Work Will Keep Our Girls from Walking the Streets
Our Girls: Their Work for the War
Notes: A World War One book that simultaneously recruits women to work in the British munitions industry and explains their presence to a public skeptical of the appropriateness of women working in factories. The author, a successful novelist, argues that women shouldn't be given just two choices when it comes to work—doing the drudgery that men don't want to do or being a "parasite" and not working at all. He then adds that factory work keeps women from pursuing their third option, prostitution: "Earning substantial wages, and being free to marry or not to marry, as they please had dealt a death-blow to [prostitution] which is based on the poverty of the woman and the wealth of the man."
127 pages plus 15 halftone photographs on 8 leaves.
Edition + Condition: First edition. Paper a bit tanned and spotted, else very good in a dust jacket with chips at the edges. This copy has the ownership inscription of a person named "Mabel" who appears to have been living and perhaps working at Woolwich, where the factory described in the book was located.
Publication: London: Hutchinson, 1916.
Item No: #362008
Price: $250