By 1943, 90% of single women of working age, and even 80% of married women, were working outside the home in the armed forces, industry and other wartime organisations.
Their lives – and the nature of British society – were changed forever. At the end of World War II, as after World War I, many women were pushed out of their jobs to make way for men returning from war. But long-held notions of the limited capabilities of women had become untenable in the light of their vast and varied contribution to the war effort.
The nine women whose silhouettes can be seen at the IBCC from March 2025 illustrate the range of those previously unacknowledged qualities and capabilities.
- The sheer courage of nurses who returned to a doomed ship to rescue wounded servicemen, giving their own lives in this service.
- The suicidal bravery of women agents returning to occupied France as part of SOE, and ending up in Nazi death camps.
- The scientific breakthroughs achieved by women physicists, for so long deemed by academia to lack the intellectual capacity of men.
- The technical skills displayed by women engineers, and the risks, sometimes fatal, they took to test their innovations.
- The physical endurance of women aviators, piloting the full range of heavy and difficult aircraft into operational positions.
- The concentration and precision displayed by those who spent long nights plotting and recording aircraft movements.
- The physical strength and accuracy shown by women in munitions factories, or packing the huge parachutes exactly in the only way that would enable them to save a man’s life.
- The dedication to service that would bring them to work long hours in the Air Raid Precautions teams, or the NAAFI, or the Women’s Institute, caring for evacuees, boosting rural food production, collecting rosehips for essential Vitamin C and, of course making tonnes and tonnes of jam!
- And, perhaps most remarkable of all to those men who believed women were incapable of management, the organisational skills that lay behind the creation of the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Women’s Land Army and the development of the WI.
Not all of that ground could be lost, or ignored, after the war. It did still take time for the lessons to be transferred to a peacetime Britain. For decades women continued to be paid less than men in the same jobs, to be taxed at their husbands’ top marginal rates, and in the middle-class professions to be expected to stop work when they married. Women diplomats had to resign from the Foreign Office on marriage until 1973, the same year separate taxation was finally introduced – and statutory maternity leave followed two years later.
So it is hardly surprising that women “firsts” were slow in coming. The first female ambassador, Anne Warburton, was not appointed until 1976. Margaret Thatcher, the Lincolnshire grammar schoolgirl who became Britain’s first women Prime Minister in 1979, was only the sixth woman to make it into a British Cabinet.
Industry was still slower to adapt. Marjorie Scardino became the first woman Chief Executive in the FTSE 100 in 1997, and I followed her to become the first woman Chair of one of these biggest British companies in 2002.
Today, however, the gender pattern of business, government and all other walks of life looks very different. Though progress towards the full realisation of women’s capabilities is still slow in some professions and industries, there are women leaders and role models right across the spectrum. A number of them are coming in March to commemorate and celebrate the contribution made by the nine wartime women whose silhouettes are being unveiled at the IBCC – a contribution not only to the engine room of war but to the front line of peace.
Sarah Hogg
