9 - Labour and the woman worker

Summary

With its priority of expanding output and maximising labour supply in order to do so, the Labour government's policies were bound to have a major impact on women's employment. That employment had rapidly expanded in the war period (table 9.1), though the significance of the increase has been much debated. Marwick, in particular, saw the war period as marking a major and positive change in women's activities and aspirations. Most recent literature has taken a much less sanguine view about the impact of the war on women. Writers such as Summerneld and Smith have emphasised both the limited extent of wartime changes, for example in the extent of gender segregation in employment or the absence of equal pay, and also the temporary nature of many of the changes that did occur. Smith summarises this now predominant view: ‘The postwar aspirations of the vast majority of women factory workers were focused on marriage and domestic life; their wartime employment was considered a temporary response to an abnormal situation.’

Whilst much of the recent argument about the limited impact of the war on women in Britain is persuasive, it commonly treats developments in the later 1940s as a minor postscript to wartime changes. Yet there were major developments in the area of women's employment in this early post-war period. First, some of the trends evident before the war reasserted themselves, notably the upward trend in overall female activity rates.