Prior to the First World War, argued this writer, who signed as “WM”, the average factory woman was “indifferent” to suffragism and the attempts to improve her working conditions or economic position. The majority of suffrage organisations were dominated by the middle- and upper-classes, and most women who worked in factories were more concerned with maintaining a marriage than joining a union to fight for a pay rise. The war changed that. The importance of women’s work in munitions factories, as acknowledged by the government and the press, emboldened the workers, WM argued. Within the working class, new leaders of workers’ rights emerged. What’s more, the war destroyed many workers’ “formerly incorrigible belief in the economic security of marriage”. The circumstances of war had laid the groundwork for a whole new kind of working woman.
Before the war a public-spirited factory woman was so rare a being that she was worn as a trophy by the organisation that had the luck to discover her. Miss Annie Kenney, the half-dozen ex-factory workers who were employed as speakers by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Women’s Freedom League, the dear old souls in nodding bonnets and jet-beaded mantles who were brought from the East End by Miss Sylvia Pankhurst to prattle motherly common sense from the plinth of the Nelson’s Column, the handful of Lancashire weavers or Black Country hollowware workers who sometimes came to London as deputations to Cabinet Ministers, and the old factory hands who from time to time were found among the organisers of such bodies as the National Federation of Women Workers or the Workers’ Union, were the wonders of their time.
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