4 - British women’s writing of the Great War

Summary

“The time has come,” the Foreman said

“To talk of many things,

Of Screws and Shells and Overalls

Of clocking on, and Kings

And why the shaft gets boiling hot

And should the mandrels sing?”

This short extract from E. S. Caley's “The Foreman and the Manager,” a parody of Lewis Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” raises many issues central to women's war writing and the feminist scholarship that has brought both women's experience of the war years and their considerable body of writings on the war to public attention since the 1980s. Published in a munitions factory newspaper, the poem is about male responses to the huge impact of the war on gender roles. The Foreman, according to Claire A. Culleton, who discusses this poem in her rich account of women and working-class culture, has recognized the need for women's labor and is lecturing the manager of a munitions factory on the need to begin instructing the new female workforce. Culleton tells us that munitions workers numbered 900,000 of the nearly 3,000,000 women employed in British factories by the end of the war. Another 2,000,000 “worked in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the Women's Land Army, the Volunteer Aid Detachment, and other paramilitary organizations,” working both at home and in the war zone, albeit not as combatants. Women's mass entry into previously male jobs fundamentally challenged the period's dominant assumptions about women's capacities and proper role in the home. Even though women were forced out of these jobs at the end of the war, their experience of “Screws and Shells and Overalls” marked British twentieth-century society and contributed to women's economic, social, and sexual emancipation.