Do You Agree with the View That Women Gained Nothing from Their Wartime Experiences?

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After the end of World War I, men began to return back to Britain to continue with their lives. The women who were in their positions of work almost immediately found themselves without a job as they were seen as dispensable by business owners; often an unqualified man was given the position previously occupied by a much more qualified woman in civil service purely because of his sex. But while it may seem like women were dropped completely at the end of the war, they did gain some things from their wartime experiences, just very little. Source U explains that women didn’t gain any “long term advantages” from the war but they were able to prove that women as a whole were capable of doing a wider range of jobs than just in domestic services, including physically demanding and intellectual jobs. It is obvious why it is conceivable that women gained nothing from their wartime experiences as the “agreements with employers and trade unions” as seen in Source U showed that men were to be reinstated into their previous jobs once the war was over. Due to this, over 600,000 women lost their jobs within five months of the war ending. Trade Unions were the blight of women working as overall they didn’t like women and saw them as a threat to the livelihoods of their male workers. In order for them to allow women to work, women had to compromise to ‘dilution’, which saw tasks that could be completed by one man being undertaken by two women. Furthermore, because women only did part of a skilled job, they were paid much less than their male counterparts. The Government attempted to push for equal pay within the workplace, but this was difficult to achieve in practise as women lacked the experience of industrial bargaining to force the issue. Source T shows dilution in action with a woman having to assist an older man as she is unable to carry out the job alone even though she

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