How war made women’s lives go with a bang

As I unearthed the lives of real people and the situations they found themselves in, I couldn’t help but wonder again and again at the stories of those around them during these upheavals. And thus I found myself moving on to writing a novel, Park Lane, which takes two young women from the Edwardian era through the war and out into the unrecognisable world on the other side.

Park Lane is historical fiction and takes place during a time of transformation in sexual attitudes that directs the lives of those two very different women. As in the novel, in real life this transformation was not a rapid metamorphosis, but rather an evolution that reflected the changing perceptions of the war itself.

Before the war, Edwardian women took lovers after they had married and produced “an heir and a spare”. This was for practical purposes. Married women were attractive partly because they were not in pursuit of a husband. Also, although contraception was available, it was not easy to obtain — all forms of it were strongly disapproved of by any respectable family doctor. And until the 1930s, abortion carried as many risks as childbirth.

However, if a woman was married she could pass off any unwanted children as her husband’s. So long as the top end of the nursery was filled with his own children, he turned a blind eye. Among some classes the logistics of extramarital sex were ritualised. Men slept with women in their social circle and visits to the woman’s home were made between tea and supper. “Husbands,” writes Anita Leslie in Edwardians in Love, “were expected to go out to tea (with other men’s wives if not to the club).”

Groups of girls would lie in wait for soldiers “seizing them by the arm as they passed” Lengthier encounters required an invitation to stay at the same country house, where the more thoughtful hosts allocated bedrooms so that lovers were near each other.

Husbands were placed in outer dressing-rooms so they could go on their own nocturnal wanderings. “Respectable” unmarried women, on the other hand, clung to their virginity as a pre-condition for marriage.

Almost as soon as war broke out in 1914 all this changed. At the start the war was seen as a glorious escapade and there was a great deal of excitement up and down the country.

Those who signed up would have the chance to go to the Continent and fight for their country before returning home to glory. Everybody wanted a part of this adventure — those not in uniform wanted to come as close as they could to those who were. A phenomenon, rapidly named “khaki fever”, swept the country.

In its broadest definition khaki fever gripped men as well as women, the former wanting to spend time with and drink with the soldiers training in the tented camps that sprang up across the country. Soldiers found themselves invited to teas and meals in people’s homes. Those who could accept, even if they were not enlisted, found a reason to wear uniform, including the Bishop of London and several vicars.

When it came to girls, however, khaki fever took a different turn. Even young women who had hitherto kept suitors at arm’s length appeared desperate to foist their favours upon soldiers. Groups of girls would lie in wait for soldiers “seizing them by the arm as they passed”, wrote Edith Sellers in Boy and Girl War Products. “I saw some English Tommies, who were being pursued by girls, spring into an omnibus for safety. The girls sprung after them, whereupon the boys promptly betook themselves to the top, although it was raining in torrents.” (Buses were open-topped at the time.)

Although many more age groups were affected, the main public concern was the 13 to 16-year-old girls who were harassing soldiers. The age of consent had been raised from the former to the latter in 1885 but these teenagers, still young enough to have their hair tied back in ponytails that “flapped” as they ran (thus earning them the name “flappers”) nonetheless appeared sexually active, or at least wanting to be.

Not all the soldiers resisted the opportunities of khaki fever and cavorting couples soon became a public nuisance. A pedestrian stepping into a deep doorway to allow somebody to pass risked finding it occupied.

Important in its ability to shock, khaki fever affected women who, in the normal course of events, would have been expected to behave impeccably. “Khaki fever,” writes Professor Angela Woollacott in her paper Khaki Fever and Its Control, “seemed a flagrant challenge to the belief that sexual chastity was integral to respectable femininity.”

Within weeks “morality” patrols were pacing pavements and park pathways. These were staffed by women less young, who in these patrols found their own outlet for excitement with the war. They strode through cinemas (coming to the conclusion that the lights should be kept on between performances), flashed torches into doorways, evicting inhabitants, and scoured the corners of parks.

By October 1915 there were 2,300 patrols and they were so zealous in their task that before long they became at least as much of a nuisance as the couples themselves. “It is about time,” wrote one anonymous complainant to a local newspaper in 1915, “something was done about ancient spinsters following soldiers about with their flashlights.”

Whereas the younger girls’ behaviour resembles that of music and movie star fans today, one explanation for khaki fever among adult women was that at first they felt otherwise excluded from the war. Many of them lost their jobs as demand for non-essential goods fell and their offers to work elsewhere in men’s jobs were rejected. Women were paid less than men and it was feared that when the soldiers disbanded the men would find themselves out of work.

Indeed, when in March 1915 the Board of Trade ordered a national register for women to volunteer for war employment, khaki fever seemed to subside: 30,000 women registered within weeks and the munitions factories opened their doors.

There were other factors at work, too. The war was turning. Six months in, it had not been “over by Christmas” and didn’t look as if it would be over by the next. News of the losses and the dismal telegrams were seeping across the Channel, and khaki now connoted a sad, rather than feverish, tone. Zeppelins had reached Britain, the passenger liner Falaba had been sunk by a U-boat and poison gas was being used in the miserable second battle of Ypres. The excitement of war was fast subsiding and with it the excitement over a man in uniform.

The excitement did not vanish altogether. Despite widespread disapproval of khaki fever, a little moral leeway was now given — the more men being killed, the more babies were needed to fill their places. Women, generally working class, who had the children of long-term boyfriends to whom they did not happen to be married were supported as though they had been.

