Health

  More women were dying in childbirth in 1921 than they had been a decade earlier, but health visitors were not allowed to advise on contraception – even to married women. One mother of eight children living in two rooms in Battersea told an inquiry: ‘I had a bed in the back for the two girls, a bed for the boy which I take down every day and put up at night to make more room. We have our food in this room, I do all my cooking here. In the other room is my bed, a bed I make up for the other little boy on the settee, and the pram the baby sleeps in.’34

  Stopes clinics for working women were few and far between, but patent medicines to ‘bring on’ bleeding were widely advertised and sometimes effective. Most of the customers for the widely advertised pills to ‘restore health’ were married women of all classes who preferred to induce a miscarriage than to birth or raise another child. When a woman could not afford the pills, or found them ineffective, she resorted to all sorts of interventions, some effective and some dangerous. One reported: ‘In the thirties, my aunt died self-aborting. She had three children and couldn’t feed a fourth . . . So she used a knitting needle. She died of septicaemia leaving her children motherless.’35

  At least 15 per cent of women who were registered as dying in childbirth – about 300 women a year in the decade from 1923 – died from abortions, and that number was almost certainly an underestimate because doctors would conceal a fatal illegal abortion on the death certificate to spare the feelings of the family.36

  Women were frequently prosecuted for abortion, and there were generally up to 50 women abortionists imprisoned in Holloway Prison at any given time, serving sentences of as much as 14 years. The women were unqualified but not incompetent, and not all of them worked solely for the money. One said: ‘I knew it was against the law but I didn’t think it was wrong. Women have to help each other.’37

  Abortions were legal if two doctors agreed that the mother’s life was endangered by the pregnancy or she would die in childbirth. In 1938, this inadequate abortion law was challenged by a London obstetrician, Dr Aleck Bourne, who treated a 14-year-old girl with cognitive disability. She had been raped by five off-duty guards officers, who had invited her to the Royal Horse Guards Barracks, promising her a horse with a ‘green tail’. When her mother took the girl to St Thomas’s Hospital, the consultant refused to abort, saying that since the five rapists were officers, ‘she might be carrying a future prime minister’.38

  Beecham’s Pills to cause abortions were advertised to ‘assist Nature in her wondrous functions’

  ‘What Are the Wild Waves Saying?’, Beecham’s Pills advertisement, late nineteenth century (Chronicle/Alamy)

  The highly regarded Dr Bourne agreed that although there was no immediate danger to life to the girl – as required by the law for an abortion – there were such risks to her physical and mental health that ‘If one waited for danger to life, the woman would be past assistance.’39

  He carried out an abortion and was taken to court, accused of performing illegal surgery. The judge ruled that doctors might perform surgical abortion (before 28 weeks) to protect a woman’s mental and physical health. She did not have to be at risk of death from the pregnancy or birth to justify an abortion.

  The Women’s Co-operative Guild congress of 1934 – continuing its remarkable campaign for the rights of working-class women – called on the government to legalise abortion like any other surgical procedure.40 The Abortion Law Reform Association was formed in 1936 by Stella Browne, Dora Russell, Frida Laski and Joan Malleson, and in three years had nearly 400 members – mostly working-class women. Browne, courageously, spoke of her own abortion when she gave evidence to the 1937 Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion: ‘If abortion were necessarily fatal or injurious, I should not now be here before you,’ she said.41

  Stella Browne (1880–1955) believed that women should be able to have sexual experiences outside marriage and control of their fertility.42 She linked the ban on abortion to the many ways that women were controlled: ‘What is this ban on abortion? It is a sexual taboo, it is the terror that women should experiment and enjoy freely, without punishment. It is the survival of the veiled face, of the barred window and the locked door, of burning, branding, mutilation and stoning; of all the pain and fear inflicted ever since the grip of ownership and superstition came down on women, thousands of years ago.’43

  Childbirth itself was a dangerous procedure, especially for poor women. Giving birth could be fatal for women suffering from malnutrition and ‘rickets’. Country women and poor women attended by a midwife who did not go from patient to patient still had more healthy births than those in towns attended by professional men with multiple patients.44 Sepsis and puerperal fever continued to cause many deaths until the male medical profession finally agreed to basic hygiene practices, such as wearing masks, gloves and aprons, and antiseptic procedures.

