The Middy June 10 1999

War shaped a new role for women

In a strange reversal of fortune the two terrible world wars that shaped Sussex Society in the 20th century helped set women free.

While their men folk fought at the front, landed on the beaches or took to the seas and skies, wives hitched up their skirts and got on with the jobs of making things work at home.

Other women – whose only opportunity to leave home in 1913 was to go into service – suddenly found themselves manning Red Cross ambulances in France, herding cattle or assembling munitions.

And after World War II the change was even more dramatic; women's worlds and expectations had shifted for ever.

Thousands joined up for mainstream military service; decoded enemy documents and parachuted into Nazi occupied Europe.

Others ran steelworks and food production plants, managed thousands of acres of productive farmland or kept the local departmental store stocked, staffed and open.

Imagine their horror when the men came home and they were expected to return to the shop floor.

In the year 1901 nearly 60,000 women in Sussex were employed in domestic service; in 1990 there were 92.

There were 11 journalists, one civil servant, 19 missionaries but more than 2000 nurses, 10 iron mongers, a wheelwright and – amazingly – 15 lady blacksmiths.

Early this century domestic service was underpinned by education which put it about that women of all social classes could best use their abilities in the home; theirs or someone else’s.

At elementary school they learnt needlework, cooking, laundering and homemaking.

Even Virginia Woolf, who lived at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, recognised the division between women who could “stroll through the house and say that cover must go to the wash all those sheets need changing” and women who actually did the washing, ironing and cleaning.

Before World War I a huge gulf separated women who kept servants and the servants themselves; in those days of friendship between the two classes was practically impossible.

Grace, a former nanny, tells how she went to work for the Parker family at Fen Place Turners Hill.

The Hon Trevor T Parker DSC RN (retd) worked in the city.

Grace was in charge of baby Jennifer, six year old Riffa and three boys, John and Christopher at Eton and Roger at Saint Leonards Prep school.

She said: “I got on well with Mrs Parker. Mr Parker never spoke to me, even while passing on the stairs.

I taught the boys and girls all their table and house manners, decorum, reading, writing and many others besides.

I used to play ice hockey on the frozen Fen Place millpond with the boys in winter.

My wages were minimal and I never had time off but I had a nursery maid”.

Connie Brackpool was sent for years training at the Oakes, Balcombe.

The lady of the house provided a uniform and gave her two and six pence per week – if she didn't stay she had to return her rail fair and uniform.

The emergency born of the First World War forced society to change its notions of a woman's role; suddenly there was a man's job to be done.

Women appeared in industry, banks, on buses and trams, on the railways and in engineering. They became bank tellers and civil service clerks. They walked behind the plough and mucked out animals in Lloyd George's land army.

They went to France, too, as nurses in Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps or in Voluntary Aid Detachments.

There are poignant photographs in County’s archive office sharing Sussex volunteer ambulance drivers smiling bravely for the cameraman on the Western front. 

Many women also joined the women's auxiliary services; Baden Powell's poster of 1915 showed women and men contributing to the war effort. But when the war ended, the women were expected back home.

Even advertisements changed: in April 1919 Sussex archive advertisements showing “Glitto” which removes grease, oil and dirt from the hands for Lady munition workers now rebranded to “make the chat the kitchen glitter.”

The feminist historian Ray stretchy recording: "if women went on working it was from a sort of deliberate wickedness.

"The tone of the press one in a moment; these people who had been heroines and saviours of their country were now parasites, black legs and limpets."

By 1921 there were two per cent fewer women in the Sussex workforce than in 1911. But in 1918 the Representation of the People Act had given most women over 30 the vote.

Posters and leaflets displayed in Horsham in 1917 called for "votes for women".

One declares: "why women, should you come forward and demand the vote?" "Because you have a laws, pay taxes equally but have no choice on what those taxes must be.”

Most working-class women had no intention of submitting once again to this slavery of service.

Gladys Pole from Burgess Hill worked in munitions for two and half years; she returned to the employment exchange, turned down domestic service and was refused benefit.

In January 1930 women civil servants voted in favour of compulsory retirement of women on marriage.

Although northern Britain was devastated by the great depression the Southeast felt it only slightly.

But now "new industries" were growing here: electrical engineering, motor manufacturer, food processing and canning, chemicals and synthetic fibres.

These created new jobs for women; it was women who worked on the assembly line is making new appliances for sale on low market.

During World War II large numbers of women once again worked the land, parachuted into France, welding bombers, drove ambulances into blitzed cities and folded parachutes.

Many women entered the labour force too – not only for patriotic reasons but because they needed the money.

Strident headlines threatening ruined childhood and neglected homes faded from the scene.

But afterwards when William Beverage wrote his 1942 report assuming the female workforce would reassemble the pattern of the 1930s he was mistaken.