WAR IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

Like fat, war is a feminist issue. Only not the way most people think. The depressing truth is, without the world wars, it seems unlikely that women would be in the position of relative autonomy they are in the West today.

In WW1, when nearly a generation of Europe's finest and brightest young men were killed in the field, the women at home moved out of the house and into the munitions factories. Their countries needed them. And for the first time since the Victorians, their countries paid them a wage, although not much of one, and women had money of their own.

The women's suffrage movement changed its battle cry to one of patriotism, possibly on the basis that "Male disbelief in female capacity can never be persuaded away. It can only be worked away." (Dr Elsie Inglis)

Women answered the call. They worked in factories, on farms, drove trams, buses, became electricians, plumbers and civil servants. Women became police, worked in army communications and other non-combat jobs. They worked in hospitals. Although the first two offers of nursing aid made by women to the British authorities were rejected, the women

went ahead anyway. Notably, Mrs St Clair Stobart, whose original offer to the Red Cross of women's Convey Corps had been summarily dismissed, and Dr Elsie Inglis, who had proposed posting of women's hospital units across Europe to the War Office. They joined forces and opened a hospital in London. France was not so short sighted, and welcomed all the help it could get, allowing Drs Murray and Anderson to open a clinic on French ground staffed entirely by women. In Russia, which pulled out of the war to have a revolution,  it was women who were guarding the winter Palace on the night on which the government surrendered to the Bolsheviks.

Many women had to continue being working mothers when their husbands did not return from the front. More men were killed in the field in World War 1 than in any other war before or since. War had broken down the barriers. It had done away with chaperons, and the delicate ettiquette that had attended inter-gender relations. There were, across Europe, now more women than men. And these women were vastly different from who they’d been four years earlier. These women knew their worth, and they weren't about to let their new-found freedom go. They had proved they were capable. It made it hard to argue against giving them the vote.

In 1939, another war was declared. As one general remarked, it was simply the second act of the Great War. Women returned to the workplace – in the munitions factories, in the Auxiliary forces, on radio stations, in medical corps, in resistance movements, as spies, secretaries, floor managers – as every role that needed filling, save actually fighting (except in Russia).

Women were not allowed to be pilots in the RAF, although many served on the ground as part of the WAAF. If they wanted to fly, they could - for the ATA – all classes of planes except sea-planes, on the grounds that those were technically boats, and you couldn’t have a woman steering a boat (whether that was nautical superstition or a convenient way to keep some small part of masculine prowess unassaulted, I’m not sure. I can’t find any reliable sources). The ATA flew planes from factory to radio/instrument fitting stations to RAF bases and back. They flew ferry planes of men and equipment wherever it was needed. They flew unarmed in war zones. While only about 10% of the ATA were women, they got the glory. Their safety record looks amazing compared to that of the men, but this isn’t because women are better pilots – it’s that, at least in the beginning, they had to have 500 flying hours experience, comapred to half that for men, and they were watched  far more closely for mistakes – being women.

And when it was all over, finally, the world was left in the charge of a generation who had seen civilian life completely disrupted twice. The old order couldn’t simply be reinstated, although you could argue that the 1950s tried to do just that. Without the social disruption and exigencies of war, women may never have got the vote, or jobs outside the home, and we’d probably still be fighting for those basic rights – a voice, a room and a purse of our own.