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The forgotten ‘mateys’:women workers in PortsmouthDockyard, England, 1939-45Ann Day aa University of Portsmouth , University of Portsmouth,United KingdomPublished online: 20 Dec 2006.
To cite this article: Ann Day (1998) The forgotten ‘mateys’: women workers inPortsmouth Dockyard, England, 1939-45, Women's History Review, 7:3, 361-382
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The Forgotten ‘Mateys’: women workers in Portsmouth Dockyard, England, 1939-45
ANN DAYUniversity of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT This paper is based on nearly 30 interviews with women whoworked in Portsmouth Dockyard before and during the Second World War.Their testimonies show that women experienced their wartime work indifferent ways, with attitudes that were to impinge on employment relations, oncalls for equal pay and on the provision of facilities to relieve their domesticresponsibilities. Government response to these problems reveal the duality ofpolicy decisions and the difficulties of balancing the need for labour withdominant ideals about the cultural position of women. Shifts in employmentpractices in wartime conditions highlight the debates around the impact ofwartime work on gender divisions in the workplace and perceptions of femalepaid employment by both men and women at that time.
Introduction
Studies of women’s paid employment, particularly during periods of nationalconflict, tend to be placed inside a framework of analysis where the findingsare presented through a model of patriarchal relations. The result is aninevitable linkage of male dominance and female subordination with thepublic world of the workplace and the private world of the home, so that theinvolvement of women in paid employment, particularly in types of workpreviously only available to men, is viewed as having a ‘liberating’ effect onwomen’s lifestyles both in terms of the new opportunities provided and intheir own expectations.[1] The weakness of such an approach is that it cancut across many of the realities of women’s experience in the workplace andneglect some of the more subtle nuances of employment relations, such ashow perceptions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are played out within workpractices, or, if they occur, in what ways shifts in these perceptions are
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manifested. Of course, this is not to denigrate the important work that hasbeen carried out on female paid employment by a number of historians,which has served to expose the significance of fights for the implementationof equal pay for equal work, struggles to gain the abolition of the marriagebar for women, and demands for the provision of an effective infrastructureof childcare and other domestic responsibilities.[2] What is being questionedis how influential such measures were in altering perceptions of genderrelations, both in the workplace and in the home, and, perhaps equallysignificantly, whether the widening of employment opportunities for womenduring wartime periods stimulated a coterminous raising of forms of femaleconsciousness, such consciousness perhaps challenging constructions offemale identity predicated on prevailing notions of gender differentiation.This article seeks to address some of these debates through the experi-ences of women who either volunteered or were conscripted to workin Portsmouth Dockyard during the Second World War. The studystems from a number of oral interviews conducted with both men andwomen who were employed not just in the wartime itself, but duringthe inter-war years.[3] Although the interviews used can only be aselective example and do not in themselves provide a definitive studyof women’s work in Portsmouth Dockyard, the responses from theinterviewees are indicative of certain attitudes and reveal the articula-tion of both male and female perceptions of women’s involvement intraditionally male-dominated forms of employment. Penny Summer-field’s more recent work has focused on the overarching implicationsof female employment by looking at women’s paid work from theinter-war period through to the wartime and on to the post-war years.From this approach she questions whether wartime work had anysignificant effect on opportunities for women in the post-war period,or whether their ambitions regarding paid employment were altered inany way.[4]In this respect, what is being put forward is an analysis of women’swork opportunities across a continuum of gender narrative, rather thanlimiting the discussion to an isolated historical period. By following asimilar pattern to that laid out by Summerfield, it is hoped that acomparison can be made between the pre-war employment activitiesof women who came to work in Portsmouth Dockyard and theirperceptions of the female role within a genderised social structure inorder to ascertain whether any shifts can be identified. Bearing in mindJoan Scott’s assertion that the representation of gender in political,economic and social discourse is crucial to an understanding of the
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processes whereby gender divisions were constructed [5], an evalua-tion will be made of government wartime policies on female employ-ment, as well as the attitudes of male trade unionists and their role inmediating such policies. Oral evidence is invaluable in unearthing theremembered experiences of men and women and their views on suchcomponents of the workplace as the construction of ‘skill’, the hierar-chy of status in the workforce, involvement in trade unions and differ-entiations in levels of pay. The use of oral history as a methodologicalapproach in this area of study has a number of precedents, as inWomen At War [6], where Pat Ayers records the memories of womenin Liverpool during the Second World War, and also in the writings ofPenny Summerfield and Gail Braybon already mentioned.
‘Inside the Wall’
A phrase often used by dockyard workers when referring to their workplaceis ‘inside the wall’ and, indeed, the dockyard wall was not only a physicaldivide between town and dockyard, but also a psychological one between thelocal community and a place of state employment. For women the divide waseven stronger, as they not only went inside the dockyard wall to work, buthad to cross the barrier of male dominance and prejudice. This was despitethe fact that women had been employed in Portsmouth Dockyard since theearly part of the nineteenth century, albeit in very small numbers. Their soleform of employment at that time was in the Colour Loft, making flags,canvas work overalls and tool bags, or in the roperies spinning yarn.[7] Itcould be argued that such work does not appear to challenge the traditionalmasculinity of dockyard employment, because the types of work involvedwere viewed as suitable areas for women and particularly aligned to thedominant ideology of the nineteenth century. This is not to imply that thework in itself was not arduous or that it did not require a high degree ofskill. One woman interviewed said that she “... used to cry because the workwas so hard”[8] and even some of the men acknowledged that the ColourLoft women were assiduous workers, saying “they didn’t even lift theirheads up when we went past, they worked so hard”.[9] Another woman wasemployed when she became a widow, stating she had previously worked inthe local corset factory and found the conditions in the dockyard verydifferent. “The working conditions were not what I was used to, it wasdirtier in the dockyard and with 62 other women, it was very cramped. Wealso had to go outside to get to the toilet, often in the wind and rain”.[10]She went on to become the head ‘cutter’, responsible for cutting out all theflags and pennants, a job that required a high degree of accuracy as anymistakes would lead to a costly waste of materials.
