Describe the employment of women in Britain in 1914 at the outbreak of war

As struggle broke come forth in 1914 about 1/3 of wo workforce were in or so type of take overing employment. The majority of this was domestic service or secretarial work and most multitude accepted, there was no place for women in manual labour e. g. dock-labouring, mining or road -digging. A womans role was very(prenominal) much as the homemaker. They were regarded as the worn downer sexual urge and the sex that had fewer rights than men. De centime women were expect to stay at home and put the children of the family. They had to obey their husbands. Britains leisure class was kept in comfort by an host of domestic handmaidens.A large property ingester with a wife, two children and a 62-roomed brook n the West End demand an indoor staff of 36. Some of the servants accomp any(prenominal) the family to its other homes the country house, the seaside v afflictiona, the barb box in Scotland each of which to a fault had its own separate staff, containing many women. The working daytime could be a gruelling 17 hours long. The most important fe young-begetting(prenominal) servant of the household was the housekeeper, known by the form of address of Mrs, she commanded a platoon of fe phallic domestics like ladys maid, housemaids, kitchen maids and the scullion who water-washed the dishes.Upper class women were not pass judgment to work. They therefore were involved in munificence work and voluntary work also they were heavily involved with the suffr climb onttes. Many working class women worked all day at jobs in their own homes, however any(prenominal) working class women worked in factories, to stick on the mens income, which often wasnt enough. Workrooms were often crowded, dirty, ill lit, ill ventilated and insufficiently heated. The hours tolerable under the Factory Acts in 1901 were long. Women and girls everyplace 14 years could be utilise 12 hours a day and on Saturday 8 hours.In addition, in veritable industries, and dressmakin g was one, an additional 2 hours could be worked by women on 30 nights in any 12 months. At the outbreak of war women realise about 65 per cent of the male wage. The employment of little errand girls, unremarkably only 14 years of age was common. Their work was very varied tally errands, matching materials, and taking out parcels, cleanup spot the workrooms, and often also helping in the work of the house. To be running just about doing odd jobs for the employees of a busy shop was hard work and tiring.It was not impress that the young women in those workshops often looked exhaust and overdone barely there were heap of girls to take their place, so they would not take a crap in. Many others were employed to work on the surface of coal mines or on fish docks at hard, tiring, physical labour. A sexist outlook upon women in the piece of work operated throughout this period. It resulted in skill definitions and pay differentials. Womens work was usually considered unskilled, where as a man doing the same job would be considered skilled.For example welding was perceived as a skilled job when men did it but when women became welders during the First World warfare it was seen as unskilled, with women being paid fractional the male rate. Middle class women seek to get into professions as doctors, lawyers, accountants and bankers but tack it incredibly difficult. The opinion of men was that they were not intelligent enough and too weak emotionally therefore unable to exact sex with the work. They did assure employment easier to find as teachers, as this was dealing with children and they were able to find employment in the white-collar industries as clerks, telephonists and secretaries.However female clerks would earn less(prenominal) than one third of the male wage, and a female typist would earn i??1 a week compared to i??3 a week earned by a man. Women from the upper and middle classes came to have more opportunities in the late ordinal century. Th is was particularly so in education. higher(prenominal) education was open to women, although they were restricted in taking degrees in either Oxford or Cambridge. Most women lacked such opportunities. Women mainly travel into the low-skill, low-pay sweat shop sector as they were denied rag to the new technologies.Female factory workers were principally worse treated than men in pay, training and opportunities, and the trade unions mainly male organisations co-operated with the management or the definition of skills, which touch on pay, were controlled by men and favoured them skilled women were naughtily recognised. Women were also paid piece evaluate and found their wage lowered if they earned too much. One factory quizzer remarked that What can one do when a girl is earning as much as 15 shillings a week but lower the piece rate? In a survey just out front the war the social commentator and reformer, S.Rowntree, had argued that i??1 a week was necessary in order to live in a higher place poverty but few women certain this amount. In J. M Barries comedy What always Woman Knows (1908), John Shand, the railwayman false MP, owes his success as a debater to his wife Maggie, who has transformed his boring speeches when she typed them up. Women had achieved some degree of marital equality and been given over some educational opportunities by 1914. They had also begun to make some inroads into traditional male occupations and they had focused political action on winning the vote.