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‘many sisters to many brothers’ 

the same as traditional female domestic tasks.’^26 Whilethese new identities were
indubitably marked by class in terms of their availability, they all provided women
with opportunities rarely available before the war.
These new employment opportunities—and, more tacitly, the social freedoms
contained therein—are the subject of several poems, largely written by middle-class
women, some endorsing and others opposing these freedoms. For Madeline Ida
Bedford, the title of her poem ‘Munition Wages’ gives some indication of how the
new economic freedoms of the largely working-class female munition workers were
perceived:

Earning high wages? Yus,

Five quid a week,

A woman, too, mind you,

I calls it dim sweet.

Ye’are asking some questions—

But bless yer, here goes:

Ispendsthewholeracket

On good times and clothes.^27

While the speaker goes on to say that part of this spending spree is because
the munitions worker might find herself ‘Tomorrow—perhaps dead’, the tone
of the poem is condemnatory. Tensions surrounding duty and responsibility are
often undercurrents of the poems about work. Mary Gabrielle Collins’s ‘Women
at Munition Making’ provides a much more sanctified version of the munitions
worker, decrying the ways in which women have had to leave behind the traditional
work of mothering to work in factories:

Their hands should minister unto the flame of life,

Their fingers guide

The rosy teat, swelling with milk,

To the eager mouth of the suckling babe.^28

The nurturing hands of mothers becoming the killing hands of the munitions
workers are, in this poem, antithetical to the ‘natural’ order of things: ‘But this
goes further,|Taints the fountain head,|Mounts like a poison to the Creator’s very
heart.’ That women were being paid for this sort of work is positioned as both not
‘playing the game’ properly but also as disruptive of the natural social order.
No such recrimination is cast upon those working in a nursing or providing
capacity. The reasons for this are various, but are linked with class and gender

(^26) Jenni Calder, ‘World War and Women—Advance and Retreat’, in Barbara Korte and Ralf
Schneider (eds.),War and the Cultural Construction of Identities in Britain(Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2002), 164.
(^27) Madeline Ida Bedford, ‘Munition Wages’, in Reilly (ed.),The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry
and Verse 28 ,7.
Mary Gabrielle Collins, ‘Women at Munition Making’, ibid. 24.