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What has to be recognised is that the feminisation of work processeswas founded on perceived differences between the ‘natural’ capabili-ties of men and women, where “jobs [were] transformed when thegender of the workers changed, reflecting that men [were] simplybetter than women and the benefits [were] awarded according”.[11] Itwas the generally accepted notions of gender divisions that werecrucial to government policy on wartime recruitment of women intoindustry, as the boundaries had to be made much more flexible inorder to utilise female employment outside of the accepted work struc-tures whilst at the same time maintaining the fundamental ethos ofgender differentiation. Large numbers of women began to beemployed in Portsmouth Dockyard from 1916 onwards, initially asoffice clerks but later increasingly in the heavier industrial work.[12]New technology introduced nationally had enabled a breaking-downof some of the old craft processes, despite resistance from the craftunions, and an increasing subdivision of labour. In the dockyards suchprocesses meant that machine manufacturing could be undertaken witha minimum amount of training, using what was defined as semi-skilled or unskilled labour, and thus deemed as easily transferable tofemale operators. At the peak of their employment in 1917, 1750women worked in Portsmouth Dockyard across a whole spectrum ofsemi-skilled and unskilled types of jobs.[13]At the end of the First World War, women were forced to give up theirnewly-found job opportunities and the Government carried out awidespread campaign to encourage women back into the home andinto pre-war types of female paid employment, particularly intodomestic service.[14] In Portsmouth Dockyard, during the inter-warperiod women were allowed to take the Civil Service examinationsand enter, or re-enter, as non-industrial clerical workers and as tracersin the Drawing Office. It would perhaps be easy to make the equationthat this was a direct result of their wartime work, but the increaseduse of female clerical workers was not peculiar to Admiralty service; itwas part of a national trend stemming from the second half of thenineteenth century, related to some extent to the greater availability ofeducated women with the introduction of compulsory elementaryeducation in 1870.[15] However, this is a clear demonstration of thecomplexities involved in simply seeing shifts in post-war types offemale employment as a direct consequence of their wartime service
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rather than looking closely at long-term trends. Even in this sphere ofincreased employment opportunity for women, those who enteredPortsmouth Dockyard as clerical workers during the 1930s had theircareer prospects hampered through the imposition of a marriage barand restrictions on promotional opportunities.
Essential War Work
The massive mobilisation of women during the Second Word War intoindustries such as engineering (in particular in munitions), into the servicesand, of course, into the dockyards, involved the government in anincreasingly conflicting situation, where demands for wartime productionmeant they had to again recruit women in the place of men. Ernest Bevin,the Minister of Labour and National Service at that time, called forvolunteers to aid the industrial side of the war effort, but this strategy wasless successful than was hoped and consequently a compulsory scheme wasintroduced in 1941.[16] This is one of the differences between mobilisationof women in the First and Second World Wars, as in the former conscriptionof women workers was never introduced and recruitment relied onvoluntarism, based overtly on patriotic ideals. In practice, however, theattraction was often the ability to earn more money than was possible inpre-war types of female employment. For the Second World War, the need toconscript is partly explained by the sheer scale of wartime production,coupled with increasing mechanisation which demanded a huge semi-skilledor unskilled workforce.The industrial side of Portsmouth Dockyard certainly did not fit intothe prevailing ideal of women’s work and for most female workers itwas not an option until they were directed into essential war work viathe Labour Exchange. From 1941 onwards all women had to registerunder the Registration of Employment Order, as the voluntary schemehad not produced enough workers for the ever-increasing demands ofwar.[17] Propaganda aimed at attracting women workers on a volun-tary basis seems to have been focused mainly on recruitment intothose occupations traditionally associated with women as ‘carers’,such as nursing, and in the women’s services where they provided asupportive network for the male fighting force.[18] The ineffective-ness of propaganda schemes in encouraging women into the workforceperhaps highlights the ambiguity of government attitudes at the time,where the need for compulsory registration of women for war workappears to contravene the very essence of ‘private’ and ‘public’ incontemporary political strategies. Although the Ministry of Labour
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(MOL) established a committee of women to assist with the decisionson female employment during the War in a bid to appear as if theywere addressing ‘women’s issues’, the framework remained a power-fully patriarchal one with a continuing conflict on the part of theadministrators between the necessity for women to maintain the home,to produce and care for the future generation, and a rapidly diminish-ing male workforce which could only be replenished through an influxof female labour.[19] Thus, as Higonnet & Higonnet point out, theGovernment was effectively taking over the previously ‘private’ roleof male head of the household in an attempt to balance the needs ofindustry with those of the home.[20] Susan Carruthers maintains thatit was the patriarchal attitude towards voluntarism which underminedthe Ministry of Labour’s campaign to attract workers into industry[21], and certainly many of the women interviewed did not espouse apatriotic motivation, or a recognition that they were helping the men tofight the War, and very few of the interviewees had actually volun-teered for war work.The majority of the women interviewed said that they went into thedockyard because they had to through the introduction of conscription,and a number also said that it was a preferred alternative to going intothe services. Many of the unmarried women interviewed, who hadbeen directed into the dockyard, were from lower middle-classbackgrounds and even had they wished to work away from the area orto enter the services, were deterred from doing so by parentsconcerned with their moral welfare. The dockyard in some ways wastherefore seen as the lesser of two evils and at least enabled singlewomen to remain under the control of their families. Only one womaninterviewed emphasised the relevance of her work to war production,saying “[W]hen I walked past the Gate, walked past the police, I feltthe importance of the place ... I thought I’m doing my bit for the wareffort”.[22]
