Assignment Choice #2: Role of Women During WWI

The Role of Women in WWI
Student’s Name
Institution
Role of Women in WWI
Introduction
The role of women in a patriarchal society has always stood at hospitality provision and probably nursing. Women accompanied men to the battlefield both as wives and attendants (Goldstein, 2003). They provided cookery services, nursed the wounds they sustained and did their laundry as well. The women’s services were a strong pillar in the army’s efficiency. At the beginning of World War 1, American women pushed for their inclusion in the workforce. They got hired in more prominent positions, including transportation, construction, and mass war production. Their part in the war forms the backbone of this paper.
The Opportunities and Challenges the War Presented Women with.
Women are often denied chances to engage in active service in the military. This is probably due to the physical demands of military service (Goldstein, 2003). Though they advocate for equality in the workforce, they get hired in subordinate positions and earn much less compared to their male counterparts. At the beginning of the war, more job slots were available for women. Female nurses could sign up for the army. Other slots were now open to women, including clerks, and typists, among others. The only right women enjoyed was suffrage, which most countries granted them during the war.
The en-masse recruitment of men onto the battlefield presented an opportunity for women to show the world that they could match their male counterparts regarding productivity and competitiveness. This was most of the jobs vacated by men who joined their colleagues at the war-front were availed to women following the vocalized campaigns on gender equality and equity. The women who took up these positions gained new skills and polished them with time thus matching the men who previously held these posts.
As much as women movements championed ‘equal pay for equal work,’ women’s productivity at that time was not at par with that of their male counterparts (Ouditt, 1994). Their output was not as high as of the male workforce at the time. As such, women had a challenge on board, to pull up their efforts, that is, to increase their productivity to match their male colleagues regarding productivity. They were expected to attain the accomplishments made by men within the same time frame, using the same equipment.
The war posed an enormous challenge to working women as they had to toggle between work, family and sometimes study. More often than not, women failed to strike a balance between work and family since the work demands were so high, yet the society was skeptical about working women. The perception that women were supposed to work only in beautifying their homes killed the women’s morale making life so hard for them.
The ideal woman during the war was a risk taker. Her place in the society changed when her husband got recruited to the war front (Ouditt, 1994). Women at the time took up jobs in the factories to manufacture crude war armaments, which they would ship to the men on the battlefield. In their bid to fill the void left behind by their warring husbands, women did jobs that exposed them to health risks while gauging their ...