The presentation is split into two parts. The first part outlines Historic England’s ‘Women in Shipbuilding’ project (WiS) and the role I played in scoping potential research outputs relating to women in shipbuilding, ship-repairing, and marine engineering trades during the First World War.

Although women’s First World War experiences in munition factories are comparatively well told, there remains a lack of historical attention to the role of women in shipyards. In January 1919, the shipbuilding labour force totalled 266,000 of the insured workforce. Of this total, only 8,800 were women — 3 percent of the total shipbuilding labour force. The gap in the historiography and lack of understanding of women’s experience in shipbuilding, has prompted those involved in the project to think critically about the different experiences of women’s war work, processes of dilution, as well as the legacies of women’s entry into shipyards.

The second part of the presentation is based on a chapter of my PhD research, which exposed how women trade unionists negotiated gendered boundaries in the labour movement immediately after the war with the passage of the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act (August 1919). Particular attention will be paid to women involved in North East branches of the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW).

Drawing on testimonies of those involved in the NFWW sheds light on women’s protest cycles and repertoires of action during a transition from a wartime to peacetime economy. These protests concentrated on experiences of women’s expulsion from heavy industry, subsequent unemployment, “right to work” campaigns, as well as the Labour Exchanges coercion for women to accept vacancies in traditional ‘unskilled’ prewar occupations.

Finally, the presentation will discuss the impact these protests had in challenging common tropes associated with women’s labour during this period. In the wake of the Representation of the People Act (1918) — which transformed citizenship from a gender and class perspective — women’s unemployment brought to the fore debates about the contradiction between the duty and ‘war service’ of subjects versus the democratic rights of citizenship. The North East NFWW maintained that participation was indispensable to full citizenship within civil society and that the British Coalition Government had a moral obligation to accommodate its citizens.

Dr. Joe Redmayne is a British social and labour historian. His research deals with British social history in the twentieth century, with a focus on transnationalism, labour movements, and the contentious politics of class. Joe completed his PhD at Newcastle University in March 2024. He is currently a Research Associate in Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit & Collective, where he is working on the Women in Shipbuilding partnership project with Historic England (https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/oral-history/2023/12/13/joe-redmayne-joins-newcastle-universitys-oral-history-unit-and-collective-for-historic-englands-women-in-shipbuilding-project/).