For women in Portsmouth before the onset of the Second World War,the main areas of employment were in domestic service, shopwork or in thelong-established corset industry [23], all of which were female-dominatedtypes of work. As Miriam Glucksmann’s work has shown, opportunities forwomen workers also opened up in some of the light industries that wereestablished during the inter-war years.[24] In Portsmouth a company calledAirspeed, producing light aircraft, was opened in 1932 [25] and employed anumber of female operatives, some of whom were later called up to work in
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the dockyard. The entry of women into Portsmouth Dockyard, a domainpreviously the province of male labour, is summed up by one interviewee,who said:
When I first went in there I was overwhelmed ... I’ve never seen so manymen popping up from holes in the walls and holes in the ground and Ithought, oh dear, I’m not going to like this! [26]
The idea that women may object to working in areas of employmentpreviously monopolised by men, and thereby invoke male hostility andresistance, was taken up by the Ministry of Labour. One of theirrepresentatives, Mr Ostens, was sent to all the Royal Dockyards in 1941 tocarry out a report on the labour supply problem. He recorded that:
The matter [of female employment] is constantly under review andwomen are entered for training to displace men so as the men can beemployed elsewhere. In connection with this, an attempt is being made toenter women for the easier work usually carried out by SkilledLabourers and for certain of the lighter labouring work to enableLabourers to be released for heavier work and for dilution purposes.[27]
As well as addressing the perceived need to allocate female employees to theless skilled types of work, and avoid antagonism from the craft unions, thereis an implicit recognition that the female physique could not cope with therigours of ‘male’ jobs. This is reiterated by one male dockyard worker whosaid:
The main thing was that they [women] didn’t have the physical strength... to carry the big fire extinguishers ... When you’re climbing down avertical ladder, you’ve got to take these things with you. It did causeproblems and eventually women tended to be taken off this work andthey were put on cleaning duties.[28]
This raises the question of whether women simply took over men’s jobs andcarried them out with the same level of responsibility, as has often been theassumption. The oral evidence seems to indicate that this was certainly notso and that the types of work allocated to women in the wartime periodswere defined, by men, according to a perceived suitability. The first types ofwork given to women were based on cultural assumptions about women’s‘natural’ abilities, such as welding, electric and light machining, all involvingdexterity, lightness of touch, attention to detail and a supposed tolerance formonotonous and repetitive work. In this way the form of work to someextent became ‘feminised’ and women never really changed theirtraditionally defined identities, strengthened by the fact that in the dockyardwomen were always supervised by male workers and rarely carried out awhole job by themselves. Thus, despite the large-scale mobilisation of womenduring 1941 and 1942, men continued to dominate the employmentstructure in Portsmouth Dockyard and female employees always remained in
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a subordinate position to male workers, rarely being allowed anyindependent power or autonomy. This was not entirely due to theirrelatively small numbers in the workforce – at its wartime peak a total of3000 women out of a workforce of approximately 25,000 [29] – but toemployment patterns that were managed by men and which remainedlargely structured along the lines of established divisions for skilled andunskilled work.However, although much of the work carried out by women wasdeemed ‘unskilled’, in practice, as with the Colour workers, manyaspects of their employment required a degree of expertise which hadto be acquired over time. One interviewee worked in the Saw Millsand had to ‘braze’ the saws, that is sharpen and renew the teeth, whichinvolved very precise and skilled workmanship.[30] Machining in thefactory also required milling machine parts to a very fine level ofaccuracy. Many of the women interviewed stated that they enjoyedtheir work, took pride in their accomplishments and were eager torelate details of the ability required to carry out some types of work,particularly if this involved learning a skill they could not haveacquired in their traditional spheres of employment. But howevermuch skill was involved or experience gained, women were deniedaccess to what was considered the ‘skilled’ work of men and therebythe wage levels that went with this type of work. Many of the inter-viewees accepted this and did not see it as a denial of their own rights,but rather that their work in the dockyard was transitory and that there-fore they should accept the lower wages and subservient positionsbecause they thought the men who had families to support wereentitled to more. This attitude could be said to stem from the conceptof male workers as the family ‘breadwinner’ and that women’s wageswere only supplementary, and is clearly grounded on strong patriar-chal values.[31] This is corroborated by one interviewee who said:
The way I used to look at it was I was married, had a job ... and some ofthese men had three or four children besides their wives, so whyshouldn’t they earn more, because they needed more. That’s the way Ithought about it.[32]
Such an opinion was not voiced by all the women interviewed and, as will beseen, there is evidence to suggest that the fight for equal pay for equal workwas very much part of the female worker’s agenda from the inter-war periodonwards. Whilst, therefore, some women undertaking industrial waremployment did recognise that certain jobs they were doing were equivalentto those undertaken by men, for many of those interviewed there was an
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acceptance of the limits tacitly imposed on their sphere of employment and atoleration of their ancillary position within the workforce.In relating the experiences of women workers in Portsmouth Dockyardto the wider sphere, calls for equal pay for women and men doing thesame jobs were part of a national movement stemming from theincrease in female employment during the inter-war years. Because ofincreasing pressure from such organisations as the Civil Service EqualPay Committee, formed in 1935, and the Woman Power Committee,Bevin eventually persuaded the Engineering and Allied Employers’National Federation and the trade unions to accept equal pay inprinciple.[33] Although the Admiralty agreed the maxim of equal payfor female industrial workers during the wartime period, in practicewomen were always supervised by men, or other women, and were notallowed to do night shifts, both criteria excluding them from any truelevel of equality with men. The attitudes of male trade unionists towomen workers is reflected in the agreement drawn up between theAdmiralty Industrial Council and the Skilled Trades Joint Committeein 1940, where Clause 5 states that “[W]omen are not to be substitutedfor men where enough competent men are available”, and Clause 8where “[W]omen workers may be employed on work previously doneby boys and youths under 21 (including apprentices)”[34], thuscoupling women’s work with that of inexperienced males.It is interesting that out of all the women interviewed, the most vocif-erous in demanding equal pay were the female clerical workers. It hasto be borne in mind that a number of women were employed asnon-industrial workers during the inter-war years, so it may not besurprising to find that their perspective during the wartime would beembedded in the possibility of retaining or gaining permanent employ-ment and therefore something tangible to fight for. At a national levelthe percentage of women employed in clerical work had risen to56.6% by 1951.[35] Despite the general trend to employ women innon-industrial jobs, for women in Portsmouth Dockyard the possibili-ties of promotion remained limited and, indeed, one interviewee said,“[T]hey scraped the barrel of men before they gave promotion to anywoman”.[36] Nonetheless, female clerical assistants fought to abolishthe reinstatement of the marriage bar after the war and to implement asystem of equal pay for equal work. The marriage bar was formally
