Women Clerks and Secretaries
The first section of this case study examines issues relating to women's early employment in the Civil Service and is followed by an analysis of the cost of living in 1922.
Equal Pay for Equal Work – the ‘Awks’
‘Women are paid less not only because they produce less and because their work has a lower market value, but also because women have a lower standard of life, both in physical needs and mental demands’ – Sidney Webb
AWCS officials date unknown
The Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries was initially formed, in 1903, as the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists. Membership of the ASWT was not confined to women, but they always took the leading role, and the change of name to 'AWCS' in 1912 reflected the reality on the ground. The needs of government administration during World War I formed the major part of the growth of the Association – from under 900 in 1916, membership rose to between 7,500 and 8,500 four years later.
As Marsh and Ryan1 have said, ‘the emancipation offered to women by war conditions released political enthusiasm as well as suffragette activities which frightened many but encouraged others to promote the union cause’. By 1916 the Association had registered as a trade union; at the Congress of 1919 it was formally accepted into membership of the TUC.
Handbill - To Temporary Government Workers
The AWCS called themselves 'Awks'. They adopted as their emblem and badge a depiction of what appears to be a Great Auk. Despite this perhaps unfortunate choice of symbol, the union, especially in the London area where its membership was mainly concentrated, proved to be a lively, controversial and sometimes provocative outfit. One of its leading members, Anne Godwin, was in 1961 to become only the third woman President of the TUC.
Handbill A Pubilc Meeting
The end of the First World War brought immediate employment tensions back home in Britain. During the war an estimated 1,200,000 women had had their first taste of paid work. As Sarah Boston puts it, ‘Women who had been restricted to domestic work of one kind or another had experienced the comradeship and the better wages and conditions of industrial work. Many of them refused to return to domestic service. They were not keen meekly to relinquish those jobs to men on the assumption that men had a divine right to the better jobs’.2
In November 1919 the AWCS took up the case of women bank clerks threatened with redundancy after the return of ex-servicemen. And when 700 women War Office employees were given a week’s notice when they went back to work after that Christmas, AWCS organised a protest meeting and demonstration – dubbed by journalists ‘the flapper stunt’. Prime Minister Lloyd George was in France so unable to meet an AWCS deputation. ‘The women, undeterred, found a pilot prepared to fly them to France and when bad weather prevented their flying, they booked nineteen berths on a cross-channel ferry’.2 Lloyd George returned before they set sail, and agreed to meet them.
AWCS emblem
The women argued that while they did not object to jobs being given to ex-servicemen who had been civil servants pre-war, they did object to them going to any man simply because of his gender. They also tackled the question of equal pay for equal work, with the following exchange reported in the Association journal, The Woman Clerk: Miss Withrington, President of AWCS: ‘Men and women are on identical work, and yet there is gross disparity in the scales of pay’. Lloyd George: ‘Is this the case? I don’t see why this should be. How do you explain this?’ Treasury official: ‘Old established custom’3
Executive Committee Minutes
A pledge was given that all temporary civil servants should receive one month’s rather than one week’s notice. But the women’s broader grievances were ignored, and a resolution was passed at a meeting in February 1920 mandating the AWCS to put up candidates at Parliamentary bye-elections to further their cause4. (Read the resolution.)
Some male clerks took a different view on the employment of women in the Civil Service – read an article from the National Union of Clerks’ monthly journal, The Clerk, of February 1921.
Quote from The Woman Clerk May 1920
