![]() Front-line fighting was, and essentially remains, a masculine prerogative and the role and status of individuals possessed of that prerogative was, and is, structured and indicated in complex codes of rank, decorations and uniforms that are awarded to the bearer after various rites of passage. The question of acceptance here was less to do with competence-women were, after all, working in almost all the professions by the time that they were allowed to become army auxiliaries in 1917-than with the implications of a female presence in an eminently masculine context. The most difficult area for women to enter, and the most significant for critics of women’s work, was the army. ![]() Just as the presence of women on the labour market was perceived by the suffragists to possess a great symbolic value that could be turned to the advantage of the struggle for votes for women, so their presence in certain professions was perceived by others as a symbol of the destruction of traditional values and the harbinger of society’s decline and inevitable collapse. Certain sectors resisted longer and more fervently than others. They therefore attract the observer’s attention but the important thing is the line.ġ The Great War saw the massive arrival of women of every social class into virtually all the areas of the British economy. Rites of passage mark the crossing of a line that defines a fundamental division in the social order.
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