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abolished from 1946, but it took until 1954 for equal pay policies to beimplemented.The assertiveness of some women in the Civil Service ClericalAssociation was not generally matched by trade unions in the indus-trial sphere. Although many of the women interviewed said they wereasked to join a union when they first entered the dockyard, nearly allwere non-active and had no real awareness of union activity. Whenasked if she got involved, one woman replied, “Oh no, that was morefor men, we went to make the tea and do the raffles”.[37] A variety ofreasons for women’s lack of involvement in trade unions have beenput forward, one or two pointing to the types of work usually under-taken by women, which were deemed as unskilled or semi-skilled.This form of employment was late in unionising because of thecontinuing dominance of craft unions and their protectionist policies.Low wages and fear of victimisation by employers are said to havealso had an influence on unionisation, as did a tradition of subordina-tion, especially for women, coupled with lack of time for union activi-ties and the greater demands of home and family.[38] One intervieweestated that she had been approached to join the union by a malecolleague and invited to discuss the matter in a local pub, thus indicat-ing the continuing ‘maleness’ of union activities. Not all of the womeninterviewed were passive in this direction and some did fight for unionrecognition. One woman, employed in 1941 as a telephonist, broughtwith her the experiences of union activity from her former job at thePost Office. She was not prepared to put up with the working condi-tions and sexual discrimination she encountered in the dockyard andaligned herself with the Wiremen’s Union, later becoming a shopsteward for the women workers in her department.[39]Clearly the unions faced a dichotomy in their attitudes towards theincreasing demands for equal pay. First, by defining certain work as‘women’s’ and therefore unskilled, the craft workers were able tomaintain their status and higher levels of pay. As was seen in the caseof the First World War, many of the more skilled types of work hadbeen broken down and a number of the smaller, less skilled taskscould thus be carried out by ‘unskilled’ labour, including women. Butwhat has to be remembered is that notions of equality in the workplaceat this time were often alien to both men and women, with an accep-tance that female labour was always of less importance than men’s
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purely because women were doing it and not because of the actualwork involved, as was pointed out earlier. The evidence from oraltestimonies shows that trade unions at a local level were willing totake up the case for women workers to have better working conditions,but in terms of relatively minor issues such as separate toilet facilitiesand tea breaks. Of course, these issues did not challenge the maledominance of the work processes and, ultimately, the implementationof such concessions and improved facilities were advantageous to themale workers themselves in highlighting the need for them. Nationallyunions did fight for increases in wages, but negotiations were carriedout separately for men and women, so that by the end of the SecondWorld War women in shipbuilding and the metal and engineeringindustries were still earning, at the most, only 62.5% of the averagemale wage.[40] In the dockyard the level of women’s wages wasalways gauged on those of the men and any increases followed onfrom negotiations between the Admiralty and male workers.[41]A good example of how trade union bodies avoided the question ofwomen workers is revealed in the Minutes Book of the PortsmouthDockyard Trade Unionist Friendly and Benevolent Fund from 1935 to1955.[42] This Fund was established specifically for trade unionmembers working in the dockyard and the question of femalemembership was raised by the Yard Committee Secretary at theFund’s first Management Committee meeting in October 1935. At thattime it was agreed such a matter would involve a change in rules andtherefore should be dealt with at a General Meeting of the members,indicating that female union membership had not even been consid-ered when the rules of the Fund were first established. The subject wasnot raised again in the Minute Book until a meeting in June 1944, 4years after women were introduced into the dockyard in largenumbers. It was stated that a letter had been received from theAmalgamated Engineering Union “requesting consideration of theadmittance of women workers”.[43] The Committee decided that norecommendation would be made on this and the matter was dismissedat a further meeting in September 1944, when it was resolved that “thematter be deferred until the employment of women in the dockyard issettled on a permanent basis”.[44] Bearing in mind that the unions hadonly agreed to female employment in the dockyard on the understand-ing that this was for the duration of the War only and therefore purely
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of a temporary nature, such a resolution clearly indicates that sometrade unionists were resistant to the notion of women workers achiev-ing any kind of permanent recognition.Whilst antagonism to women workers has often been couched in termsof job protection by labour and feminist historians, it could also beargued that it was as much about protection of ideals of womanhood.One male worker, talking about women welders in the dockyard, said,“The dockyard wasn’t the place for women, it was a dirty and noisyplace, where men used coarse language, and women shouldn’t have tobe there”.[45] Such sentiments were voiced by other men interviewedand are confirmed by some of the women, who said the men ‘lookedafter us’, implying that the men considered they were in need ofprotection from the harsh world of the dockyard. Women in a male-dominated environment were clearly seen by many men as a threat totheir perceptions of female values and codes of behaviour. Itchallenged not only gender differentiations in the workplace, but thefundamental concepts of masculinity and femininity as they had beenconstructed over the previous decades. Whether or not these attitudeswere merely a mask for more deeply-held fears about the competitionof women in the workforce, it is still important to recognise how somemen would have articulated their concerns and the manner in whichthey expressed their feelings.
