How remembrance ignores the vital roles and sacrifices of women during WW1, celebrating men and animals more widely

One million women worked in the munitions factories in 1918. This was dangerous work – hundreds lost their lives and the alternative danger of poisoning resulting in yellow jaundice made these women the subject of mockery

There’s a crescent of concrete on Park Lane, cleft down the middle. Through the slanted gulf trudge a cast iron horse and a donkey, both laden with packs. Etched into the walls a menagerie of camels, rams, llamas and elephants march behind the words “Animals in War”.

These creatures represent all animals who have died in the line of duty over a variety of military actions for Britain. Underneath the title reads the words, “They had no choice.”

Some two miles east, a bronze plinth – a quarter of the size – with empty smocks, hats and bags hanging off of it, commemorates the Women of the Second World War. No faces, figures or names are present. The limp, hanging uniforms could, at first glance, be those of men. And no memorial exists at all to commemorate the women who lost their lives in the First World War, which ended 100 years ago this week. The obvious inference is that women have played less of a role in our country’s wars than beasts.

An estimated 20 million people lost their lives during the so-called Great War, an unimaginable number. Of those, almost a million were British soldiers. Memorials to this devastating slaughter are rightly plentiful. But the absence of any monument for women suggests their vital contribution was not valued, and it diminishes their function to nothing.

In 1916, conscription took most men over the age of 18 to the front lines. Women’s efforts on the home front were indispensable.

They filled roles previously occupied by men on the railways (50,000 of them) as ticket collectors, guards and conductors; they worked as police, in the civil service, as tram drivers, firefighters and in the fields. More than 100,000 women joined the armed forces during the conflict, through the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Royal Naval Service, arms of the military that went to the battlefields and worked in non-combat roles as cooks, office clerks and mechanics. So vital was their contribution that in 1915 the incoming prime minister David Lloyd George proclaimed that, “Without women, victory will tarry.”

The most significant contribution of women in the First World War was in the munitions factories where one million women worked in 1918. As well as long, unpleasant hours, this was dangerous work, requiring the handling of explosives. Hundreds lost their lives. Risks of combustion were real and the alternative danger of poisoning resulting in yellow jaundice made these women the subject of mockery as they were labelled “canaries”.

A handful of British women even joined the front lines as soldiers and spies, so desperate were they to contribute to the war effort. Journalist Dorothy Lawrence became the only woman soldier in the British army at the age of 20, when she dressed up as a man so she could report on the battlefields.

Flora Sandes became the only woman to fight on the battlefields. The 40-year-old tried to sign up to the UK army but, when rejected, joined the Serbian army, eventually rising the ranks to become a sergeant major. In 1917, she was awarded Serbia’s highest military medal. Many nurses died while tending to the wounded and one went a step further – Nurse Edith Cavell cared for soldiers on both sides of the conflict without prejudice, before smuggling Allied soldiers out of German-occupied Belgium, saving 200 men in a single year.

When she eventually became involved in an espionage network, passing vital intelligence to the Allies, the Germans discovered her clandestine work and she was executed by firing squad. Rather than being celebrated, her story was then used as a vehicle by the government to increase conscription. A statue of her likeness sits in St Martin’s Place, but she was not the only woman to have contributed.

Many women relinquished their posts after the war, as the men who returned re-entered the workforce. But the war had radically changed women’s position in society. Their work led to the government finally conceding in 1918 and, out of gratitude, giving property-owning women over the age of 30 the vote. Among those few women who remained in their posts, the first-ever protests over equal pay followed. Most, however, dutifully returned to the home. But what they had done remained.

The lack of memorials commemorating the women who fought, spied, worked, nursed and died during the First World War is yet another example of an historic erasure of female input. As we remember the millions of lives lost and the striking poignancy that marks this centenary, let us ask ourselves when women’s contributions will also be recognised, when their own sacrifices will be considered worthy of noting and let us hope that if they are, perhaps they might even be raised above the importance of mules.