What did you do during the War, Mummy

Warrigal

Warrigal

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Sydney, Australia
Answer, I volunteered as a surf lifesaver.



Not me personally, mind. I wasn't born until 1943 but the women of my mother's generation turned their hands to all sorts of unconventional roles and occupations to assist the war effort and to keep the home fires burning.
 

My mother was a mail woman and walked miles every through country fields delivering to lonely farm houses.

She started at 6:00 AM and finished mid afternoon.

Later on my father married again and his second wife, my stepmother was drafted and sent to a factory 200 miles away making Wellington bombers!
 
My maternal grandmother was a machinist. She was fired at the end of the war with the explanation that the returning soldiers would need good jobs.

My paternal grandmother was a farmer, mostly potatoes. The war years were a boom time for local farmers.
 

horseless carriage said:
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Many young women took on what was then stereotypical, man's work. They did so during WW1 too, so you would have thought that the mindset had changed.
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She was your mother?

Like many young men, many young women were drafted and did what they were told - tree felling, shipbuilding, flying Lancasters single handed, though the ones we sent behind enemy lines were all volunteers. Don't think we sent any down the mines though!
 
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Pepper said:
I had absolutely no idea young women were drafted for work assignments in the UK. You guys were sure ahead of times. Of course, it was necessary. You Brits were amazingly brave.

Thanks for the information.
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It was actually pretty awful for these women who worked full time jobs in munitions factories and in the services themselves, when their husbands returned from war these women were told they had to stop work, because in those days it was the man who was expected to provide.

for the first time in History , for 6 years women had become independant earners, and had learned skills they'd never have learned at the kitchen sink, and they were gutted to be put back to domestic drudgery and lose the skills, and the friendship and the freedom they'd gained while their husbands were away at the front...
 
My mother worked at the U.S. Navy shipyards as secretary to the head guy. That was her "job".

Her "true purpose in life" was to dance with every brave young sailor whose ship passed through on their way to war. And dance she did, at the USO dances every night.

That's how she met my dad. He danced right into her heart and they married when he got back from Japan.
 
Agree with your thoughts, @hollydolly.

My Mom returned to work when I was in High School.
She taught sewing at the local Singer store.
I'd pick her up sometimes when she got off work, and I'd never seen her happier.
She's talk, and talk about the young girls in her classes and the progress they were making.

Had to be more fun to be around a bunch of girls, instead of being around her 3 sons.

Happy to share her.
 
for 6 years women had become independant earners,

I'll agree they had become independent, but not independent earners.

They were paid a pittance compared with men who were still in the same job, a situation connived at and accepted by the male dominated trade unions.

After the war it was back to the kitchen and the secretary's chair.
 
Laurie said:
Yes. I'm not saying they didn't go down the mines, I'm just saying we didn't send them. They were volunteers
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The First World War was fought on a huge industrial scale. Munitions were needed in vast quantities to feed the guns and a variety of products were required to supply both military and civilian needs.


With men recruited for the armed forces, the industrial workforce changed. Over 600,000 women took on previously male-dominated roles in industry during the war, working alongside men in reserved occupations. Women made an increasingly varied contribution, working in labs, mills and factories, sometimes in hazardous circumstances.


As an industrial hub, the North-West of England had a significant role to play. Many of the region’s companies converted to produce munitions for the war effort. Local working class women already doing industrial jobs in the North-West were joined by other women learning new skills.


These photographs show the incredible range of essential products made by women in the North-West during the war.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-women-war-workers-of-the-north-west


...and this was just the North West of England never mind the rest of the country
 
Women were working down the mines from the 19th century, and being paid, certainly not voluntary work.

It is thought of as the ultimate man’s world, a sooty-faced fraternity deep under ground. But it is a little-known fact that many women also worked in Britain’s coal mines, doing crucial jobs to keep the collieries in operation.

The role of “tip girls” or “pit brow lasses” in the coal industry has largely gone unnoticed in history books, with women portrayed as wives or mothers, sitting at home.



A new exhibition at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, challenges this long-accepted view. Breaking Ground: Women of the Northern Coal Fields tells the stories of women in the 19th -century mining industry via paintings and archive material, proving they did far more than wash their husbands’ sooty overalls.

Until 1842, women worked underground, as did children as young as eight. Queen Victoria put an end to that following a disaster at Huskar Colliery in Silkstone Common, near Barnsley, in which 26 children were killed. Her inquiry resulted in the Mines and Collieries Act, banning women and girls, and boys under 10, from underground work.

The new law didn’t prevent women and girls from working on the surface, however, so they did – loading wagons, sorting coal on conveyor belts and hauling heavy tubs up from the pit face. They had to adapt their Victorian dress to suit the environment, wearing men’s breeches underneath hitched-up skirts.

Curator Angela Thomas said she wanted to celebrate these unsung heroines – even if they would never have thought of themselves as such. “It was just a job for them. They couldn’t really see what the fuss was about.”
Few women aspired to be pit brow lasses, according to Thomas. “But for many it was preferable to being stuck in a noisy mill, she said. “They liked being outside in the fresh air.”

The last pit brow lasses were made redundant from Harrington No 10 mine in Lowca, on the Cumbrian coast, in 1972. One of them, Rita Culshaw from Wigan, told the Daily Mirror this year she had loved the work and, despite being 83, “would go back to the mine tomorrow”.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture...mining-unsung-heroines-bishop-auckland-museum
 
My mom worked somewhere in Tennessee making the A-Bomb. She died when she was 41 of some undiagnosed illness my Dad said was something like aids. I contacted the organization that helps survivors of victims of those who worked in these toxic environments. They did reply, but said it was inconclusive if she worked with hazardous material.
 
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