A Victory Job

In June 1940, two women presented themselves for enlistment at a recruiting centre in Adelaide. They were immediately rejected with the closing line of one of Milton’s sonnets: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The idea of women serving in Australia’s military forces was controversial right from the early days of the Second World War. In contrast, women in Britain had been mobilised since 1938, taking up roles in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the Women’s Royal Navy Service and the Women’s Land Army. Though women were making a valuable contribution to the war effort abroad, the notion was not easily accepted in Australia. One of the women rejected for service told the Barrier Miner: “There are innumerable well trained women who are eager to take over the work of hundreds of young men who are filling positions in both the fighting forces to be sent overseas and in the militia … Women, hundreds of them with years of training and experience, capable to fill most of these positions, are just passed over at the very time when they could do some good. The government should give the women of Australia an opportunity to take an active part in helping to avert catastrophe from their country.”

Despite their enthusiasm, it would be more than a year before Australian women were permitted to serve their country in uniform. Large sectors of society felt that a woman’s place was in the home, while others feared that inclusion in military life would compromise a woman’s femininity as well as the natural order of life. As the war raged on and the debates about women’s service continued, women served in voluntary organisations including the Women’s Air Training Corps (WATC), Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps (WESC) and the Women’s Australian National Service (WANS). They filled employment shortages created by the war and undertook training for air raid drills, first aid, telegraphy, military drills, mechanics, clerical work, transport and more. In doing so, they demonstrated that women were capable of filling roles normally undertaken by men.

"Replace them with women"

By 1941, Australia’s armed forces were facing serious manpower shortages as more and more recruits were required for front-line roles. The armed forces turned to the women of Australia to fill these shortages, as had been successfully done in Britain. By the end of 1941, women in uniform were everywhere, and each branch of Australia’s armed forces had its own women’s auxiliary.

The Royal Australian Air Force was the first to adopt the enlistment of women into the service to fill manpower shortages in administrative and clerical roles. Sir Charles Burnett, a senior commander in the RAAF, commented to the War Cabinet in 1941: “There are a large number in the air force of able bodied men who might be replaced by others. Every man that we give up in that way can go into the fighting service … We have a surplus of technical personnel awaiting aircraft duties and they are being employed as waiters and mess stewards while they actually have technical ability. It seems extraordinary that we should take in people who are physically fit who could go into the army or navy if we could replace them with women.” To remedy this, the Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force (WAAAF) was formed in February 1941.

The Navy soon followed suit, with the formation of the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service in April 1941. Many of the initial WRANS recruits had trained under Violet McKenzie, who had pioneered technical training for women before advocating for their inclusion in Australia’s armed forces. With the training they had received, a small number of women began entering naval service, filling roles initially in intelligence, telegraphy and Morse code, before branching out into other roles as clerks, drivers, sick berth attendants and more. The Army was the last of the services to allow the enlistment of women, starting in August of 1941. It quickly garnered the support of thousands of female recruits, who sought to fill any roles as typists, cipher clerks, drivers, signallers and searchlight operators.

"Whether we like it or not"

Despite rising to every challenge, women still faced opposition from some areas within the military, with the War Cabinet instigating an inquiry into the future of women’s military roles in November 1941. During this enquiry, enlistment for women’s services was suspended. Factors influencing the inquiry included fears that the use of women’s auxiliaries would break down the pay standards of men; a belief that expenditure in providing training and accommodation for female recruits was extravagant; and demands on limited resources for uniforms and materials needed for those fighting at the front. A conference was held to discuss the future of women’s auxiliaries in December 1941, attended by the ministers for defence and munitions as well as the heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The minister for the army, Mr Forde, argued: “Over a year ago I was opposed to the recruitment of women to the various services but things have changed considerably since then. The demands of the services have greatly increased and I can see now that we have run into a very acute stage, if we are to achieve victory, we will have to employ women the same as has been done in England if this war is going to last very long.”

“If in this time of national stress,” one woman told The Dawn newspaper, “women wish to render service to their country, the facility and opportunity should be provided for them to do so, especially is this so at the present time, when the recruiting question is a problem.” The Brisbane Courier-Mail argued for faster inclusion of women in the services, noting “the reasons stated on behalf of the federal government for its suspension of the recruiting of women for auxiliary defence services are not convincing.” In the end, the increasing pressure of the ongoing war meant that women’s services were allowed to continue. Forde was adamant: “Whether we like it or not, we will have to utilise women.” However, it was made very clear from the outset that women would be included for the duration of the war only, with men to replace them as soon as the emergency was over. Not only this, but it was agreed that women in the auxiliary would only be paid two-thirds of the rate of pay given to men in the same class of work. Pay equality for the sexes, which had been argued by trade unions, was not achieved; but the rate of pay for women in the auxiliaries was still higher than they might have expected in civilian occupations. 