However, for women who had babies as the result of more casual liaisons, censorship was absolute. Even Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the women’s campaigner, had warned in a paper, Women’s Work in Wartime, that “another evil even more insidious and more degrading than that of drink has to be guarded against and fought”.

Meanwhile, women were stepping into men’s shoes. In France and Flanders, as well as Britain, they became motorcycle couriers, ambulance drivers and medical auxiliaries who dealt with horrific injuries every day. And they were flocking into the munitions factories. Munitions work was dangerous and the women who worked with TNT were called “canaries” as the compound turned their skin and hair yellow.

It was well paid, however, and it offered women an alternative to the drudgery of a life in domestic service. Young women who worked in the munitions factories were independent in their existence and, as a consequence, their spirit.

This independence of spirit spread across the board of women working in the war. The feeling of empowerment that taking on men’s roles brought with it inspired a confidence new to them. It brought down some of the behavioural barriers that, before the war, they had felt surrounded by. Women who had crossed the Channel to the front, where they rode horses into the trenches to tend to the wounded and drove ambulances ferrying the near-dead, came back to Britain with their eyes opened wider than had been possible under the rigid social rules with which they had been brought up. Flappers stayed out all night and slept all day and gave the impression of being sexually available

In this environment, women started to feel free to take the sexual initiative themselves. And as they dashed to and from shifts in whichever service they were working, keeping them chaperoned was impossible. Another incentive was that the sheer scarcity of men back home meant shy girls risked remaining spinsters.

As the deaths mounted, a more primitive and usually subconscious sexual drive also came into play — the exaggerating effect of the stress of war on sexuality. As Helena Swanwick, daughter of the artist Oswald Sickert and sister of Walter, summed up in her autobiography I Have Been Young: “Sex before marriage was the natural female complement to the male frenzy of killing. If millions of men were to be killed in early manhood, or even boyhood, it behoved every young woman to secure a mate and replenish the population while there was yet time.” The longer the war drew on, the lower the moral threshold fell.

The few men home on leave thus found themselves surrounded by potentially sexually interested women, often regardless of whether the men were married.

The wartime diaries of my great-grandfather are full of the names of young women who dashed around town and country with him — especially while his wife was ill in bed at home. These women, as well as feeling confident and sexually driven, were also full of another behavioural impetus, hinted at by Swanwick. This was the duty to show soldiers home on leave a good time.

As the fighting conditions and death toll worsened, this duty to please the men increased. If, on a suitor’s last night home, he asked you one final favour, then the pressure to oblige fought hard against the tradition of remaining a virgin until marriage. To hold back was almost selfish.

“In a war situation,” says Ros Taylor, a chartered clinical psychologist and author of Confidence in Just Seven Days, “we forget about the future, reputations and the such-like and live in the moment. And anxiety heightens arousal. Emotion hijacks rationality.” Moreover, adds Taylor, “in wartime, conventional morality is suspended. We also bond with people easily, making friendships and relationships that would not normally happen”.

In Park Lane both the female protagonists make sexual choices that, outside wartime, they are extremely unlikely to have made. Their decisions cut across social as well as moral boundaries. They are certainly relationships that would not normally happen.

Countering this increased sexual confidence and activity of women during the war was the fact that performing men’s roles was giving them a growing degree of masculinity. As the war stretched into its third year, both its start and possibility of ending became small dots on opposing horizons and what had initially seemed an adventure of “playing a man” now threatened to be a lasting state of affairs.

In Evadne Price’s novel Not So Quiet, written under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith, the female ambulance drivers face a struggle to retain their femininity amid the mud, blood and cold. As the narrator, Smithy, watches the aristocratic Tosh chop off her own hair, it is this question that occupies her mind. She muses on the irony of the name her mother gave her: “Z was the paragon of beauty, virtue and womanliness . . . Z was never an ambulance driver somewhere in France.” She considers copying Tosh but decides not to because “it would definitely put the tin helmet on womanliness”. When one of the other ambulance drivers is the first to speak, it is to say, “You’ll look awfully unsexed, Tosh.”

The answer to this was, when back from the field, to prove you were still attractive as a woman. And in this post-apocalyptic world doing so required competitive spirit. With three-quarters of a million British men dead, there were all too few men left to attract. Those who survived and weren’t too maimed were hard fought over.

This lack of men had a lasting effect on women’s sexuality. Even those who decided to fall back into traditional lines of virginity and marriage had to flirt more pro-actively and strategically than before and now had more tools at their disposal. In March 1918, Marie Stopes published Married Love, which demystified the marital bed.

There was also going to be a significant group of women who would never marry, for whom the only potential sexual life was an affair with a married man, and the 1920s became the age of the “vamp” — the short-haired but impeccably made- up woman with a hypnotic stare.

The most famous type of woman to emerge from the war was the new “flapper”, who embraced the sense of nihilism that arrived with the end of the war. For many people the traditions and beliefs that had led to such mass slaughter needed to be rejected wholly.

Flappers in their way did just this. They, too, cut their hair short and dressed in androgynous shapes but bejewelled dresses. They stayed out all night and slept all day and gave the impression of being sexually available, yet not giving a damn as to whether they actually were.

Half a dozen years on from the new flappers’ ponytail-flapping namesakes (and some of them may have been the same women), the horror in between had been so great that khaki fever — caring enough to chase a soldier down the street — had been replaced by not being able to let yourself care at all.

Park Lane by Frances Osborne will be published by Virago on June 7