Munitionette

Early in the war, the United Kingdom's munitions industry found itself having difficulty producing the amount of weapons and ammunition needed by the country's armed forces.

It also forced the factories to admit more women as employees, because so many of the nation's men were engaged in fighting in the war and male labour was in short supply.

[citation needed] Historian Angela Woollacott has estimated that approximately one million women were working in munitions industries by mid 1918.

[2] The national munitions factory in Gretna, which was the largest industrial site in the world at the time,[3] recorded that 36% of its workers had previously been in domestic service.

[2] In an article written in 1916 after a visit to HM Factory Gretna, Rebecca West wrote "Surely, never before in modern history can women have lived a life so parallel to that of the regular army.

Prolonged exposure to the nitric acid used in the process turned worker's skin yellow, prompting the popular name canary girls.

[7] In 1925 the Five Sisters window at York Minster was rededicated to the 1,513 women who died in the line of service during WWI, including the munitionettes.

In the August 1917 Act, the certificate regulations preventing women from leaving factories without their employers' permission to earn higher wages elsewhere were repealed.

Moreover, the Ministry of Munitions had pledged not to devalue men's work by paying lower rates whilst they were temporarily away at war in the 1915 Act.

A report was published in June 1916, which concluded that "the majority of working women are making good use of their incomes" and "were doing well by their children, their homes, and their absent husbands".

[12] Activities such as social clubs, theatrical societies, bands and debating groups were formed in munitions factories, and piano music and singing were especially popular.

[1] The Munitionettes' Cup was a famous competition in north east England in 1917–18 held between women's football teams from various munitions and other factories.

Some factories' managements appear to have considered their staff participating in football a "necessary evil" that contributed to productivity and discipline amongst women 'displaced from their traditional gender roles'.

Whatever may be the future position which women's labour will take after the war, it will be enormously influenced by the actual practice which has been followed when so much in the making, and when so much control is vested in the organisation of the Ministry of Munitions... Now is the time during the Great War for us to perceive, discover and proclaim the principles which should regulate, for perhaps the lifetime of a whole generation and perhaps for longer, the lines of advance on which women's industrial work should proceed.