Women Called to Service

Ernest Bevin faces an almost insoluble equation. For two years, the mobilisation of men has stripped the munitions factories, civil defence services and military auxiliaries of hundreds of thousands of workers. Orders pile up in tank and aircraft workshops, anti-aircraft shelters need staffing, and the general staff demands that the ATS, WAAF and WRNS be brought up to strength. Women are volunteering in significant numbers, but never fast enough to keep pace with the demands that the war imposes.

Bevin knows that the decision he is bringing before Parliament has no precedent in any liberal democracy. Conscripting by law unmarried women aged 20 to 30 — directing them to assembly lines, anti-aircraft batteries or signals units — means crossing a line that even Nazi Germany had not yet dared to cross for its own female citizens by late 1941. Conservative circles protest against family separation and the moral hazards they associate with barracks life; religious groups see an attack on women's domestic vocation.

Yet Bevin also has 2 less radical alternatives at his disposal. He could intensify voluntary recruitment campaigns and rely on patriotic momentum to fill the workshops without legal compulsion. He could also opt for a local and selective requisition system, activated factory by factory according to immediate production needs, without any general national conscription. Bevin must choose between these 3 paths before the war machine stalls.