Women and the Great War

As Ruth Adam shows in A Woman's Place, the First World War irrevocably changed women's lives, partly because of the opportunity it gave them for paid work. But immediately after the war the tide turned very sharply:

Since the middle of 1915 they had been gallant workers, for whom no praise could be too fulsome; admired, with affectionate amusement for "playing the man" like Shakespeare's Rosalind. But now the masquerade was over; it was time to hang up the doublet and hose behind the kitchen door and get back to skirts and aprons, to keep an eye on the clock so that the breadwinner's hot tea could be slapped down in front of him the second he got in.

It did not, of course, happen like that: the move towards women's right to employment on an equal footing with men could not be reversed. Griselda in William - an Englishman would have certainly worked as, say, a bus conductress or indeed in a munitions factory in the war and then wanted to go on working at something after the war; and of course one of the things she could not possibly have anticipated as she committed herself to the suffragette cause was that a war provoked by the death of an archduke in whom she took not the slightest interest would result, before long, in women having the vote.

Similarly, Alex in Consequences: although the novel is autobiographical, E.M.Delafield backdated it so that it did not appear too personal. Therefore, when Alex emerges from the convent it is 1908 and, for women, society has not changed that radically over the previous ten years ­ the war was still five years away ­ hence her tragedy. But when E.M.Delafield herself emerged in 1912, she rested in the country for two years but then, in 1914, was able to grasp the completely unexpected but life-changing opportunity to become a VAD. This affected things forever for her because she was able to leave home with no questions asked; gain self-respect; and acquire the emotional equilibrium to begin writing in the evenings. For Alex no such happy ending was allowed.

Even the American heroine of Fidelity realises, at the end of the book, that her future will be changed because of the war, declaring that

'it seems to me the war is going to make a new world ­ a whole new way of looking at things. It's as if a lot of old things, old ideas, had been melted, and were fluid now, and were to be shaped anew.'

The poet hero of Julian Grenfell would have agreed with this - it was what he was hoping for when, as an Oxford undergraduate, he wrote his philosophy book. He himself lived long enough to see his sister Monica become a VAD. 'Having been brought up in a world in which it was held that no girl could be in intimate relationship with a man for five minutes, suddenly,' as Nicholas Mosley writes, 'she found herself, with the approval of that world, dealing with masculine pain and dirt for fourteen hours a day. . . She came to look back on the war as a time in which for once she had been in contact with reality.'

Some of the authors of our books had their lives changed because of what their fathers had suffered in WWI. For example, Mollie Panter-Downes's father was killed in the first months of the war, leading her to live quietly with her mother; she began scribbling in note-books, became a published writer at the age of sixteen, and later on turned into one of our best known chroniclers of the Second World War.

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