Women at War Work
Women in War Factories. By Amabel Williams-Ellis, with a foreword by Lady Cripps. (Gollancz. is.)
SOMEWHERE in this country there must be a whole class of readers whose Bible is Mass-Observation and these tracts for the times its commentaries, for their publication is presumably to satisfy some demand for reports and documentaries, since an increase in their number has been obvious since the war. But Mrs. Williams-Ellis' booklet is worth the attention of the general reader, for it covers the ground effectively and without too much recourse to that told-to- the-children style habitually employed by the B.B.C. (except when broadcasting to schools) or by writers self-consciously lease-lending to America.
Mrs. Williams-Ellis catches the atmosphere of factories, the per- sonalities of the workers, managers and " Welfares," and the noise and monster-ness of the machines. Her story of the woman of 70 who insisted on driving the huge crane that carried a molten bar across the shop shows that cranes have the same attraction for women as high-powered cars ; an appeal to the taming-the-monster complex that makes the wives of drunkards think they will reform them. She gets the noise but she does not. get the smell. Perhaps there are some things that a part-time worker in a factory knows better than the best of observers outside, and it does not appear that Mrs. Williams-Ellis has actually worked on a machine or she would know that the emulsified oil " jetting over chisel edge and steel" is pervasive and permeating, and does not call to mind a "milky waterfall " to anyone who knows it at close quarters as " slurry."
Mrs. Williams-Ellis does not forget to mention part-time work, and it is here that there is still a reserve of labour that might be more largely drawn upon. The.need at this stage is not for appeals, nor for conscription, but for the organisation of better arrangements to free those who are anxious to work. What domestic help is avail- able should be allocated to the household where it is most needed, and a question to which the national organisations of voluntary help might give their minds is whether .the enthusiasm available for working in`canteens for the Forces could not be extended to canteens in factories and even to providing teams that would undertake to keep house for women out at work.
On another point, it would surely have been a wiser policy for the Government, instead of abolishing all arts courses at the univer- sities, to have allowed them to continue on condition that the students (and this should go for the girls still attending those finished -institutions, the finishing schools) took part-time work in the holi- days. They would b: useful then to relieve married women with children at home. A change of work is as good .as a holiday, and to see something of factoryt life at first hand an education. For anyone, whatever their age, reservation or present war-work, making something lethal may be recommended as the best possible tonic
for morale in the fourth year of war. ROSALIE MANDER.
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