  Women Loving Women

  The new professional sociologists (all men) discussed love between women but – as sexologists – they were mostly interested in women’s love if it was sexual. Women’s love for women came to be defined as a sexual experience using genital touching to stimulate orgasm, and everything else was defined as platonic love, meaning non-sexual, or friendship. Female lovers were assumed to be attempting to reproduce heterosexual intercourse as best they could without the necessary equipment. Women’s desire for other women was said to be an ‘inversion’ of their true nature, which was assumed to be heterosexual. The same belief when applied to homosexual lovers led some sexologists to suggest that both lesbians and homosexuals were ‘inverting’ their natural desires, and they created and named a new third sex called ‘inverts’.

  For men, the definition of homosexuality as a hereditary disability could be helpful as it provided a defence against the severe laws that banned homosexual acts. For women, it defined what had been a normal and widespread loving relationship as an act of genital sexuality, a sin, and a disability or illness. Passionate female devotion was both sexualised and pathologised.45

  Some women found the new label helpful as yet another definition of female nature – but one that widened the parameters of expected behaviour. Some acknowledged their sexuality and deliberately created an androgynous or manly appearance. Some were glad to break the ‘asexual’ model of romantic female friendship and claim their own erotic nature.46 But some women continued to insist that a deep love for women could be untouched by sexuality. The notes on one of Havelock Ellis’s own patients, who he described as a ‘true invert’, read more like a woman whose love was not sexual but highly spiritual. ‘Miss M’ told him: ‘I love few people . . . But in those instances when I have permitted my heart to go out to a friend, I have always experienced most exalted feelings, and have been made better by them morally, mentally, and spiritually. Love is with me a religion. The very nature of my affections for my friends precludes the possibility of any element entering into it which is not absolutely sacred.’

  Vera Brittain’s biography of her friend Winifred Holtby specifically described a lasting love between two women without erotic overtones. She was clear that women’s shared love was ennobling and would lead to other spiritual loves: ‘Loyalty and affection between women is a noble relationship which far from impoverishing actually enhances the love of a girl for her lover, of a wife for her husband, of a mother for her children.’47

  Women at War

  All single women between 19 and 40 years of age were conscripted into National Service in December 1941. Wives, mothers and those single women who headed a household with servants – so upper- and middle-class single women – were exempt.48 Conscripted women had to choose a wartime occupation, such as mechanic, engineer, munitions worker, air raid warden, bus and fire engine driver. Within two years, almost 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women were employed in essential work in heavy industries like engineering, metals, chemicals, vehicles, transport, energy and shipbuilding.49

  Women could choose to join one of the auxiliary services – the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) or the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) – but they could not be combatants.50 Class snobbery persisted in the services: the ATS, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women’s Voluntary Service were all headed by elite women, indicating the suitability of these services for middle- and upper-class conscripts. Many ladies volunteered for patriotism, and some hurried into snob services before they were allocated to lesser-status company.51

  A total of 640,000 women enlisted in women’s divisions of the armed forces.52 The ATS first recruited women as cooks, clerks, orderlies, store women or drivers in 1938, but they went on to serve in anti-aircraft command, on searchlights – the 93rd Searchlight Regiment were all female. They also worked in mixed batteries on anti-aircraft guns, despite officially not being allowed to fire them.53 Their marching to the tune of ‘Anchors Away’ suggests different:

