South Yorkshire Times, October 2nd 1943
Women at War
Mr. Bevin is credited as the initiator of the vast meeting of British women held in the Albert Hall, London, on Tuesday, when the leading ministers of the Crown put the nation’s thanks for an invaluable contribution into words. But whoever conceived the idea for the gathering, it was a nice gesture and a timely one.
The time is not opportune for us to be told exactly what we owe to the army of women workers who helped to revitalise industry after the first shock of Dunkirk. To tell that story in its entirety would be to give away too much valuable information to the enemy. Mr. Churchill did, however, mention that his 1939 appeal for a million women to undertake an active part in the war effort had been answered more than threefold, a magnificent response.
When the history of these troublous, yet in an ultimate sense glorious, times comes to be written, the fashion in which the British Nation roused and rallied itself cannot but enthral posterity. No nation in recorded history has ever given its enemies such a long start and survived to plan for victory.
In this astounding resurgence the women have played a part unequalled in any other country, save perhaps in Russia. After Dunkirk the preeminent necessity was to replenish our stock of weapons, never adequate to the demands of modern war, and sorely depleted by this disaster.
That we were able to achieve such a rapid expansion in production was due in no small measure to the part played by the women. They took on all kinds of tasks in and out of uniform. In the Forces, in factory and on farm they played, and are still playing, a truly manly role, making possible the complicated readjustments necessitated by the impact of total war on a state whose economy was only geared for the quiet pace of peace.
Now that we are at last “full out,” as the Prime Minister put it, and setting the “pace that kills,” not much more can be asked of the women, or of the nation as a whole. What is imperative, and what all the speakers at Tuesday’s great meeting emphasised, is that there shall be no slowing down, no loss of this momentum which has been gained at the cost of so much sweat and tears. The six thousand women delegates took back to their millions of comrades, voluntary as well as paid workers, the call to staunchness and endurance in the stressful days ahead. It was a call made confidently upon them by those of the highest responsibility in the State.
The response is sure. Britain has shown the world what womanhood can do, and, in discharging the task they have so well begun British women will endure whatever rigours are necessary to ensure the resounding defeat of totalitarian tyranny.