Childcare Provision
It was these ideas about the female role that underlay government concernswhen dealing with the issue of women’s continuing domestic responsibilities.Such was the case with nursery provision and strategies to ease childcareproblems for working women. As the pressure for even more industrialworkers grew, and the resultant need for an increase in the number ofwomen workers, the Government was forced to push the boundaries for itsrecruitment schemes even further. Although married women with childrenwere not conscripted, many were forced to work in order to supplementmeagre incomes, and nursery provision became an issue that could nolonger be shelved, as had been the case in the early years of the War. Therewas a clear reluctance for the Government to become involved in what wereseen as women’s domestic arrangements, added to which the womenthemselves seemed to prefer to rely on tried and tested methods ofchildcare, such as relatives and friends. The general attitude in Portsmouthappeared to blend with that of the Ministry of Health (MOH), which hadmanoeuvred the MOL into agreeing with a policy where the emphasis was
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on private arrangements for childminding rather than large-scale nurseryprovision. Nearly all of the interviewees with children left them with closerelatives whilst they were working and some had only a vague idea thatwartime nurseries existed in the town. A widow with one son respondedbitterly that:
You didn’t have childcare in those days, oh no. Nobody bothered aboutyou very much ... because I was working they halved my national pension... that was £2 for me and 10s for my son ... that gave me £1 5s, whichthey added to my earnings and taxed. I lost my home as well, because Icouldn’t afford the mortgage, and I had to live with my mother. [46]
It could be surmised that because of the close-knit familial relations amongstthe working classes in Portsmouth there was already a traditional networkin place of family members who were willing to care for children whenmothers had to go out to work. As a naval and garrison town it was usualfor men to be away at sea or in the army and it was therefore common forthem to be absent for long periods of time, leaving their womenfolk withlittle or no income and the need to work for their upkeep. The huge corsetindustry, already mentioned, was founded on this readily available cheapfemale workforce, so it was customary for women to rely on their relativesfor childcare.[47] On a more speculative note, nursery provision in theinter-war years was associated with provision for the needy and had thestigma of relief attached to it. This may have carried over into the warperiod and perhaps acted as a disincentive for many women to availthemselves of the facility.However, such a reluctance on the part of those interviewed is notreflected in the demands for nursery provision seen at a wider level,and also in Portsmouth as a whole. The MOH and Board of Educationhad been responsible for nursery provision during the inter-war period,and in the early years of the Second World War considerable conflictarose between MOH policies and the needs of the MOL.[48] At a locallevel, wartime day nurseries came under the MOH via its subcommit-tee for Maternity and Child Welfare, whose main concerns centred onthe suitability of premises for nursery age children in terms of space,facilities and staffing levels, and on the nursing qualifications of staffin charge of the nurseries. Endless wrangles ensued between the MOHand the MOL, which resulted in the provision of nurseries beingdelayed until 1942. Although conscription of women in war work didnot start until 1941, demands for nursery provision were alreadystrong. At the TUC women’s conferences in 1941 and 1942, motionswere passed urging increased nursery provision and the Labour Partywomen’s sections also called for greater activity in this area. In
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October 1940 there were 14 nurseries nationally providing for only6.4% of all children up to the age of 4, and no wartime nurseries inPortsmouth. Penny Summerfield comes to the conclusion that theMOH was reluctant to increase the numbers of nurseries because itfirmly believed that children were better cared for in the home by themother, or by childminders who acted as surrogate mothers.[49] InPortsmouth there was a local campaign for nursery provision, led by amale Labour councillor, which sparked off a lively debate in the localpress with letters of support for the campaign and some hostility to theproposals, arguing that a woman’s place was in the home.[50] Eventu-ally, after considerable delay, Portsmouth opened its first nursery inJune 1942, followed by four more by the end of 1944.[51] Althoughthese events were reported in the local newspapers, it is clear that for anumber of the women interviewed their childcare practices werereliant on traditional networks of self-help and that governmentnursery provision was not always deemed appropriate or convenient.Two of the women interviewed were war widows who had to go out towork to supplement their small pensions. Both had young children andone had to take her 2 year-old boy from her house to the nursery, awalk of nearly 3 miles, then catch a bus to the dockyard everymorning, and back again each evening, often in the blackout. She hadno relatives to turn to and her consequent reliance on the governmentnursery increased her working day considerably.Similar debates around government intervention are revealed whenlooking at the provision for restaurant outlets to assist wartimeworkers. The British, or municipal, restaurants were popular, butwhilst used by some interviewees at lunchtime, there still seemed to bea strong tendency for dockyard employees to return home for theirdinner and also a tradition that the hometime evening meal should becooked by the woman of the household, even if she was working.Canteens made it easier for women at work to feed themselves, butstill left the problem of shopping to feed their families. Many of thewomen interviewed said that they did their shopping during the lunchbreak, which left them little time to eat themselves or to have any restfrom their work tasks. Actual time for shopping was exacerbated bythe rationing system and lack of basic foodstuffs in the shops at timeswhen working women could get to them. Many therefore had to relyon their mothers, or other relatives, to help out. Shopkeepers were
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reluctant to alter their hours of opening in order to accommodatechanging work patterns and in Portsmouth some shops only agreed tostay open late on two evenings a week after a conference held at theChamber of Commerce in 1942 between unions, dockyard officialsand various trading associations.[52] Again there was considerableconflict between government departments; the Ministry of Food hadthe retailers to contend with, whereas the MOL was far moreconcerned with the interests of industry and therefore the loss ofproductivity through women’s absenteeism to do their shopping.[53]The increase in factory canteen provision and the wartime Britishrestaurants were a partial solution, but it is glaringly apparent in anycontemporary literature, or in government policies on the problems ofthe ‘double burden’ of work and home, that there was an overwhelm-ing assumption the domestic sphere should remain the responsibilityof women. This is borne out by the rapid closure of nurseries at theend of the War, and in Portsmouth, by the 1950s, only two remainedout of the five established a decade earlier [54], showing clearly thatchildcare was deemed the province of the private sphere and not theresponsibility of government or the local authorities.
