World War One began in 1914 and ended in 1918. Women’s lives were majorly affected during the war. My role is to find out if the lives of women were greatly affected by the First World War.
During the war since most of the men were off fighting, the women were needed to stay home and run things so that the economy would not completely fall apart. Women had to take over men’s work to ensure that the jobs were fulfilled this was a huge step for most women as before all that they knew was house work and how to look after the kids. The following source explains the wages and problems women had whilst working. Source A5, is useful to me because it tells me how much women earned in the munitions factories and whether or not they liked it. In domestic service women did not like the work, but when they started to work in such places like the munitions factory some changed their minds and actually enjoyed it. ‘I started on hand-cutting shell fuses, we worked twelve hours a day apart from the journey morning and night, as for wages; I was very well off earning £5 a week’. Source A5 was written by the memories of women’s lives that were altered by the war the main write being Mrs H. Felstead. These memories are shown in the ‘Imperial War Museum’ for the public. This source is reliable because it states when it was written and who wrote it. However the source might not be completely reliable because the memories of the women may have changed since then; I think that source A5 could also be biased in some way or another. The purpose of this source is to show what it was like 1914-1918. Source A7 links in with source A5 because it is also talking about wages in the First World War. Source A7 is reliable to me because of what is written in the poem, it was about the munitions factory in 1917. The source might not be entirely reliable because there is a chance that