Before the war, a woman role is to stay home taking care of the kid and do the cooking. However, when the men go to war, with not enough people working, the woman began to go to work in offices, factories, shops, transport and on the farm. The young teenager in the city was forced to assist with harvesting in the countryside. There were more jobs than it used to such as working for munitions factories to sever the high demand for weapons. Even Though there was a variety of different opinion about the idea of women do man job, the introduction of conscription in 1916 made the need for women worker urgent.
As a result, Women in that time was able to be a railway guard, ticket collector, poster worker or they can take part in the challenging job such as police, firefighter and back employee. The figure of woman’s employment rates increased significantly, from 23.6% in 1914 to 46.6% in 1918. Also, the employment of married woman also increased up to nearly 40% of all woman workers. However, they received lower wages compared to the man who started the movement of demanding for equal pay among female.
Women firefighters in action, 1916
By the year 1917, the majority of the worker in multiple factories was women, and they produced approximately 80% of weapons and shells for the British Army. Unfortunately, women had to work without any protective clothing which leads them exposed to many chemical substances such as trinitrotoluene, and it made theirs since turn yellow. Not only these chemicals affect their appearance, but it also had a negative impact on their health, around 400 women died from overexposure to trinitrotoluene during the great war.
Women campaigning against the Unemployment Insurance Act in 1920
Lecture summary: During this particular period after the war ,we get to know about many art movements such as the Dada movement, Surrealist movement, and De Stijl. The Dada movement was lead by Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet, and performance artist. The horror and cruelty of the were affect people actively, and some of them decided to go crazy with their art to mock society. The Data movement used their craziness in the art to help people heal from what they had gone through during the WW1. Besides the Data movement, people were introduced to readymade art by Marcel Duchamp which means writing your name on something and call it art. The Germany Data movement developed a technique of photomontage. The surrealist movement founded by Andre Breton aiming to tap into the ” superior reality” of the subconscious mind:” More real than the real world beyond the real”. Lastly, the De Stijl movement also aims to heal people from their trauma from the war like Data movement, but it approached a completely different method of rebuilding, creating harmonic order with the geometric shape and mathematical structure.