The Aftermath
There has been considerable discussion about the extent to which women‘acquiesced’ in their removal from the paid labour market at the end of theSecond World War and accepted the reconstruction of ‘separate spheres’and whether this was related to the dual responsibilities that many womenhad to endure over the wartime period. In the case of Portsmouth Dockyard,a number of the women interviewed were sorry to leave but also quiteprepared to get back to the home and to start families, which many of themdid. For the majority of women, especially those who were married withchildren, the balancing of paid employment with domestic duties had beenparticularly draining and for the two widowed women mentioned previously,their memories of wartime work in the dockyard were not happy ones,although both stressed that they missed the camaraderie of other women. Itis important here to recognise that the ‘liberating’ effects of widenedemployment opportunities during the wartime may not have been quite soapparent to some of the women directly involved. Of course, for many singlewomen, their time in the dockyard provided them with a degree of socialfreedom that they may not normally have encountered. Evenings out withAmerican and Canadian servicemen at local dances, and at events organisedin their camps, as well as regular trips to the cinema were the experiences of
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one interviewee who entered the dockyard in 1941 as a messenger girl atthe age of 16:
People say it must have been terrible but to me, when I look back, it wassome of the happiest years of my life, because you just lived for today,you didn’t worry about tomorrow.[55]
The widening of social opportunities was not uncommon for many youngwomen and a number of them met their future husbands during their timein Portsmouth Dockyard. But what of employment opportunities after theWar? Those women who returned to dockyard employment were limited toworking in clerical or other non-industrial types of work, although the scopefor the former had been expanded considerably. A number of the womeninterviewed did return later as cleaners or canteen workers, some remainingin the dockyard until they retired but never obtaining work of a higher level.It certainly cannot be seen to bear out the arguments about the liberatingeffect of wartime work on women’s employment opportunities, as after theWar they effectively remained ‘outside the wall’ of male-dominated industriallife until the introduction of female apprentices during the 1970s.[56] Suchforms of post-war employment seem to bear out Carruthers’s model oflow-paid and low status female employment, which she states was aimedmostly at mature workers rather than mothers with young children [57],confirming the Government’s concern with re-establishing the role ofyounger women in the domestic sphere. For clerical workers the opportunityfor advancement was more obvious and one or two managed to achieve thestatus of Executive Officers, previously a position only available to men.However, such promotion was gained at the cost of moving to otherAdmiralty establishments when directed, an option only really open to singlewomen or married women without children.But if we see the ‘failure’ of women to hold on to the types of employ-ment and levels of pay they experienced during the war period, thenwe are defining ‘success’ within male terms. Perhaps a better under-standing of gender relations would be achieved if we recognise thatthe fundamental structure of employment was not altered through theintroduction of female labour, but rather that perceptions of women’scapabilities were irrevocably widened. This did not, of course, stop themajority of women from returning passively to the home and families,and from the Government encouraging this trend, as they had after theFirst World War. However, it undoubtedly had a profound and long-term effect on female consciousness, manifested for many women intheir activities in the feminist movement and demands for equalemployment opportunities and equal pay for both sexes. The evidencefrom the oral interviews seems to indicate that wider employment
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opportunities for women during the war years did not severely fractureeither male or female perceptions of gender divisions in theworkplace, and certainly not in Portsmouth Dockyard, although manyof the men interviewed did show a grudging respect for the work thatwomen had undertaken.It was noticed during the interviewing programme that the womentended to place far more emphasis on their time in PortsmouthDockyard than on other events in their working lives. Admittedly, thefocus for the interviews was to question them about their dockyardexperience, but the memories seemed to remain vivid and positivedespite the number of years that had lapsed in between, up to 50 or 60years in some cases. One woman expressed her feelings in a stirringrecollection of the day she left the dockyard:
I’ll never forget that day we came out of the dockyard, our last day. Aswe came out it seemed the whole world was against us, the elements ...The sea was coming out, and it was coming right over the main gate ...Oh, it was a terrible day, just as if it was weeping with us.[58]
She had three children so was glad to finish full-time work and get back toher family life, but again it was the comradeship of the other womenworkers she missed and the shared experiences of working under extremeconditions. Clearly women experienced their wartime work in different ways,but nonetheless the effects ran deep. The Second World War has becomefixed in popular memory as a major point in the process of individualidentification, particularly for the generation who lived and workedthroughout those years, and subsequent remembrances have to an extentenhanced the significance that the role of the war played in this process.[59]Although for some of the women interviewed their time in the dockyard wasonly relatively short and the work opportunities they had gained were laterlost, it was not an isolated and forgotten incident in their lives, but anencounter which had a far-reaching effect on their own expectations and onperceptions of their own capabilities. If the experiences of women in thetwentieth century are viewed across a continuum of female activity in thelabour market, then what can be seen is a chipping away of constructions offemale identity based on specious notions of appropriate cultural roles.Forms of female consciousness were shaped initially by existing evaluationsof gender differentiations, but through the demands of wartime employmentcame a recognition that constructions of gender were not immutable and,indeed, could be remoulded to allow for shifts in male and female activities;such social constructs acting as movable feasts when economic and politicaldemands required. Thus, the precepts upon which a sense of identity werefounded, whilst not undermined to any significant extent by such shifts,were laid open to challenge, with a subsequent recognition that women’s
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abilities were not determined solely through assumed biological differences.It is these factors that may well have influenced many of the women whoworked in Portsmouth Dockyard, not necessarily for themselves but inambitions for their daughters. Thus, the ‘liberating’ effect of wartime workfor women should perhaps not be viewed solely in terms of debates aroundenhanced employment opportunities, but should recognise the longer-terminfluence on expectations and an eventual breaking open of the imposedboundaries of social and cultural codes of behaviour.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleague, Dr Ken Lunn, and unknown referees, fortheir positive criticism of my initial paper and their helpful commentstowards producing the final version.
