Is the Slate Ever Clean? Women in the Aftermath of 20th-Century European Wars
It’s a bit unorthodox to open an article in a history magazine with one of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, but I think it works here. Newton told us that for every action, there is one that is equal and opposite. Newton may not have known the full extent of his genius, for does this not apply to historical events too? War brings with it a trail of destruction – but in its wake, society is left to pick up the pieces and reconstruct. Nations have a fresh start, a chance to begin again. The strength of feeling in the grief and suffering endured in conflict can be harnessed as political energy, turning the nation in a new direction. Right?
On the face of it, it is a suggestion that might have some weight. Consider the dramatically changed role of women during World War II, as mythologised in America by Rosie the Riveter. It’s probably the poster you immediately think of in association with strong women in wartime. She flexes a toned arm and has tied up her hair in practical fashion. With a formidable gaze, she tells women that “We Can Do It,” too.
It is indeed the case that, with so many men out of the country (about a quarter of all males in the US and UK were mobilised), women were needed to fill in the gaps. Britain began conscripting women to work for the war effort in 1941. Having lost the traditional breadwinner of the family, many women also had no choice but to seek employment to support themselves and their children.
But this lack of choice is key. This ‘liberation’ of women through work in war was not necessarily a thing instigated by women of their own volition. Many initially did not enjoy the world of work they found themselves in; instead, some longed for a return to the status quo. In Germany, it was the job of trümmerfrauen (rubble-women) to clear bombed-out roads, a back-breaking task. Women across Europe were restricted to simple manual and clerical jobs, the sorts of role that they might have already had prewar. Letters sent in wartime expressed a desire for husbands to return home – not just because wives missed their company, but also because they were exhausted by the work at home. “I am living in the hope of our reunion… come back! Come soon! I am so tired!” wrote one working German mother left alone with her children.
So, what could have been a ‘new beginning’ for women as a result of war was not to be. It is important not to overstate the significance of the Second World War in liberating women; many resented the experience of a working life that they received. Even our fondness of Rosie the Riveter as an image should be scrutinised. She has only retrospectively become a symbol of working women; almost no-one would have recognised her in the 1940s. Rosie originates not from a nationwide propaganda campaign, but from an internal poster at an American electricity company, displayed for only a fortnight.
Even when employing women seemed like a necessity, this was something that some European nations tried to avoid. Nazi ideology instructed German women to be keepers of the home; their priorities were Kinder, Küche, Kirche – Children, Kitchen, Church. One of the motivations for the use of Fritz Sauckel’s Ostarbeiter – ‘Eastern Workers,’ slave labour rounded up and imported from occupied Soviet territories – was that it would stop German women from having to do so much work. That a majority of Ostarbeiter were themselves women did not matter; as Soviets, they were scarcely seen as human. Fascist Italy did not develop a system of forced labour on a scale anything like that seen in Germany but maintained a similar ideological resistance to the idea of women in the workforce. Even so, at the war’s end, 50% of Germany’s workforce was female, with about a third in Italy.
But rather than using women’s wartime efforts as a springboard to encourage equal participation in the labour force, politicians post-1945 fared best if they promised a restoration of women to the homes. Konrad Adenauer was elected Chancellor of West Germany in 1949 with a pledge for ‘normality’ with regards to women. At the 1951 UK general election, women were persuaded by a Conservative party promising more traditional roles for them; 54% of women voted for Winston Churchill against just 42% for the incumbent Clement Attlee. However, even Labour’s welfare system under Attlee had denied women the chance to claim benefits without a husband.
This return to the situation of 1939 was not unprecedented. Censuses after World War I show that if any progress had been made in terms of the number of women in jobs 1914-18, it was quickly lost. Similar numbers of women had been employed pre- and post-war. It was not uncommon for women to be sacked when they got married, so that a man who was ‘more needing’ of an income could take up the job. Moreover, the traditional narrative of a war-induced shortage of men giving women more chance to select their husband, granting them more autonomy, is a false one. In Germany, the greater number of women meant a man could leave his wife and remarry more easily. The proportion of divorce cases in which the man had been the one to file rose from a third to a half after the war. Perhaps also the shortage of men made women less likely to seek divorce even if the relationship had turned sour, or maybe women did not want to relive the loneliness and poor working conditions they had experienced in wartime. In Britain, historians have critiqued the idea that women gained autonomy from changing gender ratios by noting that there was already a surplus of women pre-war. Especially prior to World War I, migration of men to seek work elsewhere in the British Empire had already put women as the majority. So, WWI’s end did not provide a new beginning for women in this regard at all.
Therefore, in spite of the massive upheaval caused by war, there was arguably little to no long-lasting change in the role that women played in the economy. That had to wait until the ‘60s and ‘70s. Why did the liberation of women not come earlier? Though the numbers show evidence of gender-balanced participation in the workforce by the end of World War II, women had mostly been employed in low-paying, unfulfilling roles. We should not doubt that women wanted the same opportunities as men, but even in war, they were not getting them. They could not experience work as men did. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that many women preferred political ideologies that promised a restoration of pre-war status quos after 1945; it was hard to develop a feminist consciousness when the brief ‘liberation’ that war provided for women in the workforce was often very unpleasant. Furthermore, there was a divide between what was practised, and what was preached. Women were needed for the war effort but were constantly told that work was not for them. They learnt this through propaganda, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, or through the swift action of employers to remove women from their payroll once war was over, as in Britain. War did not present a blank slate on which to begin again; even with elections and regime change, the slate was never clean in the first place.