During the First World War (1914 to 18), as governments sought to field the largest armies possible and so conscripted millions of men to the fighting fronts, the role of women in society was greatly expanded. Women worked as nurses and medical staff, performed support duties in the armed services, and replaced men in factories and public services. The new freedoms were mostly curbed again after the war, but one lasting development was women gaining, for the first time, the right to vote in several countries, notably in Russia, Germany, the United States, and Great Britain.

During WWI, Russia was the exception in permitting women to join the armed forces in fighting capacity. Maria 'Yashka' Bochkareva (1889 to 1920) famously petitioned the tsar in order to be allowed to do so. "Bochkareva was a brilliant success…She was four times wounded and three times decorated…She was captured and escaped; promoted corporal and then sergeant" (Shukman, 308). When the Provisional Government took power following the tsar's abdication in March 1917, Bochkareva was tasked with forming the first Women's Death Battalion. The main idea was that the well-drilled and disciplined 300 women of this battalion (who all shaved their heads) would shame male soldiers into being more disciplined themselves and inspire more men to join the armed forces. Bochkareva's battalion inflicted a serious defeat on a German army on the South-West Front in July, a victory which included the capture of 2,000 prisoners. Several other women's battalions were created in the summer of 1917, including a naval detachment.

In Britain, women who wanted to help directly on the fighting fronts could not join the armed services as combatants, but the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), later renamed the Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps (QMAAC), was formed at the end of 1916. The WAAC operated on the home front and sent women to France from 1917, members performing such duties as catering and waitressing for male soldiers. The next year, the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was established, and in 1918, the Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) was formed. These three women's organisations had over 100,000 members by 1918, but women did not bear arms in them; rather, they provided support, such as clerical work, driving vehicles, catering, and maintenance work, 'freeing' men to join the fighting ranks.

More commonly, women on all sides worked as paid and fully trained nurses or volunteer medical staff in the military hospitals behind, but often still very close to, the front lines. Over 17,000 British nurses served in field hospitals on the Western Front. Daisy Spickett was one such nurse, and here she explains why she joined the medical services:

I always had in mind that I wanted to nurse and as soon as I heard of any talk of forming Red Cross Hospitals I began to make enquiries. I heard also that there was a likelihood of the War Office wanting volunteers for military hospitals, and that was what I decided I wanted. It seemed to me the only hope of getting right into the middle of everything, getting abroad and doing whatever was going, and the idea of the Army attracted me – being in the Army. But it seemed to me the thing I wanted more than anything else and that was how I put my name down for military hospitals and got my posting in July 1915.

(Imperial War Museums)

Women in the medical services not only cared for the sick and wounded but also performed many other necessary tasks, such as driving ambulances, serving as vehicle mechanics, and working in clerical administration.

As male workers were conscripted into armies, women in Britain, France, the United States, and Germany, amongst others, were recruited to replace them in the factories. Societal norms were changed as jobs previously considered only suitable for men suddenly saw women fill these roles. Women did work in factories before the war, but the expectation that such workers would leave their posts when they got married and the idea that women's work was somehow less valuable and so was paid less than men began to be challenged during WWI, at least for working-class women. Challenged is not the same as changed, however, as most male employers continued to stubbornly regard women as temporary workers, and their very presence in the workforce was usually seen as a necessity of war.

Most people thought that when peace finally came, working women would surely return to their traditional areas of work and the family home. Nevertheless, subtle cultural changes were underway which, if not strong enough to bring about permanent change in the immediate post-war world, did lay the groundwork for the advancement of women's opportunities in later decades. For example, women in British factories were encouraged to do sports for their own health and to ensure they remained efficient workers. Consequently, women's football teams were formed with leagues set up. Matches were often very well attended by spectators. In short, it was no longer possible for men, and male-dominated trade unions in particular, to convincingly argue that women could not perform certain jobs and roles when they had clearly done so with great success for many years during the war.

There is no doubt that women helped win the war, or in the case of the losers, prolong it. Ammunition factories in all participant countries had an insatiable demand for workers, and these positions usually paid higher wages than other industries. In France, 75,000 women were working in ammunition factories in 1915, and by 1918, one-third of munitions workers were women. In Britain in 1916, 520,000 women were working in the metal and engineering industries, more than double the 1914 figure. By 1918, Britain's workforce included over 7.3 million women, and 90% of ammunition workers were women. In Russia in 1917, women made up around 43% of the industrial workforce. Here, most new jobs for women were blue-collar ones or in agriculture, and there was only a small increase in women in white-collar professions.

