The First World War would never have been won if women hadn’t taken over the ‘men’s work’, says Kate Adie. She tells Ruth Campbell about why those female workers were so important

WITH glossy, white hair and wearing a floral knee-length fitted dress and heels, Kate Adie looks very different from the flak-jacketed war correspondent who first appeared on our TV screens in the Eighties.

Having stepped away from war reporting ten years ago, Adie, who presents From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4, has now also carved out a successful career as an author.

When I tentatively inquire of the floral-clad Adie what subject she might be interested in exploring next, she fires back at me in typical direct style: “I’m interested in any bloody thing. Goldfish breeding associations. You name it. I’m curious about everything.”

Perhaps she is not so different after all.

As she talks to me over a coffee at the St George Hotel, Harrogate, it soon becomes clear that Adie, 68, who spent a year-and-ahalf researching her latest book, Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One, has lost none of her determination to seek out and report on those stories that grab her attention.

The former BBC chief news correspondent, who has covered some of the defining events of modern times, from the Gulf War to the Tiananmen Square massacre, is passionate about her latest project, marking the role women played in the war.

Where so many history books focus on men, Adie’s version looks at the war through the eyes of women emerging from the shadows of their domestic lives. “Up until then, women had been seen as second class, with no role in public life. Now they were playing a central role. The war couldn’t have been won without them. It is one of the greatest social revolutions we have ever seen,” she says.

It was her experience as a war correspondent that prompted Adie, who grew up in Sunderland, to explore the fuller picture of the war she had grown up hearing about. “Modern war touches all lives. Children go to school under sniper fire and women can’t do everyday things like shop, clean or cook because everything is falling apart around them. I remember one woman telling me, ‘We are all on the front line’.

Before the First World War, conflicts were distant events, hundreds of miles away: “This was the first time war actually came into people’s homes, where the entire nation was involved,” she says.

Adie’s desire to find out more about those left behind at home took her to the Imperial War Museum and local newspaper archives: “Local newspaper archives are underused. I was staggered by the depth of detail I found.

Wonderful stuff,” she says.

She explored what women’s lives were like before the war. “People have forgotten what women were not allowed to do. Most couldn’t get a basic education, married women never worked. There were no female lawyers or surgeons and women played no part in public life. The Post Office said women couldn’t deliver post because they would never remember addresses. I think we’ve forgotten the objections, of women having smaller brains, being hysterical, being incapable, not able to take on responsibility, being fluffy and disorganised. All of this was levelled permanently at women.”

But once the Army started running out of ammunition and 100 munitions factories were built, women were called to work there and became essential to the war machine. They were stepping into jobs in the shipyards and steelworks too, being paid three times what they got in domestic service, but still half what men got for the same job.

Adie stumbled across a beautifully written 1916 local newspaper account of a Sunderland Suffragette meeting, discussing whether women could have it all: “It was like something you might see in a newspaper today. ‘How is this to be done, while looking after children?’ and ‘Is it right?’”

Suddenly society had to get used to young women living away from home. They had money to spend, unchaperoned, in pubs and even wore trousers to work.

Even more shocking, women’s knees were seen in public for the first time too. Adie, a lifelong Sunderland fan, was delighted to discover that, during the war, women’s football took off.

They drew crowds of thousands in stadiums, matches between the Sunderland Daisies and Southwick Lilies and the women’s Tyneside and Teesside teams were reported in the sports pages of papers like The Northern Echo: “It was a proper sport,” says Adie.

But when the war ended, the men came back, and the FA changed its rules about women playing on its pitches. They weren’t needed any more. The same thing happened in the world of employment. The majority of women lost their jobs almost overnight as they were shunted out to make way for men returning from the Front. Newspapers described them as ‘parasites’ if they held onto jobs that could go to men and they didn’t get the rights or recognition they deserved, says Adie.

Born 27 years after the war ended, Adie never had a career plan because there were still few expectations of girls. After getting ‘duff ’ A-levels and studying Scandinavian Studies at Newcastle University because it was the only course she could get on, she had no desire to be a journalist and only ended up where she is, she says, thanks to a series of coincidences and opportunities.

We waited a long time for women bishops, she says, and there is still some way to go: “Our national newspapers are all edited by men. And where are the women in our courts and Parliament?”

Nevertheless, the efforts of those pioneering women of the First World War didn’t go to waste. “The memory of what they did lasted and it was picked up by future generations.”

  • Kate Adie was appearing at the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival. Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One (Hodder & Stoughton, paperback £8.99)