A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War
By Patricia Fara, Oxford University Press, 352 pages, £13.65
One hundred years ago next month, on February 6, 1918, women working in hospitals, laboratories and universities throughout Britain raised toasts and burst into triumphal song as they celebrated being given the vote.
Before the First World War, many of these doctors, scientists and academics had been impassioned suffragists and even militant suffragettes who marched on parliament and smashed windows in support of votes for women. On the outbreak of war they had immediately hung up their banners and laid down their missiles to devote their expertise to fighting the common enemy. The government’s decision to award the vote to women over 30 — the rest would have to wait another 10 years — was widely regarded as a reward for women’s war work.
Yet in many ways it was a hollow victory, as Patricia Fara’s book makes plain. For four years female doctors and scientists dedicated themselves to saving wounded soldiers, leading medical research, developing military technology and designing weapons — taking the places of men who had gone to war — and they revelled in the opportunity.
But after the war they were expected meekly to return to their second-rate, lower-paid jobs or simply to devote themselves to domestic chores. Women had helped win the war, many believed, but lost the battle for equality.
Grainy images of women driving ambulances and working in munitions factories in the First World War have become familiar to us all. Yet the remarkable story of the extraordinary women who took over men’s jobs in hospitals, laboratories and government research facilities only to be forced to relinquish them once men returned from the front is largely unknown.
Patricia Fara’s important book, the first of many being published to commemorate the centenary of women receiving the vote, is written as a paean to these forgotten pioneers. Although many of their individual stories remain sketchy, the details of their lives and contributions lost or overlooked, their collective history provides a compelling tale.
Access to education was the key that unlocked potential for many. Previously, scientifically-minded women such as astronomer Caroline Herschel and physicist Hertha Ayrton had propped up the work of brothers or husbands without significant recognition for themselves.
The girls’ private schools that flourished from the mid-19th century enabled pupils to study sciences for the first time, while the founding of women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge opened the doors to further studies in maths, medicine and science.
Pursuing these subjects towards potential careers, however, demanded astonishing stamina and pluck. As well as defying opposition from parents, these pioneers had to battle legal and institutional obstacles and popular prejudice. Some of the first female medical students were pelted with mud and offal by their male fellows. Philippa Fawcett, daughter of suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, came top in maths at Cambridge but the title of Senior Wrangler went to the best male student; she was styled simply “above Senior Wrangler”.
Yet while education opened the doors, it was the suffrage movement that trained these hardy women to organise, agitate and fight for the right to work on equal terms. Before the war, most medical schools barred women and, although by 1914 there were around 1,000 female doctors, they were almost exclusively confined to treating women and children in hospitals they ran themselves.
Likewise, women in scientific fields mainly worked in all-female research units and were paid less. A 1913 civil service report explained that men commanded higher salaries simply because they were “worth more”, being stronger, harder working and possessing sounder judgment.
Men’s jobs
War changed everything. Just as women took over men’s jobs ploughing fields and driving taxis, so female doctors and scientists replaced men in hospitals, laboratories and government departments. Emptied of young men who had signed up, medical schools and university science departments were suddenly desperate for female students.
Catapulted into posts previously confined to men, female scientists now turned their talents to the war effort. Women at Sheffield University developed anaesthetics for the wounded, while at the University of Wales they worked on new drugs and explosives. At Imperial College London, chemist Martha Whiteley headed a mainly female team testing hand grenades and poisonous gases, including the first sample of mustard gas, in experimental trenches. In the first weeks of war, medical women who offered their services to the War Office were brusquely told to “go home and sit still” but by 1915 they were in high demand.
When Florence Stoney, a pioneer in the new field of radiology, offered her mobile X-ray unit to the British army, she was smartly rebuffed so she took her equipment and skills to Serbia instead; yet a year later she was appointed head of radiology at Fulham Military Hospital.
Physician Flora Murray and surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson, both active suffragettes, initially set up a women-run hospital for the wounded in Paris but in early 1915 they were invited by the War Office to run a military hospital in the heart of London. Staffed entirely by women, it treated more than 26,000 wounded.
After the war, most medical schools shut their doors to female students again and women were turfed out of posts in hospitals, laboratories and universities to make way for men returning from the front. In 1917 the Daily Mail admitted that women had proved “we could not carry on the war without them”. But two years later a Ministry of Labour pamphlet called on women to “help renew the homes of England” by cooking, cleaning and rearing babies.
Some medical and scientific women did go on to forge distinguished careers but most had to take low-paid, second-class jobs — which they often had to give up when they married — or retire. The wonder is that they didn’t pick up their stones to smash government windows again.
Although Fara spends rather too long setting the scene before bringing her story to life through the voices of these formidable trailblazers, her book charts a significant chapter in lost feminist history.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