In Germany, women were encouraged to work in factories from an early stage during the war. The drive to move women into the workforce was led by Dr. Gertrude Bäumer (1873 to 1974), a longtime campaigner for greater rights and opportunities for women. The number of women working in the German chemical industry rose from 26,749 in 1913 to 208,877 in 1918. There were similar rises in the machine and armament industries.

The new opportunities were not without their risks. Factory work was often dangerous. Not only were machines dangerous to use, but breakdowns could cause injuries as pieces of machinery flew off. Accidents all too frequently happened because of weariness, as workers, including women, often had to endure long 12-hour shifts. Then there was the exposure to toxic materials, particularly in the manufacturing processes of ammunition and weapons. Caroline Rennles worked in a TNT factory in Kent, England, and she describes the effects of toxic materials on the appearance of workers:

Well of course we all had bright yellow faces, you see, 'cos we had no gas masks in those times…And all our faces were bright yellow – they used to call us canaries…'Course we, all our clothes like, we couldn't wear like good clothes because the powder used to seep into your clothes, know what I mean?

(Imperial War Museums)

Another worker, Laura Verity, describes the conditions in the factory she worked in:

Well I'd got this bad throat, you see, and the doctor, I don't know what it was, he said it was some kind of poisoning…And then, you see, they used a lot of asbestos at Bray's. When I think now, my sister was onto me she said it's a wonder you and me's living that all that asbestos, 'cos all these nozzles and things were made of asbestos, you know, and it used to lay on the floors and you could see your footprints in it. Used to make you wonder, you see, and we were working with it.

(Imperial War Museums)

Conditions for factory workers in Western Europe were never ideal, but they were even worse in Russia. Women's wages were very low compared to men, and housing conditions were extremely poor, often no better than primitive barracks. Those who campaigned for better rights for women were often imprisoned or exiled. Italy had similarly poor working conditions, and the authorities there, as in some other countries, permitted the use of child labour in key industries.

The general shortage of men on the home fronts led to new job opportunities for women outside of manufacturing, too, such as in agriculture and public services like ambulances and, in Britain, the police force. Women in the police began as members of the Women's Patrols, created to make sure women factory workers, both at work and in the hostels they often stayed in, behaved themselves. The role of women police officers then evolved to include patrols of public places such as parks and railway stations. Transport was a sector that saw many women find work. Women became bus drivers, bus conductors, ticket collectors, porters, and cleaners. In Britain, the number of women working on the railways rose from 9,000 to 50,000 through the course of the war; in the transport sector as a whole, the number of women workers rose from 18,000 to 117,000.

Another important women's organisation in Britain was the Women's Volunteer Reserve, founded in 1914 (as the Women's Emergency Corps). Women volunteers adopted military-style ranks and uniforms and helped operate public canteens, assisted in hospital services, and organised activities that raised funds for charities and the war effort. Some corps of the reserve also performed drills, went on marches, and trained to fire rifles. Initially, the reserve largely attracted middle- and upper-class women, but its membership soon extended to all classes of women.

The Women's Land Army (WLA) was created in Britain in 1917. This organisation sought to fill the gap in agricultural workers left by men joining the armed services. Members of the WLA were affectionately known as ‘Land Girls'. By 1918, 228,000 women were working in agriculture in Britain. In stark contrast to the voluntary participation in the WLA, in those parts of France occupied by German forces, unemployed French women and girls were forcibly relocated to work in agriculture. The rounding up of women in Lille in April 1916 became a notorious example of this use of forced labour. In other countries, where agriculture was less mechanised and where women had always worked on the land, conscription had much less of an impact.

White-collar jobs, such as in the administrative departments of companies, banks, and local government, were taken up by more and more women. There were still persistent barriers to women, such as in the male-dominated trades that required long periods of formal apprenticeship. Middle-class women who married were still expected to prioritise the family over working life. Although many more women became teachers in lower and middle education, universities in Britain still prohibited women from becoming lecturers in higher education. Finally, the vast majority of working women outside the larger towns, as was the case before the war, were limited to finding employment in domestic service. Here, too, there was change, though, as women in larger urban areas left service for better-paid jobs in industries and the public services when they could.

