“Hands That War: In the Midlands”: Rebecca West’s Rediscovered Article on First World War Munitions Workers

Abstract

“Hands That War: In the Midlands”:Rebecca West’s Rediscovered Article on First World War Munitions Workers Daniel Kielty (bio) Addressing the experiences of female munitions workers during the First World War, Rebecca West’s “Hands That War” series first appeared between 17 February and 3 June 1916 in The Daily Chronicle. Most modern readers first encountered these articles in Jane Marcus’s The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-1917 (1989).1 More recently, Bernard Schweizer reissued one article from the series in the appendix to his 2010 edition of The Return of the Soldier (1918).2 Both Marcus and Schweizer have acknowledged the existence of three articles in the series: “Hands That War: The Cordite Workers,” “Hands That War: Welfare Work,” and “Hands That War: The Night Shift.” During a research trip to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in September 2015, I discovered a fourth article among West’s papers that has escaped the attention of West scholars, “Hands That War: In the Midlands,” which is reproduced here. Though the full date is barely legible on the newspaper clipping that survives, it looks as if it was published on 17 February 1916, making it the first article in the series. Possibly due to the censorship restrictions established by the Defence of the Realm Act (1914), West does not explicitly name the munitions factories in the Midlands that she visited.3 However, she refers “to a motor works that is now producing shells,” which is likely the Austin Longbridge Plant near Birmingham.4 As with the other articles in the series, “In the Midlands” gives a detailed account of workers’ pay and conditions. West is keen to stress the irony that a state that so fervently resisted the movement of women into the workplace during peacetime should now be so reliant on it in a time of war. Moreover, she seeks to establish a parallel between the debilitating factory environment endured by female munitions workers and the trench conditions faced by men fighting on the Western Front. More explicitly than the other articles, “In the Midlands” highlights West’s sense of the incongruity between the female hands manufacturing weapons of destruction and existing conceptions of youth and femininity: The girl who gave the shell the brushful of red lead that prevents premature explosions looked so young as she mixed this stuff that was like blood; and [End Page 211] it was dreadful to see a child that it would be a gross over-statement to call small—a mere pinch of little girl that could fairly be taken between the thumb and forefinger—dipping her curls as she bent to add her touch to the instrument of death. (p. 217) West emphasizes that the troubling agency of female manual labor is driven by divine inspiration with the title of the series, which we learn from this article was inspired by Psalms 144:1: Among the lacquerers, who are doing work that no man can learn to do efficiently and which is of the highest importance, since the coat of varnish preserves the shell as water-glass preserves an egg, one found a figure that reconciled one to this terrible use of womanhood. She had the face and body of a mother; but she smiled down on her work and seemed rapt, as though she were whispering to herself the cry of the Psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teachest my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” (p. 217) Though strident about the extent to which the manual labor of munitions workers justified feminists’ confidence in the capabilities of women, “In the Midlands” reveals that West is anxious about how this labor could be reconciled with her understanding of “womanhood.” The uncertainty that West displays allows us to read the “Hands That War” series alongside contemporary writing that explicitly and implicitly expressed concern about the impact of manual labor on traditional gender roles. In the poem “Women at Munition Making” (1916), Mary Gabrielle Collins laments that those with “fingers [that] guide / The rosy teat, swelling with milk / To the eager mouth of the suckling babe” are “coarsened in munition factories...