Notes
[1] Arthur Marwick (1988) Total War and Social Change (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
[2] See for example, Penny Summerfield (1984) Women Workers in the SecondWorld War (London: Croom Helm); Gail Braybon (1989) Women Workers inthe First World War (London: Routledge); and P. Summerfield & G. Braybon(1987) Out of the Cage: women’s experiences in two World Wars (London:Pandora).
[3] The Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Oral History Archive is currently depositedwith the Portsmouth City Museum & Records Office, Museum Road,Portsmouth.
[4] Penny Summerfield (1996) Meanders and migrations: the effects of the SecondWorld War on women’s work histories, paper given at the Annual Conference ofthe Social History Society of the United Kingdom, University of Strathclyde.
[5] Joan Scott, Introduction, in M. R. Higonnet, J. Jenson, S. Milhel & M. CollinsWeitz (Eds) (1987) Behind the Lines: gender and the two World Wars(Newhaven & London: Yale University Press).
[6] Pat Ayers (1988) Women at War (Birkenhead: Liver Press).
[7] Public Records Office (PRO), files ADM1/3382 and ADIVI1/3390. Thisinformation was kindly passed to me by Philip MacDougall.
[8] Mrs We – see appendix.
[9] Mr T – employed as a shipwright from 1937 to 1982.
[10] Mrs My – see appendix.
[11] Christine Williams (Ed.) (1993) Doing Women’s Work? Men in Non-traditionalOccupations (London: Sage).
[12] Only two local references could be found for women workers in PortsmouthDockyard: W. G. Gates (Ed.) (1919) Portsmouth and the Great War
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(Portsmouth: Charpentier) and J. Sadden (1990) Keep the Home Fires Burning(Portsmouth: Portsmouth Evening News).
[13] Gates, Portsmouth and the Great War.
[14] Pam Taylor (1979) Daughters and mothers – maids and mistresses: domesticservice between the wars, in J. Clarke, C. Critcher & R. Johnson (Eds) WorkingClass Culture (London: Hutchinson).
[15] Rosemary Crompton (1984) White-collar Proletariat: deskilling and gender inclerical work (London: Macmillan).
[16] Dorothy Sheridan (Ed.) (1990) Wartime Women (London: Heinemann). For anexplanation of how the ‘Call-up’ was organised at a local level, see article inPortsmouth Evening News, 25 February 1941.
[17] Harold Smith (1986) The effect of the war on the status of women, in HaroldSmith (Ed.) War and Social Change: British society in the Second World War(Manchester: Manchester University Press).
[18] Susan Carruthers (1990) ‘Manning’ the factories: propaganda and policy on theemployment of women, 1939-1947, History, 75, p. 244.
[19] M. R. Higonnet & P. L.-R. Higonnet (1987) The double helix, in: Higonnet et al(Eds) Behind the Lines.
[20] Higonnet & Higonnet, ‘The double helix’.
[21] Carruthers, ‘“Manning” the Factories’.
[22] Mrs P – see appendix.
[23] Ray Riley (1974) The Portsmouth Corset Industry, in J. B. Bradbeer (Ed.)Portsmouth Geographical Essays, Vol. 1 (Portsmouth: Portsmouth Polytechnic).
[24] Miriam Glucksmann (1990) Women Assemble (London: Routledge).
[25] D. H. Middleton (1996) Airspeed: a short history (Titchfield: Polygraphic Ltd).
[26] Mrs M – see appendix.
[271 PRO file ADM1 16/4587 Labour in Royal Dockyards 1941-1942.
[28] Mr P – employed as a shipwright from 1950 to 1992.
[29] PRO file ADM1/14628, Employment of Women in HM Dockyards 1943.
[30] Mrs Tr – see appendix.
[31] Sylvia Walby (1986) Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge: Polity Press).
[32] Mrs R – see appendix.
[33] Harold Smith (1981) The problem of ‘equal pay for equal work’ in Great Britainduring World War II, Journal of Modern History, 53, pp. 652-672.
[34] PRO file ADM1/10436, Extended Employment of Women in HM Dockyards1940.
[35] Gregory Anderson (1988) The White-Blouse Revolution (Salford: University ofSalford).
[36] Mrs T – see appendix.
[37] Mrs My – see appendix.
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[38] For the First World War period see Barbara Drake (1984) Women in TradeUnions (London: Virago). For the First and the Second World Wars see SarahBoston (1987) Women Workers and the Trade Unions (London: Lawrence &Wishart) and Sheila Lewenhack (1977) Women and Trade Unions (London:E. Benn).
[39] Mrs H – see appendix.
[40] Richard Croucher (1982) Engineers at War 1939-1945 (London: Merlin Press).
[41] PRO file ADM1/10831, Shipbuilding Trades Joint Council – Minutes of meetingon 21 June 1940, Employment of Women due to Emergency.
