On Saturday July 8th the long awaited memorial honouring the 7 million women who made such an important contribution to the second world war will be unveiled in Whitehall.
Conscription for women began in 1941 and by 1943 nine out of 10 single women aged between 20 and 30 were working in factories, on the land or in the armed forces. Next Friday Woman’s Hour will celebrate those women with a special programme looking at the impact that World War II had on women’s lives. Over the coming week we’ll be looking back with the help of the Woman’s Hour archive, hearing from some of the women who played their part in the war effort.
In Yorkshire two groups of women were taught to be welders by Violet Pearson the daughter of one of the big factory owners in the area. She was apparently a dynamic character and a number of her trainees wrote to her after they’d finished.
The letters ended up in the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex which is where Dr Margaretta Jolly found them. In her book ‘Dear Laughing Motorbike’ she used these accounts and interviewed some of the surviving members of the group to create a vivid picture of these women’s lives.
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