Recruited Men, Breadwinning Women, and the `Re-gendering' of Postwar Societies

• In Event: Gendered Labor and War

Abstract

Important scholarship emphasizes the deservingness of veterans in explaining the relationship between war and expansion of the welfare state. Deviating from this, I argue that fiscally constrained governments seek to delegate the economic costs of demobilization onto working women, who, in wartime, step into traditionally male jobs. After the war, states can facilitate economic reintegration of (male) veterans by reallocating women's wartime jobs to returning men. I investigate this claim in the context of post-WWI Great Britain, with a focus on the Factory Act, an important case of sex-specific protective labor regulation. During WWI, Individual employers had to request approval from the Home Office to employ women in men's jobs covered by the Factory Act, a practice which persisted after the war. I create a novel dataset, consisting of Home Office responses to employer requests. Using casualty rate as a proxy for return of male veterans, I find that after the war, requests made by firms operating in regions and industries where more men returned were more likely to be rejected by the Home Office. As a result, women were pushed out of the labor force. This implies that the central government was less likely to let women maintain 'men's jobs' where more veterans returned. This paper contributes to the war and welfare literature by emphasizing the role of state in procuring veteran welfare by reversing women's wartime economic gains.

Author

• Jeongmin Park, Princeton University