How important were both World Wars to woman's right?

[Komnenos002]

I've been trying to get into some historical reading outside the armies and map-painting.

Woman's rights, employment, cultural trends, are all something I am *spectacularly* ignorant on, so it seemed like a potentially good topic to spur discussion here.

I know female employment picked up during both Wars, but also fell after at least the first. Were there cultural trends shifted as well? Woman couldn't even vote in the UK until 1918, so it seems like that was tied to workplace success during the War.

Was the upcoming feminist and sexual revolutions tied to experiences from both World Wars?

 

[Ak-84]

In retrospect, people have so claimed. Whether they actually were, is harder to say.

What is often forgotten is that the progressive and the labour movements pre WW1 opposed the women's rights movements. Often vehemently. There was a class component to this, the women's rights movement then (as it is accused of being now, I will avoid questions of the claim's accuracy) was heavily upper middle and elite class as opposed to the working and newly enriched labour movements.

The sexual revolution owed more to improved healthcare such as STD treatment and contraception, and the simple fact that sexual morality tends to be cyclic. The Georgian and Regency era were a lot more permissive than the Victorian era that followed.

 

[Sam R.]

Wage equalisation, access to work equalisation and skill equalisation are the base on which the superstructure of both working class and bourgeois feminisms rely. So the vast demand for labour power in all states in both world wars did change the position of women as workers making their labour power better desired and paid, leading to the kind of power where people won't put up with rape in marriage say if there's the least financial possibility of living independently from a male wage earner rapist.

There are other direct links with skill, sexual self control, and ideology of who is a person and what rights do they deserve.

Yours,
Sam R.

 

[Ak-84]

Despite The Guardian's efforts to rewrite history, "working class feminism" was not really a thing. Working class women had other, more immediate concerns, related to class, financial condition social status or ethnicity to care much about issues that first wave feminism put forth.

Women had been a significant part of the workforce in the early Industrial revolution, it has been the progressives who had campaigned against women working there (chiefly cause women and children in the mines and factories faced heavy exploitation), it was only in the later half of the Victorian era that women in the workplace stopped being a common phenomena, and only in N American was it complete.
Especially in pre-war Britain, the "wage earner rapist" was a rarity, in the sense that many working class women had to work full or part time, even married ones, just to make end meet. That was not going to change World War or no World War.

 

[Sam R.]

>progressives

Would you like more anachronism with that?

Rates and skill descriptors for women increased during the vast demand for labour during war and the variety of low capitalised partial labours of married women were converted into "good jobs" in warring states. The composition of the household wage moved towards a greater reliance on "male" norms of employment for married eomeb such as long continuous weeks.

Unlike the early industrialisation where the diminution of the female wage wasn't varied but increased under models that used young easily corporeally chastised women as the key workforce in light industry who couldn't but accept mechanisation.

One difference is that the quality of labour demanded under the higher mechanisation of total war was higher than in 1830. Another is that dislocated rural workers were in shorter supply.

Finally regarding working class feminisms check the history of the various CP sections.

Yours,
Sam R.

 

[riggerrob]

....... sexual morality tends to be cyclic. The Georgian and Regency era were a lot more permissive than the Victorian era that followed.[/QUOTE]
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The key word is: cyclic.

Women's' participation n the work force is cyclic.

As explained by my 70-something year old aunt women's' involvement in the work force ebbs and flows in waves that are too long for individuals to understand.
My aunt was born in Canada - during the Great Depression - when 1/3 of men rode the rails in search of work. Her father and uncles worked on harvest crews that followed ripening crops across the Prairies. Since men were under-employed, few women could find work outside the home. Remember that before electrification, housewives often worked 10 or 12 hours per day: cooking, cleaning, washing cloths, tending children, tending a garden, tending chickens, etc.
Come the Industrial Revolution, many lower class women worked long hours in factories, but the goal of every man was to earn a high enough wage that "my wife does not have to work outside the home."
Come the start of World War 2, most of the young men joined the army to fight overseas, stripping factories of workers, so hundreds of thousands of women worked on the floors of Canadian factories.
Immediately after the war, women were tired of factory work and wanted to settle down, raise families, etc.
Women leaving factories was also beneficial for returning veterans, many of whom were shell-shocked (battle fatigue, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Occupational Stress, etc.) and people believed that the best cure was hard work, a loving wife and raising children. This attitude produced the Baby Boom (1946 - 1964).
Come the 1960s, with women's' liberation, effective birth control, the sexual revolution, peace nicks, hippies, etc. many young women were reluctant to settle down in traditional families.
Come the 1970s recession (sparked by the 1973 Oil Crisis) more and more women were forced to work (outside the home) to maintain their (affluent) 1960s life style.
Given population surpluses in the late 20th century, fewer and fewer women felt pressured to live in traditional nuclear families and lesbians, etc. were allowed to publically declare their sexuality.

That was a quick time-based review of the cycles of womens' liberation, but other studies should include class distinctions, racial distinctions and regional distinctions.

 

[sloreck]

I will only speak to the USA. basically, starting with the American Civil War, you saw necessity advance the position of women during the conflict, with a retreat after the war although not to the starting point. During the ACW large numbers of men were in unifrom, leaving women to manage family farms or businesses. Additionally women were independent contractors doing piecework in uniform manufacture, women went to serve as voluntary nurses and in other roles in health care for the troops - away from home and unchaperoned in the traditional sense. naturally when the war ended and men cam back, many of these gains were erased, however the death and disability toll was such that it was necessary for widows to continue some sort of independent role, even with children.

WWI saw some of the same and WWII much more, Again, once men came back from the war women who had filled in in various war related positions were let go and their jobs given to men. What this amounts to in two steps forward, one step back. With "independence", lifting of restrictions about living away from family (for the unmarried) or husbands, and more many women would not go all the way back to their previous situation, even if they got married/had husband return, and settled down in their new suburban home contributing to the baby boom.

Because women had to perform in "nontraditional" roles and jobs during wartime, especially as it became more industrialized and total war, and they showed they could do these things the argument of "a woman's place was in the home" lost traction. The biggest issue was often the husband who went away to war and found the "little woman" was quite different now. It is worth noting that the Nazis, because of their strong adherence to the "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" (children, kitchen, church) meme grossly underutilized the "womanpower" of Germany to their detriment.

 

[Loli American]

The world wars advanced women's rights inasmuch as they moved Western nations and workers away from agricultural labor and towards a focus on industrial labor. The urbanization of the workforce reduced the amount of time women spent on reproductive labor and turned them into wage earners. With wages came increased economic equality, and demands for political and social equality inevitably followed. This process was already ongoing without the wars and would continue to go on without them, but the wars definitely sped it up.

Middle and upper class white women, as the members of their gender class with the most political capital and access to education, were the natural leaders of the feminist movement. Mind, this is hardly unique to feminism, it was a feature of all modern liberation movements.