To this day any mention of the First World War will most likely conjure up images of
trenches, devastation and destruction, violence and death on an unprecedented scale.1
Although the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men can nor should ever be side lined,
until relatively recently history had omitted another group of crucial and necessary
participants of the conflict; women. The Great War was the first mass global conflict of the
industrialised age, allowing a demonstration of the strength, resilience and killing power of
modern states. It brought about a new type of warfare, a phenomenon we understand today as
‘total war’.2 This involved the organisation of society and the economy to align with the war
effort. It became apparent that if the armed forces were to recruit the amount of men required
to enter the theatre of war, there would undoubtedly be gaps left in the labour force that
would urgently need to be filled. Consequently, the War Office devised a ‘substitute’ system,
whereby women could step into men’s civilian jobs so that they could be released to enlist in
the armed services. This did result in more opportunities for women, however this thesis will
not read simply as a recuperative history of women’s war work. Although it will explore the
occupations available to women, it has a broader intellectual aim, namely to use case studies
and archival research to think through the methods and theories of the writing of feminist,
gender and women’s histories.