History is important for women, a sense of the: limitations, opportunities, challenges and expectations of women in the past gives women a sense of who they are now. One hundred years ago women were experiencing disruption and disturbance in their everyday lives caused by the First World War. Some women from this period have made it into the history books; women such as Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette who organized thousands of women’s participation in The Right to Work March on 17 July 1915, or Edith Cavell the British Nurse who having been found guilt of treason was shot by the German army in Belgium on 12 October 1915. This year many of us will see the film of Testament of Youth based upon the life of Vera Brittain, the young women from Buxton who in summer 1915 left her studies at Oxford to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), training in London before she worked in a field hospital in France.
There are familiar iconic images of less well-known women who contributed to the war effort and are portrayed in the media and museums; women who worked in munitions and the land army, who drove trams, worked as clerks and even played football. There were also many more millions of women who still remain hidden, housewives and mothers whose everyday life was heroic as they struggled to look after their homes, worry and care for their families and at times cope with grief. On this 2015 International Women’s day and for the next three years of the First World War commemoration my plea is that the lives of these women in wartime receive more attention.
So let us remember the mothers and wives who wrote letters, sent parcels of food, stationery, socks and other clothing items to their loved ones on the front line, in training, hospitals or prisoner of war camps in the First World War. Some wrote to their men once a week, others wrote nearly everyday. Cakes were a particularly welcome inclusion in any parcel, as were cherries; strawberries did not travel well whilst rats occasionally nibbled bread before it reached its destination. One Worcestershire housewife sent her husband a Christmas pudding to share with his colleagues on Christmas day. Such actions kept the idea of the home firmly in men’s imagination; reassuring them they were not forgotten. Feeding the family at home was also an increasingly onerous task, which women had to cope with in wartime. The outbreak of war led to panic buying, prices rises and shortages and housewives over the four years of conflict found feeding their families on limited incomes difficult.
In 1914 the majority of sugar consumer in Britain had been imported from the Austrian - Hungarian Empire and wartime became an increasingly scarce resource. The Home Economist Mrs Peel suggested that salt could be substituted for sugar when making jam and that if kept a few months the salt tastes was no longer discernable. In one Worcestershire town when in 1917 supplies of sugar arrived from Canada they were handed out at the police station, an indication of the struggle for sugar could lead to a public disturbance. By 1916 as the naval war intensified, prices rose, shortages occurred, food queues lengthened, newspapers carried warnings about fines for wasting bread in 1917 and in 1918 rationing was introduced. Diaries, local newspapers and letters tell of women queuing for 6 hours for a tub of margarine, people apparently began to look thinner and by the summer of 1918 some had even lost their double chins ...
Professor Maggie Andrews is a cultural historian whose work covers the social and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and the representation of that history within popular culture. She is the author of a feminist history of the Women’s Institute movement and co-editor of a collection of essays exploring on the Home Front in Britain in C20 and Co I on the Voices of War Peace WWI Community Engagement Hub.
The Women's History Network Community History Prize (sponsored by The History Press) is an annual prize of £500 which is awarded for a Community History Project by, about, or for Women in a particular locale or community which has led to the production of a documentary, pamphlet, book, exhibition, artefact or event completed between the 1st of January 2014 and 31st May 2015. Individuals or groups can nominate themselves or someone else up to 31 May 2015. For more information on the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) First World War small grants scheme, please click here.