Across Europe, women workers were now suddenly visible everywhere, whether cleaning windows, driving delivery vans, driving trams, sweeping roads, or clipping bus tickets. In Russia, women sometimes had more possibilities than in Western Europe. For example, a Russian woman could drive a train, but this was not permitted in other countries. Even in the United States, where the home front was much less affected by the war compared to Europe, women began to work in factories, leaving their traditional roles in domestic service, which, in turn, led to opportunities for Black women who had previously only worked on the land to take their places.

Then there were the women who did irregular, often unpaid or paid-very-little work, but which was, nevertheless, essential to the continued functioning of society. Women supplemented their incomes by taking in washing, providing board to lodgers, sewing, cleaning, or looking after workers' children. Women workers were rarely given help from the state regarding childcare. British women who worked in ammunition factories did have access to 100 new childcare day centres, but other workers had to use family or friends to look after any children they had while they went to work. Male business owners proved remarkably reluctant to invest in the facilities a female workforce required, and there was little consideration that women workers were also expected to queue for food for their families, besides working long shifts.

The move from domestic service and the agricultural sector to industrial and white-collar jobs is one of the main characteristics of the female workforces in various countries during the war, since, contrary to popular myth, "there was no enormous influx of non-working women into men's jobs" (Strachan, 154). Rather, the vast majority of working women had already been working. Britain, for example, had nearly 5 million working women before the war started and 6 million at the end. Most working women, then, had not joined the labour market but moved from one sector to another. This movement was either encouraged by governments who needed to staff vital industries or was a personal choice in order to find less physically demanding work, safer work, better pay, or simply to find a job that was more interesting. Many women were undoubtedly motivated, too, by the desire to ‘do their bit' for the war effort and ensure essential industries and services continued while men fought at the front.

Rarely did women receive better wages than men in practice, despite doing the same job. Nevertheless, wages were better in factories than in domestic service, and so many women's spending power increased dramatically, and with it, their freedom to act as they wished, such as wearing the clothes they preferred or eating out without male company. There was a price to pay for this freedom, one only made possible because of the shortage of men and the expansion of certain industries. Over 4 million women lost husbands during the conflict, while millions more lost fathers, brothers, and sons.

With freedoms there also came restrictions. In Britain and France, wives of soldiers at the front received a separation allowance, but this could be stopped if the authorities discovered the wife had been unfaithful to her husband or had neglected her duty as a mother. In France, where the state was obsessed with regenerating the population, contraceptives were banned. Finally, some of the freedoms gained during the war were quickly lost after it; women were barred from certain types of work to ensure returning male soldiers could find employment. Even in those professions that remained open to women, like teaching and medicine, there was an expectation that such positions could not be held by married women, since rearing a family was deemed more important.

For too many women, then, after the war ended, there was a feeling of resentment that, despite being constantly told their work was essential for the war effort, they were now instructed to go home and have children. French factories even had signs to that effect, encouraging women not already dismissed to voluntarily leave their posts and so allow returning soldiers to regain their former jobs. This sentiment of resentment was memorably captured by one woman writing to the French paper La Vague:

My husband has been in the army for the last six years. I have worked like a slave at Citroën during the war. I sweated blood there, losing my youth and my health. In January I was fired, and since then I have been poverty-stricken.

(Strachan, 161).

Deep-rooted and male-dominated cultural attitudes proved hard to shift. As an example, the women's football leagues in Britain were now regarded as too popular a challenge to male football, and so they were banned after the war. Working women often faced abuse from men in the street, the workplace, and the press, for not giving up their jobs to men. It seemed that society had bent its rules for women during the war, but in peacetime, those rules were to be thoroughly straightened again by the men who had created them.

A more positive consequence of women's, albeit temporarily, expanded role during the war was the growing movement to give women the right to vote. In Russia, women over 20 years of age won the right to vote in 1917. In Britain, women over the age of 30 were awarded the right to vote in February 1918 (male voters had only to be 21 or over). In Germany, women were given the right to vote in November 1918, after the armistice. In the United States, women gained the same rights as men to vote in 1920. In France, the lower house of parliament passed a law to give women the vote, but this was rejected by the Senate, the upper house. French women would have to wait for another war until they were given the right to vote in 1944.