Women at War
In a people's war, women are everywhere in the story — a collection of dispatches on the factories, the services and the home front.
This collection gathers together our dispatches on the women's war: the machinists and welders of the munitions factories, the drivers and plotters and wireless operators of the services, and the women who kept households running on rations that shrank year by year.
The thread that runs through all of them is the sheer scale of the change. Work that had been closed to women for generations was opened in months, not out of principle but out of arithmetic: the war simply could not be fought without them.
Begin with our pieces on the home front — the queues, the coupons and the endless improvisation of the wartime kitchen — and follow the collection through the factories to the anti-aircraft batteries, where women tracked the raiders that men then fired upon, a division of labour that satisfied the regulations and fooled nobody.