  We are the ATS marching along

  We are the Ack Ack girls

  and this is just our marching song

  We joined the Royal Artillery

  to fight for yours and mine

  And when we see a jerry plane

  we shoot the blighter

  Shoot the blighter down54

  Women aged 18–50 and living near naval ports could apply for shore-based jobs in the WRNS to release men for service at sea. Wrens played a major part in the planning and organisation of naval operations, serving at Bletchley Park and its out-stations, operating machines used in code-breaking.55

  Wren Gwyneth Verdon-Roe wrote home in 1944: ‘I am so glad I am a plotter – it is the most exciting job because we are in on everything that is happening. The night of 4th-5th June I was on all night. We worked flat out till dawn and then the whole thing was called off because of bad weather. The disappointment was terrible, the anti-climax after all the stress. We were tearful and tired and had never felt so low in all our lives.’56

  There were far more women code-breakers than men at the now famous Bletchley headquarters – 8,000 of them to 2,000 men. One was Joan Clarke, recruited to break the Enigma Code. She worked alongside Alan Turing and they were briefly engaged to marry. Even as a lead code-breaker she was paid less than the men.

  ATS plotters at Coastal Artillery Headquarters in Dover, December 1942

  ATS plotters by War Office official photographer, Coastal Artillery Headquarters in Dover, 1942 (Imperial War Museum)

  Founded in 1939, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force compiled weather reports, maintained aircraft, served on airfields and worked in intelligence.57 Women also worked in the Royal Observer Corps, maintaining and flying barrage balloons.58 The Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) were known as the ‘Attagirls’, delivering planes to airfields all around Britain, often in bad weather and in unfamiliar planes.

  ‘You didn’t know what type of plane you were going to fly that day,’ said Joy Lofthouse. ‘You’d get out of a Tiger Moth after delivery and then into a Wellington bomber. After that, you could be flying a Spitfire.’

  Instead of flying the plane using the instruments, the women were told to stay within sight of the ground and navigate using maps, a compass and a watch. It was extremely dangerous in bad weather or poor visibility. One woman, Mary Wilkins, was known as ‘Fog Flyer’ for her bad-weather navigation.59 Jackie Moggridge joined ATA at the age of 18 and ferried 1,438 planes to waiting RAF pilots, flying 82 different types of aircraft. She later became the first female commercial airline captain.60

  Jackie Moggridge (1922–2004) flew as a pilot with the ATA during the Second World War, and later with the RAF Voluntary Reserves. Pictured here after the war with her daughter Candy Atkins

  [And Cover] Jackie Moggridge by unknown photographer, Gloucestershire, 5 October 1949 (TopFoto)

  The iconic fighter plane the Spitfire was designed by a woman draughtswoman. Stella Rutter finalised and corrected the drawings that were prepared by three male draughtsmen working under her, and checked them again before they were printed as manufacturing guides for the Vickers-Supermarine factory in Southampton. She was paid the same as the men: £3 a week. Her security clearance was so high that when the Allied Command was looking for a ‘lady’ to host the leaders before D-Day at a top-security dinner, Rutter was invited to attend:

  That was a huge responsibility for a woman of my age. There was great trust being put in me, one which I never betrayed. I was requested to help all of these commanding officers to eat, drink, dance, sit down and meet other officers who would be on their right and left on the battlefield, and meet them and know them by sight. I think approximately sixty-two other officers were in attendance and Major General Omar Bradley turned up as well, and as a hostess I was, of course, introduced to and worked with them all.61

  Not even on the eve of the decisive battle of the Second World War should a man have to pour his own drink.

