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5 - Re-negotiated Social Relationships: Women in Reserved Occupations in Glasgow and Clydeside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2017

Alison Chand
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
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Summary

As we have seen in Chapter Four, gender identities in history do not exist in vacuums and therefore should not be researched in isolation. This chapter brings men and women out of their ‘different worlds’ and takes account of the fact that men working in reserved occupations engaged with women on an everyday basis. James McMonigle remarked of women: ‘They were always there, you were always in and out of each other's houses.’ We have already discussed extensively in Chapter Two the attitudes of civilian women in Clydeside towards men working in reserved occupations. However, female labour was also regulated during the Second World War, with adult women required to register for war service. The National Service (No. 2) Act in December 1941 made single women aged between twenty and thirty liable for enlistment and, by 1943, 90 per cent of single women aged between eighteen and forty and 80 per cent of married women in Britain were engaged in either the auxiliary services or industry. In September 1943, 7.5 million women were working in industry and 470,000 women were serving in the auxiliary forces. Ralph Assheton, MP for Blackburn West during the war, speaking in the House of Commons in December 1941, referred to ‘a list of vital industries and services from which women will not be taken [for the armed forces]’, while Winston Churchill asserted in November 1941 that ‘any women already engaged in one of the vital war industries’ would not be called up to the auxiliary services and, although Ronnie Johnston and Arthur McIvor observed that Clydeside women continued to be excluded from working in heavy industries, a significant number of women in the region were nevertheless employed in reserved occupations and therefore exempt from joining the women's auxiliary services.

As we have seen, my advertisements to recruit men who worked in reserved occupations for interview also attracted a number of women, indicating the neglect of the experiences of these working Clydeside women in historical research. Cultural and official sources also illustrate this neglect.

Type
Chapter
Information
Masculinities on Clydeside
Men in Reserved Occupations During the Second World War
, pp. 104 - 129
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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