Noakes, L (2011) From War Service to Domestic Service: Ex-Servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919-22. Twentieth Century British History, 22 (1). pp. 1-27. DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwq031
Noakes, L (2011) From War Service to Domestic Service: Ex-Servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919-22. Twentieth Century British History, 22 (1). pp. 1-27. DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwq031
Noakes, L (2011) From War Service to Domestic Service: Ex-Servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919-22. Twentieth Century British History, 22 (1). pp. 1-27. DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwq031
Abstract
At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme’s failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants.
Item Type: | Article |
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Uncontrolled Keywords: | Humans; Emigration and Immigration; Colonialism; Social Change; History, 20th Century; World War I; Veterans; Women, Working; Female; United Kingdom; Household Work |
Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain |
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies, School of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 15 Dec 2017 12:28 |
Last Modified: | 30 Oct 2024 15:59 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/20824 |