Justly proud

Over the following four years, more than 53,000 women served in roles in the AWAS, WRANS and WAAAF while 3,000 more had served in the Australian Women’s Land Army. On 15 August 1945, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the Second World War. Hostilities in Europe had ceased only a few months earlier, but the world was irrevocably changed by six years of devastating conflict. With the end of the war came the beginning of demobilisation, as those who had served abroad and on Australia’s shores made their return to civilian life. The thousands of women who had served in uniform played no small role in Allied victory, and had proven their worth as a sex outside the traditional roles of motherhood and homemaking. Though they had made a significant contribution to the war effort, the Australian response to the formation of women’s services was much less than that of other countries, including Britain, where some 640,000 women had served in uniform.

The influx of men returning from the front after the war raised an important question – what future did women have in the military? Some branches of the military were keen to retain women in civilian, administrative positions after the war, but large sectors of Australian society were keen for things to return to the way they had been before 1941. A Gallup poll in 1945 recorded that eight out of ten people agreed that men should have first preference for jobs in the post-war period. Others felt more strongly about women’s roles, as one Rockhampton man expressed in the Morning Bulletin:

It was during the war that women were asked to go into the factories, become bus conductresses, mechanics and otherwise assist in industry while men were away in the services. And right nobly did they rise to the great occasion … After the war, the emergency became an opportunity. Women retained their place in industry as a privilege and now it is claimed as a dogmatic right. The war work by women should not be used as a handle to usurp man’s lawful place, by biological and domestic necessity, of being the support of his wife and children. Every women who is doing a job that a man should be doing, irrespective of whether that woman can do the work or not, is selfishly upholding an unnatural anomaly. The idea of women in the home being slaves is surely a superstition or an unfortunate type of mental outlook. The home is not a prison.

Certainly, many were fearful of the impact that women could have on a man’s ability to find work on his return from the front. With women receiving lower rates of pay, it was feared that employers would choose to hire women as cheap labour, rather than returning men to their pre-war careers, if women were not forced to step down. As well as this, some also feared a falling birth rate, concerned that women might choose employment and wages over marriage and motherhood.

Nonetheless, some women were not looking to give up the opportunities and freedoms they had won during the war. “Women are free as never before,” claimed one woman writing to the Western Mail. “Women have worked too hard in this war to be pushed back into obscurity afterwards. But I don’t think these plums will drop into our laps without any effort on our part … we shall have to work and plan and fight for them. We shall be up against the tremendous problem of prejudice.”

Despite their achievements and the tenacity shown by Australian women during the war years, all three auxiliaries were disbanded almost immediately after the war. Little thought was given to a continuing role for women, who were expected to return to the domestic sphere, effective immediately. One ex-servicewoman told the Adelaide Mail: “I don’t know what I’m going to do later. I used to help about the house and farm before the war, so I suppose I’ll be doing that again.” The former director of the WRANS, First Officer Margaret Curtis-Otter recalled: “We were very sorry. All the services were sorry, because the women had proved that they were very useful indeed in so many ways, and the services themselves I think wanted to keep the women. But the government of the day wouldn’t agree to it all so we had to be disbanded.” In June 1947, Melbourne’s The Age recorded the final discharges of women from the AWAS and WAAAF, declaring “so will end a chapter in the history of women’s service to this country of which everyone is justly proud.”

"Makes you think"

This chapter did not end, however, and many women did not return to the home sphere as some hoped. These women had been changed by their wartime experiences and had shown what they could do. Many remained in the civilian workforce in the following years. After January 1946, the number of women in civilian employment increased gradually, and by 1947 had almost regained the levels seen during the war. Post-war, female employment surpassed the wartime peak, as women continued to seek the opportunities they had proven themselves so capable of fulfilling. In the years after 1945, women continued to work in roles outside the spheres of “traditional women’s work” and followed career paths which would not have been open to them in 1941. It was clear that the impacts of women’s work during the war would have a lasting effect into the post-war years and beyond.

In December 1951 women returned to the military sphere when the Federal Cabinet approved the enlistment of 4,000 women into the Citizens Military Forces (CMF). The Minister for the Army told the Daily Examiner: “Extension of the women’s army services to the CMF for the first time is a recognition that women no longer were mere auxiliaries, but an essential part of any army in peace or war.” Most notably, these women were recruited as part of the CMF, not simply in addition to it, and were once more able to step outside traditional female roles, working as searchlight operators, signallers, armourers and more. It took twelve months, however, for women to receive the same pay, service conditions and training obligations as men in the CMF.

Women who served during the Second World War were an important part of the development of women’s rights in Australia. Some forty years later, women were integrated into Australia’s Defence Force in their own right, not as part of a female auxiliary. Today, women make up just under 20 per cent of the Australian Defence Force, and continue to serve in diverse roles in Australia and overseas as pilots, infantry, mechanics, medics and more. In 1947, Smith’s Weekly pondered the changes to Australian society: “So there you have a picture of modern industrial society: women crowding into engineer’s working overalls, men sitting down to sewing machines and spinning jennies which have been abandoned by their female tenders. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” One wonders what they would think now.