  Women also volunteered for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) or served in Civil Defence, the National Fire Service or in military nursing.62 Thousands of FANYs were recruited for the Special Operations Executive and about 60 were trained as spies, parachuting into occupied countries to organise resistance fighters preparing the way for the Allied invasion. Among the heroines were French-born Vera Leigh, captured and murdered,63 and Odette Sansom, captured while serving with the French resistance and tortured by the Gestapo.64 Violette Bushell, a shop girl inspired to serve by the death of her husband Étienne Szabo of the French Foreign Legion, was dropped into France twice, before being captured, tortured, sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and executed, aged 23, in 1945. Pearl Witherington was said to be the best shot of the SOE and served in the French resistance with a million-franc bounty on her head. She survived the war and explained that she had wanted to defend France: ‘I just thought, This is impossible. Imagine that someone comes into your home – someone you don’t like – he settles down, gives orders: “Here we are, we’re at home now; you must obey.” To me that was unbearable.’65

  British resistance agent Noor Inayat Khan (1914–44) was posthumously awarded the George Cross for her courage as an SOE radio operator in occupied Paris and a prisoner at Dachau

  [And Cover] Noor Inayat Khan, unknown photographer,1943 (IanDagnall Computing/Alamy)

  Noor Inayat Khan was the daughter of an Indian Muslim family of musicians and poets, a descendant of the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan. She overcame her Buddhist belief in not taking life because of her opposition to Nazism and her hope of making common cause between Indian and English people. ‘I wish some Indians would win high military distinction in this war,’ she said. ‘If one or two could do something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody admired, it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians.’66

  She was the first woman radio operator ever dropped into France, and she chose to stay on in Paris as the only English radio operator, even when her circle was broken up and she was offered evacuation. Life expectancy for a radio operator, who had to reveal their location with every transmission, averaged six weeks. Arrested by the Gestapo, she escaped, only to be recaptured and spend ten months, shackled hands and feet, in solitary confinement. Transferred to Dachau concentration camp, she was shot in 1944.

  The Women’s Auxiliary Service (Burma), or WAS(B), consisted of a band of 250 British women, also known as the Chinthe Women, who worked alongside troops during the Burma campaign. One soldier remembered a ‘Chinthe Woman’:

  The Burma Road was being washed away as my Platoon was marching towards Pegu. In the distance we saw a lone lady standing by a table in the rain, and as we got nearer we saw she had lots of mugs of hot tea on the table. She gave us all tea and a packet of cigs and a wad. She was a lovely Scots lady who must have been 50 years old. I spoke to her and told her she was too near the guns, and she should go to a safer place, after all the Japs were only 4 miles up the road. She would not leave and said, ‘There will be other soldiers behind you who will want tea. I am just a WAS(B).’67

  The women who worked on British farms came to be known as ‘Land Girls’ of the Women’s Land Army, paid directly by the farmers who employed them.68 The average wage for male agricultural workers had been 38s per week, but the women who replaced them were paid 28s per week, with 14s deducted for board and lodging, and a basic working week of 48 hours in winter and 50 in summer, and no holidays. Conditions improved after 1943 with the introduction of the ‘Land Girls Charter’, giving them a week’s holiday a year and raising the minimum wage.69 One woman – Amelia King from Stepney, of African descent – was rejected by Essex County Council, which said that farmers would not want her labour and local people would not provide housing. The racist rejection was raised in the House of Commons, which could think of no solution but that Amelia King apply to another service.70

  The Women’s Timber Corps, known as ‘Lumber Jills’, were recruited to fell trees and manage forests for essential wood supplies.71 Annice Gibbs, who worked for the corps, said: ‘We soon got used to heavy work, such as lifting pit-props and cutting them into various lengths for the coal mines. There were no mechanical devices used then and every pit-prop was cut by hand . . . [at the dinner break] we sat under a tree eating beetroot sandwiches.’72

  Victory depended on the women at work, and the government provided inducements, opening 1,341 new nurseries for the duration and recommending equal pay. Some employers agreed to pay male rates – if the women were doing a man’s job, ‘without assistance or supervision’; but most women’s pay remained around half that of the men workers they had replaced. Semi-skilled and unskilled jobs were newly defined as ‘women’s work’ and exempt from equal pay negotiations. Women injured during enemy bombing raids or while serving in Civil Defence received a third of the compensation paid to men – 7s a week for a disabling injury compared with 21s a week for men. Equal rates would only be introduced after campaigns by women in Parliament and trade unions in April 1943.73