and lost much of my shyness. I could go anywhere, any place and find enjoyment.’ The same loss of inhibition was echoed by a
Mrs M. in the Midlands:
‘The war changed everything. Until then I had led rather a sheltered life, but now I had to meet and mix with more people … The public houses were always so busy … it was so unusual to see
women drinking. It just hadn’t been done before.’ These were new voices, speaking with a new confidence.
Young women like Phyllis Noble
began to feel that a future beyond the home was a reality. In the autumn of 1941, thirsty for self-improvement and intellectual stimulus, she and her friend Emily Pluck (‘Pluckie’) started attending psychology evening classes at Morley College in Lambeth. Friends at Morley encouraged Phyllis’s latent interest in feminism, and she and Pluckie joined a rally in Trafalgar Square, where Edith Summerskill and Nancy Astor spoke out in favour of equal compensation for women who had received war injuries. And their proto-feminist tendencies were stoked by attending Conway Hall meetings to hear speakers like Bevin’s Labour Party colleague Mary Sutherland on the topic ‘Women and the War’. In her diary, Phyllis recorded that she had found this talk enlightening, but questioned Sutherland’s assertion that ‘most marriages are happy’. ‘I feel bound to disagree,’ wrote this precocious nineteen-year-old. ‘I think probably most couples jog along as best they can in their self-made rut.’
At Morley too they were taught by Amber Blanco White, who persuaded them to read feminist writers such as Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby – they were ‘models in whose footsteps we might follow’. With her gangly height and gappy teeth, Amber Blanco White was a woman of charm and vivacity, and she opened her students’ eyes to the possibilities of sexual freedom for women. Before the First World War she had had a notorious affair with H. G. Wells and she revelled in introducing her psychology class to the delights of free love, advising them never to tell their husbands if they had a lover, and advocating sex before marriage as being good for mental health. She even acted out, in front of the entire class, how couples could get more fun out of their sex life by adopting unorthodox positions for intercourse. Phyllis and Pluckie came away from such sessions inspired with breakaway dreams. In the questioning intellectual climate of wartime London, freedom, modernity and equality of the sexes were surely now within their reach. A whole world of fascinating work and endeavour seemed attainable: ‘uncertainty about the future made us more determined to squeeze what we could out of our wartime lives.’
At this point, peace still seemed very far away.
A Man’s Job
Once Bevin introduced registration, individual women needed little encouragement to join the services. Conscription acted as a spur and a challenge. If you weren’t part of it, you were losing out. A steady procession of young women set out to see for themselves how they could make a difference, to their country, to their own lives and, in some cases, to the course of history.
One of these young women
was probationary teacher Dorothy (‘Doffy’) Brewer. Today, at over ninety, Doffy still possesses something of the shyness and gentility that she felt to be so cramping as a young girl growing up in suburban east London in the 1930s. Back in 1941 she was twenty-two, plagued with the feeling that she was missing all the fun. ‘What was I doing? Nothing … If there was something that could be done, I wanted to be part of it.’ Large numbers of Doffy’s pupils had been evacuated, making her feel all the more pointless. She was well aware that teaching was a reserved occupation for all women over the age of twenty-five, but Bevin’s new rules meant that from September this would be reduced to twenty. Her year’s probation was due to be completed in August. Between resigning from her job and joining the army, she had barely a month. Doffy felt a bubble bursting in her brain. As she sat on the bus on her way to school one wet morning in June things came to a head. Outside, rain was coming down in sheets; she could barely see out of the bus windows. As ever, the local bore, Mr Harris, made straight for the empty seat beside her:
I thought: I’ll join the Army if Mr Harris says …
‘Flaming June, eh?’ he remarked, as he thumped himself down.
That was it. Mr Harris had made my decision.
A BBC appeal calling for kine-theodolite operators attached to the Royal Artillery persuaded Doffy that she was a suitable candidate for the ATS: she had mathematical qualifications, good eyesight, good general health, love of open-air life, and she was five foot two in her heels. She posted her resignation letter to the Education Office, and on the way home went into the recruiting office and took the oath. There they told her, ‘You’ll be doing a man’s job.’ Her pay, however, would be two-thirds that of her male counterpart.
