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This article examines the relationship between women munitions workers, the 'munitionettes,' in WWI-era Glasgow and Paris and the radical anti-government labor unions. These two cities were the centers of industrial production in Britain and France during the war, and each contained radical, male-dominated labor unions that frequently challenged state authority. In hindsight, the munitionettes were ideal candidates for these radical unions, as they were underpaid and increasingly militant. Despite this, these unions undermined the munitionettes' work and opposed their movements for better wages and working conditions. This article explores how male-dominated WWI-era labor radicalism failed to incorporate women in the workplace due to gendered notions of work, patriotism and identity. It demonstrates how women developed their own working-class identity, militancy and unions, as they became the most effective strikers during WWI, despite their rejection by the radical labor unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that cinema was an important social space for young, female munitions workers in Britain during the First World War. Unlike the public house, the cinema erected no social barriers to a female presence. Additionally, the cinema trade was promoting films to a youthful audience which was attracted to movies that emphasised active female roles such as those in the serial queen melodramas. In munitions areas such as Gretna and Carlisle in the Borders young female workers flocked to the cinema while attendances declined in some non-munitions areas. State-run cinemas in the Gretna area also encouraged their presence, but incurred the anger of the film trade by attempting to divert workers away from commercial outlets, with limited success, however. The wartime public visibility of young female workers in social spaces such as the cinema increased pre-war concerns about the content of film, particularly when dealing with themes of social relationships and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]