World War I

World War I is presented as a turning point in the expansion of women’s paid work, not as a moment when work by itself resolved women’s subordination. The war’s labor crisis drew more women into employment across social classes and professions, while the surrounding analysis stresses that access to production did not automatically bring equal pay, freedom from domestic duties, or control over reproductive life.

Wartime labor and women’s employment

The labor crisis of 1914–18 spread women’s employment more widely and helped carry the movement into the lower middle and middle classes. Women entered liberal professions as well as the agricultural, industrial, commercial, financial, and clerical work in which they were already active. The book places this shift against earlier figures: in France, 900,000 women had worked from home in 1900, making items such as clothing, leather goods, funeral wreaths, purses, beadwork, and souvenirs; by 1906, 42 percent of women aged eighteen to sixty were working across a broad range of occupations.

Prewar census figures show how widely women’s participation varied across countries: 42 percent in France, 37 percent in Finland, 34.2 percent in Germany, 27.7 percent in India, 26.9 percent in England, 19.2 percent in the Netherlands, and 17.7 percent in the United States. The account cautions that rural labor raised the figures for France and India. In France around 1940, outside peasant work, it counts approximately 500,000 women heading establishments, one million female employees, two million women workers, and 1.5 million women working alone or unemployed. These figures mark an enlarged presence in economic life, but not yet an equal one.

Employment, class, and solidarity

Women’s employment could serve employers while provoking conflict among workers. Employers welcomed women partly because they accepted low wages, and male workers could view this cheaper labor as a threat to their own position. The book therefore rejects the assumption that women and the proletariat possessed an automatic solidarity simply because both were oppressed. It compares women’s position in this labor conflict with that of Black workers in the United States: groups subject to exploitation could be turned against other workers, and recognizing a shared structure of disadvantage required political consciousness rather than arising spontaneously.

The account identifies union organization as a change in this dynamic. Once women were integrated into unions, they could defend their own interests without being made to appear as competitors endangering the working class as a whole. In this framing, wartime labor expansion matters not only because it put more women to work, but because collective organization could alter who had the power to negotiate the terms of that work.

Production and reproductive labor

The wartime expansion also exposes a persistent conflict between productive employment and reproductive responsibility. The book argues that women’s entry into paid work did not displace the burdens of pregnancy, childcare, and housekeeping. In France, domestic work and child care remained almost exclusively women’s responsibility; because the anti-feminist tradition discouraged men from doing household tasks, women faced greater difficulty reconciling family and work than their spouses did. Employment could thus enlarge a woman’s public activity without freeing her time from unpaid labor.

The discussion connects this imbalance to the absence of reliable control over fertility. Contraception was not universally available or consistently used, while abortion was officially forbidden. Women could consequently face health risks from unregulated abortion or be overwhelmed by repeated pregnancies. The book’s broader argument is that reproductive demands are not interchangeable with ordinary employment: pregnancy and maternity engage a woman’s life in ways that cannot be explained simply as a job or service, and a social account that treats women only as workers misses a central part of their situation.

The limits of emancipation through work

The book’s historical account gives paid work a crucial but limited role in emancipation. Modern industry can reduce the significance of muscular differences, and large-scale employment can give women an economic basis for independence. Yet economic access does not itself undo patriarchal authority, household divisions, or the social expectation that women organize their lives around marriage and motherhood. The measure of change is therefore not simply whether women work, but whether they gain concrete freedom and the conditions to shape their own projects.

World War I’s significance in this account lies in the way its labor crisis accelerated an existing transformation while leaving its contradictions visible. Women’s work expanded across occupations and classes, but low wages, worker hostility, unequal domestic duties, and constrained reproductive choices continued to shape its meaning. The war marks a broadening of women’s participation in production; it does not stand as proof that employment alone completed their emancipation.