Kine-theodolites are subtle and complicated instruments that can not only photograph a target – an aeroplane, say – but also locate it in time. They can also calculate with accuracy the position of the shell-bursts fired by a gunner. But this important information could not be used in action, as the results took hours to produce. Instead its value was in training gun teams. The urgent need for operators meant that Doffy and her fellow ATS (none of whom had ever studied physics before, since few girls’ schools included it on the curriculum) would be given just three weeks’ training.
However, before she could learn to be a kine-theodolite operator she, along with thousands of other young women now recruiting, had to learn to survive in the army. In September 1941 Doffy Brewer was among 200 young women who arrived for training at Talavera Camp on Northampton racecourse. Two weeks later another 200 arrived. It was the same across the country, and the basic training routine was the same for all of them. ‘If you survive it,’ wrote Doffy, ‘nothing in the way of discomfort, humiliation, culture-shock or fatigue that life can bring afterwards can be as bad.’ For three weeks she and all the other ‘rookies’ were alternately bullied and shamed, crushed and abused.
The boot camp approach was quite deliberate, and completely impersonal. It started on day one, with latrine parade. Twenty-four girls with no notion of what to expect were quick-marched in groups of six to use the latrines, and given precisely one minute each, no more. This was followed by the issue of kit and bedding: khaki uniform (‘not becoming’), stockings, winter woollens, nightwear, coat, overalls and underwear. Blankets and sheets. Ear plugs. Shoes, cleaning gear, tin mug and cutlery, toothbrush, hairbrush and mending kit – which immediately came in useful. The corporal handed out the next item with an order: ‘Here’s your brassière. Make it fit before morning parade tomorrow.’ And finally, sanitary towels:
These are issued every month. One packet, size two. If you want size one or three, you’ll ask your corporal.
We all nearly died of shame … Nobody talked about such things, openly.
However, Doffy and her comrades had a man to thank for this thoughtful provision. Sanitary towels were Lord Nuffield’s contribution to the grateful Women’s Services and would become known to many as ‘Nuffield’s nifties’.
Next, Doffy was given her ID disc. It was to be signed for, and never removed. That was followed with instructions on how to lace up shoes in the correct fashion.
We fell out, groaned our way into the hut, and folded our individuality into our suitcases, for the duration.
Next day was drill: more commands, square-bashing, parades. But it was in the canteen that Doffy’s middle-class gentility came under worst assault. She learned to dread the foul-mouthed mockery aimed at her by the other girls, most of them Midlands lasses who had left their jobs as skivvies and housemaids to join the army. Their language was larded with obscenities; it seemed to Doffy that they took malign pleasure in finding disgusting interpretations for her every remark. ‘It was sheer hell.’
Inspections, medicals and more inspections. Marching and manoeuvres. And scrubbing. The scrubbing was carried out, in long lines, on hands and knees, wearing indestructibly thick denim overalls. It took hours. The sergeant-major who came to inspect the work walked his muddy boots across the wet concrete floor that they had just scrubbed and told them to do it again. ‘Some of the girls cried.’ Everyone had blisters on hands and feet, everyone was suffering from the cold 6.30 a.m. starts, after uncomfortable nights on rough cotton sheets. The food was fit for pigs. ‘Serve your country? Hold on to the thought, if you possibly can.’
By the second week the blisters were starting to heal, and Doffy had learned always to carry her own bath plug. She had also made friends with the only other girl not from the Midlands, and a simple intelligence test had given her the chance to shine. Then came the pep talk from the Regimental Sergeant-Major, the ‘truly Great Man’ of the camp. It was this that finally broke Doffy’s spirit. Expecting yet another round of browbeating and bullying, she stood firm, only to find all her resolve undermined by the RSM’s strategy of carefully calculated emotional sabotage. Instead of haranguing them, the Great Man made the new recruits feel
understood
. He knew, it seemed, just how they felt: ‘I’ve been in the Army for twenty years … and I’ll tell you this: I’m still homesick, and
I
want
my
mum!’ Then he went in for the kill:
‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to be at home with her right now. But we’re in the Army to fight Hitler. Remember Hitler? He’s waiting for us. We’re going to finish him together, you and me. We haven’t got time for a few months to cry for mum.’
… I felt the warmth spread through me. I was lost. I belonged to something greater than myself. Love and loyalty … Alternate bullying and praise; pushing to the limit of endurance with threats and insults, then a kind word. I knew what they were doing. But it still worked. Only a broken spirit can love.