D 651 Nurse with baby in respirator

Here are some suggestions for activities related to this theme. We have provided a range from you to choose from, and adapt to suit the age and needs of your pupils.

1. First World War: What work did women do?

Look through all the pictures in the image gallery and any more you can find in books.

Make a list of all the different jobs you can find.

• Do you think women in those days usually did these jobs?
  

Ask the class to fill in a table like the one below, or offer up the photos to the whole class and ask them to vote on whether they think that the job shown was one that women usually did, before the war.

Photos to use:

• Building rubber tyres
  
• Gravediggers
  
• Chimney sweep
  
• Nurses
  
• Cleaning railway carriages
  
• Glass workers
  
• Brewery workers
  
• Women carrying coal
  
• Plumber
  
• Timber worker (Women's Land Army)
  
• Shell filling
  
• Howitzer factory
  
• Shipbuilding
  
• Caustic soda workers
  

Look at all the jobs you have ticked.

• What kind of jobs are these?
  
• Would you as a modern person say these were 'women's work'?

Look at all the jobs you have marked with an X (no).

• Do you as a modern person think these are men's jobs?
• Why were women doing these jobs during the First World War?
• What had these new workers been doing before they began war work?
• Who would suffer because they had gone into war work?

Group your pupils in pairs. Encourage them to imagine that they had started working life as a domestic servant and then became a munition worker as part of the war effort.

• How would their working conditions have changed?

Starting points for discussion could be: Pay, Working Conditions, Social aspects…

Ask the pupils to list 3 advantages and disadvantages of their new job and three advantages and disadvantages of their previous occupation.

• What happened at the end of the war? Which of these jobs continued to be done by women? Why?
• Using Powerpoint, and these and other images, create a presentation about what sort of work women did during the First World War and how they felt about it
• Role-play: using one of the pictures, freeze frame drama or hot seat question session
  

These activities could be repeated for the Second World War using these photos.

• Milk lady
  
• Welder
  
• Airplane factory worker (stores)
  
• Making barrage balloons
  
• Cooks
  
• Washerwomen
  
• Making fishing nets & glass floats
  
• Munitions factory workers (2 pictures)
  
• Nurses
  
• Land Army - milking cows
  

These and other activities are available to download as pdfs in the Classroom Resources section.