The Woman's Part: A Record of Munitions WorkYates, L. K.
History
The Woman's Part: A Record of Munitions Work
Yates, L. K.
Great Britain. Army -- Ordnance facilities; Weapons industry -- Employees; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
Speaking generally, the rejects are extraordinarily few, and although it
would be premature to draw definite conclusions, the experience of the
Training Section suggests that there is considerable latent capacity for
engineering work in a large number of women. A tour of the Instructional
Workshops emphasizes the point; everywhere, women may be seen mastering in
the short intensive course the one advanced job for which each is being
trained. In the Instructional Workshop, the atmosphere of a School is
exchanged for that of a factory, the conditions of a modern engineering
shop being reflected within its precincts. Thus the students 'clock on and
off' on arrival and on departure, observe factory shifts, work on actual
commercial jobs, obtain their tools from an attached store, and so on. The
work varies in these Instructional Factories as in the engineering shop of
the commercial world.
In one section of such a hall of tuition you may see the women intent on
the production of screws, or bolts, or nuts; in another part, such objects
as fuse needles may be in the course of manufacture. You stop to see the
magic which is answerable for the birth of the tiny factor which shall
detonate the explosive, and you are amazed to find that a fuse needle
requires six tools for its production and eight to nine gauges for testing
the accuracy of its measurements. Or, you may perhaps pause before a
machine which is turning out tiny grub screws. To see a rod of steel offer
itself, as it were, to the rightful instruments on a complicated machine
to impress the thread and slit, to watch it proceeding on its way until a
tiny section is divided and a complete screw is handed over to a tray
outside the machine, is, to the uninitiated, a miracle in itself.
To see the whole of these complicated processes guided and operated by a
smiling girl makes one hopeful for the national industries of the future.
Setters-up of tools are at work in another section of the same
Instructional Factory and at other machines are students grinding,
milling, or profiling.
You may then visit another Instructional Factory to find that aircraft is
the specialty. I recall one such training-ground in a bay of an aeroplane
factory. There the girls learn almost every part of aircraft production,
from the handling of the tiny hammers used on the woodwork for the body
and wings, to the assembling, or putting together the tested parts. In
this training factory, a system prevails of lectures by the practical
instructors on the use of necessary tools; questions from the students are
encouraged at the close of the lecture, and, I was informed, when on one
occasion I was one of the audience, that the saving of the instructor's
time by the adoption of this method was beyond expected results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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