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Wives and MothersWork and LeisurePolitics and PacifismQuiz

Wives and Mothers

Front page of WW2 recipe book

Find out about how women's experience of marriage and motherhood has been affected by conditions during war and the threat of nuclear war.

Read the fact file, look at some original photographs then print the sources and try the worksheets.

What do you think?

  • Why was Florence White so concerned with spinster’s pensions?
  • Why was the ‘Kitchen Front’ so important?
  • Do you agree that women are natural peacemakers and men are warmongers?

Printable worksheets and source material:

The Kitchen Front:
worksheet | source material

Spinsters:
worksheet | source material

Mothers and War:
worksheet | source material

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  1. In the First World War many young women waved goodbye to their boyfriends and fiancés as they went to off to fight and never saw them again. This had a devastating effect on them and many ended up as ‘spinsters’ – women who never married.
  2. Florence White lost her fiancé Albert who died in a military hospital in 1916 and ran a confectioner’s shop with her sister Annie. She saw that many women in her situation faced an old age of poverty with no one to support them and in 1935 she started the National Spinster’s Association. It campaigned for pensions for women over 60, which they finally won in 1940.
  3. Imagine air raids going off at any time of the day or night or having to feed a family on a week’s rations which included sheep’s head stew or roasted rabbit! During the Second World War many women found themselves on the ‘Kitchen Front’ trying to carry on as normal in dangerous and difficult conditions.
  4. Ordinary women such as Kathleen Binns were given government booklets on how to prepare nourishing meals and cope with children in wartime. They often ended up exhausted as they took on their husband’s role in the home and had to go out to work as well.
  5. A nuclear bomb dropped on Huddersfield would kill between 100,000 and 150,000 people immediately,houses and buildings would disappear and the heat caused would melt metal. In the 1980’s the fear of nuclear war caused thousands of men and women to join CND and join in marches and demonstrations against nuclear weapons.
  6. Women became an important part of the peace movement and some pinned nappies and photos of children to the fences were nuclear missiles were kept. They believed in ‘maternalism’ – mothers were natural peacemakers as they cared for children. War was caused my men and their values of conflict and violence.
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