[42] This book was kindly donated for research purposes by Mr Richard Bennett ofthe Transport & General Workers Union.
[43] Management Committee Meeting, 13 June 1944.
[44] Management Committee Meeting, 21 September 1944.
[45] Mr S – he entered Portsmouth Dockyard as a riveter in 1936 and eventuallybecame a supervisor of welders (including women workers in the wartime).
[46] Mrs M – see appendix.
[47] Riley ‘The Portsmouth Corset Industry’.
[48] Denise Riley (1979) War in the nursery, Feminist Review, 2, pp. 82-108.
[49] Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War.
[50] Portsmouth Evening News (EN), 6 February 1942.
[51] EN, 12 June 1942 – first nursery opened.EN, 8 October 1942 – second nursery opened.EN, 16 December 1942 – third nursery opened.EN, 17 November 1943 – fourth nursery opened.EN, 5 May 1944 – fifth (and last) nursery opened.
[52] EN, 14 February 1942.
[53] Penny Summerfield (1983-84) Women, work and welfare: a study of child careand shopping in Britain in the Second World War, Journal of Social History, 17,pp. 249-269.
[54] EN, 22 February 1958.
[55] Mrs S – see appendix.
[56] S. W. B. Leathlean (1990) A History of Apprentice Training in H.M. DockyardPortsmouth (Winchester: Hampshire County Printing Service).
[57] Carruthers, ‘“Manning” the factories’.
[58] Mrs F – see appendix.
[59] Martin Evans & Kenneth Lunn (Eds) (1997) War and Memory in the TwentiethCentury (Oxford: Berg).
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Appendix: Details of Interviews with Women Workers in Portsmouth Dockyard
Mrs H Worked as a telephonist from 1941 to 1946 and an active trade unionmember.Mrs M Widowed in 1946 (her husband had worked in the dockyard) and sheentered as a clerk.Mrs T Started in 1929 as a typist, then became a clerical officer, retiring in1967.Mrs Tk Worked in the Finance Department from 1938 to 1978. She becamean Executive Officer and was active in the Civil Service Clerical Association,becoming a representative on the Whitley Council.Mrs B Worked as a tracer in the Drawing Office, where she met herhusband, and left to get married.Mrs S Entered as a messenger girl in 1941, then moved onto the petrolpumps in the Transport Department. She left in 1947.Mrs H Worked as a machinist from 1941 to 1946, where she met herhusband and left to get married.Mrs L Employed as a clerical assistant in the Wages Section from 1941 to1952. She was kept on after the War.Mrs S Worked as a clerical officer in the Drawing Office from 1941 to 1950.She was married to a draughtsman in 1948, but was allowed to stay on.Mrs W Worked in Expense Accounts from 1930 to 1936. She married in1936, but was called back into the dockyard in 1939 (no children). Shebecame an Executive Officer and retired in 1971.Mrs R Employed as a machinist from 1941 to 1946. She met her husband inthe dockyard.Mrs Hr Worked on the bench in the Factory, then on milling machinesdoing piecework. The noise affected her nerves and she was moved into theDrawing Office in 1943.Mrs Hy She was taken into the Colour Loft as a war widow in 1941. She waslater made a Recorder until she left in 1945.Mrs Fs Worked as a rigger in the Sail Loft from 1941 to 1946. She wentback into the dockyard in 1963 as a cleaner/tea lady until she retired.Mrs F She was taken into the dockyard as a wire splicer from 1942 to 1945because she was a war widow. She had three children, one in Kingston daynursery. She went back into the dockyard after the war as a cleaner, thenbecame a woman police searcher.Mrs Tr Worked in the Saw Mills from 1940 to 1945. She met her husband inthe dockyard and left to get married.Mrs We A naval widow on a small pension, she worked in the Colour Loftfrom 1948 to 1960. She was hostile to the trade unions.
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Mrs P Worked as a wireman from 1942 to 1946. She was one of only twowomen working afloat on HMS Hilary, the command ship for the D-Dayinvasion.Mrs My Worked in the Colour Loft after the War, because she was a navalwidow. She met her second husband in the dockyard.Mrs C Went into the dockyard in 1941 at the age of 15 to work in thecanteens. She later moved to the Drawing Office as a clerk.Mrs Hn Volunteered to enter the dockyard in 1941 and worked afloat on thetugs, lagging pipes and boilers. She returned after the War as a cleaner,then became a woman police searcher.Mrs B Entered the dockyard in 1938 as a temporary clerical assistant in theNaval Stores. She married and left at the end of the War.Mrs Pm Worked during the wartime period on landing craft welding thebulkheads.Mrs Mp Worked firstly as a fire girl with the riveters, then as a riveter andfinally as an acetylene welder from 1941 to 1944.Mrs O Went into the dockyard in 1941 as an electrician’s mate. She was thefirst of six women to be trained as wiremen. She left in 1945.Mrs Br Entered as a girl messenger in the telephone exchange in 1943. Sheleft in 1945 to get married.Mrs C Entered the dockyard in 1927 as a clerical assistant in the WagesSection. She left in 1937 to get married, but was called up in 1939. Sheretired in 1970.
ANN DAY is employed as a research associate in the School of Social andHistorial Studies, University of Portsmouth, Milldam, Burnaby Road,Portsmouth PO1 3AS, United Kingdom. She is engaged on a project centredaround the Portsmouth Dockyard workforce, using extensive oral historytestimonies. She also works on a part-time basis for the Portsmouth RoyalDockyard Historic Trust as their Oral History Coordinator. She has recentlypublished a paper in Llafur on the closure of Pembroke Dockyard and isalso joint editor with Ken Lunn on a book of dockyard history (to bepublished early 1999). She is currently working with Ken Lunn on acomparative history of labour relations in Portsmouth, Plymouth andChatham dockyards.
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