Using a range of parish
records, records from the Registrar General of Scotland, charity organizations,
and media reports, this article contributes to the historiography which
evaluates the effects of World War I in Britain as well as the history of lone
mothers and their children. It highlights how during the war, women, especially
lone mothers, made significant gains through the welfare system, changing
approaches to illegitimacy and the plentiful nature of women’s work but also
how in doing so this brought them under greater surveillance by the state,
local parishes, and charity organizations. Moreover, as this article will
demonstrate, many of the gains made by women were short-lived and in fact the
war contributed to high levels of family breakdown and gendered and
intergenerational poverty endured by lone mothers and their children.
...It was not just married women who came under greater
surveillance. Among the first women to come under the lens of the state
agencies were single women, especially, young working-class women. These young
females were among the greatest beneficiaries of women’s wartime economic
progress because they were the first to be enlisted to substitute for men who
were called to arms and this gave them greater spending power to enjoy the
modern leisure pursuits such as dance halls, cafés, cinema-going, and access to
new fashions and makeup. Woollacott argues that young women became targets of
regulation due to concerns over what the press would label “khaki fever.” This
was the idea that young women, especially those who resided near army camps,
were attracted by the excitement of war and to men in uniform which it was
feared would result in high levels of illegitimacy, prostitution, and venereal
disease.37 According
to the Registrar General for Scotland in his Annual Report of 1916, there had
been serious concerns that the war would lead to an increase in illegitimate
births.38 This
was not only due to khaki fever, but also related to the notion that departing
or returning soldiers, uncertain of their futures, would engage in premarital
sex.
These fears were translated into the establishment
of women’s patrols across Britain.39 In
Scotland, the patrols worked with the police, were sanctioned by the Scottish
Office, and were run by the National Union of Women Workers.40 In
1915, there were 425 patrols in Scotland based in twenty different locations.41Edinburgh
had thirty women’s patrols by 1916.42 Women’s
patrols monitored “girls” whose behavior was regarded as unsatisfactory, those
who gathered in the vicinity of military camps, who might potentially tempt
soldiers into misconduct.43 The Scotsman newspaper
called the patrols “an organized chaperone system” to avert the development of
“loose and dissolute habits” and increased levels of illegitimacy, especially
as the men who were seen as most likely to succumb to the charms of the young
women were older married men—so there would be no opportunity of averting
illegitimacy through marriage.44 To
this end, the Defense of the Realm Act was used to regulate women’s behavior.
For example, in Cupar, Fife, there was a military curfew which forbade women
from leaving their homes after 10 p.m. at night.45
Yet for all the fears expressed, illegitimacy did
not increase significantly in Scotland during the war. Table 1 below
highlights the number of illegitimate births peaked at nearly 9000 in 1912
before falling steadily to a low of 7,295 in 1917. However, the number of
births in Scotland also fell during the war period. The average percentage of
illegitimate births to total births in the period 1911–13 was 7.32, which
remained unchanged for the war years.46 Nevertheless,
more than 50,000 illegitimate children were born in Scotland between 1914 and
1919…
Full article at: http://goo.gl/5XK6Ac
By:
1University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Annmarie Hughes, Room 208, Lilybank House, Bute Gardens,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RT, UK. Email:ku.ca.wogsalg@sehguh.eiramnna
More at: https://twitter.com/hiv_insight
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