In May 1941, mother of two Anne Lee Michell stood among the rubble on the streets of Plymouth, handing out cups of tea. The city had been heavily blitzed a week earlier and Michell, who lived in Somerset, had travelled there as part of a ‘Queen’s Messengers Convoy’ created to provide emergency assistance to those affected by bombing. For three days Michell and her colleagues provided refreshments and smiles of reassurance to firefighters, demolition squads, and people who had been made homeless, from a handful of mobile kitchens and canteens.[1]

Six months earlier, in London, Winifred Marshall was volunteering in a similar way on her own doorstep. Alongside colleagues she served cups of tea and cheese sandwiches to rescue teams among the ‘big smash-ups’ of the Blitz in Kensington and the East End, after asking to be sent on the most ‘Dangerous Jobs’.[2] Meanwhile, in York, Hilda Appleby was staffing a clothing exchange where mothers could acquire coupon-free clothes for growing children by trading in older garments. Appleby also ran ‘Make Do and Mend’ classes in the local area and did regular night shifts at the station canteen, where servicemen passing through on busy trains could stop for a quick meal of tea and coffee, pork pies and sausage rolls.[3] All of these women were members of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS). They were all ‘doing their bit’, as volunteers, as citizens, and as women.

Over the course of the war more than one million women like Michell, Marshall and Appleby joined the WVS. Together they performed a wide range of voluntary work stretching into almost every arena of wartime life. From blood transfusion services to fundraising drives to evacuee support to rural ‘pie schemes’, the women of the service were described as ‘maids of all work in green uniform’, ready to support the war effort wherever, and however, it was needed.[4]

Despite their size and importance to Britain’s ‘home front’, historians have rarely talked in-depth about the WVS. There are multiple interconnected reasons for this. Like other groups of women, members of the WVS have often been overlooked as a result of dominant understandings that approach war as a quintessentially ‘male’ activity. More interestingly, however, they have also been overlooked within feminist attempts to explore women’s roles in conflict, because these studies have often applied masculinised understandings of ‘service’ based on paid work and military service – leading to a focus on women who entered ‘men’s roles’ in wartime (for example in heavy industry or in the ATS, WAAF, or WRNS). The tasks that the WVS performed were often quotidian, informal, and even mundane – ordinary tasks undertaken by women in extraordinary times. As such, they have not proved as attractive to researchers or storytellers looking for the most exciting and perhaps more obvious examples of wartime citizenship in action. It could be said that the WVS were such an epitome of the spirit of ‘getting on with things’ in the ‘people’s war’ that they have sunk into the background of historical narratives, both in terms of academic studies and our heritage landscapes.

Even a brief look at historical records held by the IWM, however, show that the WVS was central to gendered concepts of wartime citizenship. In 1940, recruitment film Britannia is a Woman praised the contributions of the WVS as critical to the war effort, and attempted to inspire new recruits by showcasing the contributions of those who had already signed up:

“The call is sounded, and women fall in line for service in their country’s call”.[5]

Service in this context comprised a variety of activity which responded to local and national need: the film depicted women running communal kitchens, providing first aid, distributing gas masks, caring for evacuees, and driving mobile canteens. Members of the WVS, the film described, were a ‘devoted band of organisers’ carrying out a ‘tremendous feat’, and the WVS was an organisation in which ‘every member, whatever her task, wears the same badge as her Queen’.[6]

Four years later, Ministry of Information film Willing Hands similarly celebrated WVS volunteers and the wide variety of work they had undertaken for the war effort. Over clips of WVS members caring for children, ironing sheets, mending clothes, cooking meals, and serving cups of tea, the narrator stressed the importance of their contributions and in particular their voluntary spirit:

“They wear a uniform, but they have no brass bands, no parades, no compulsion. And yet the Women’s Voluntary Services for Civil Defence, with a membership of one million, have become a part of public life and served twenty government departments.”[7]
 

Moreover, the scenes depicted and the narrators’ commentary in Willing Hands also emphasised the ‘feminine’ nature of the work done – not as something antithetical to the demands of service in wartime, but absolutely central to it:

“They bring to all their tasks the special training and talents of women, and years of experience.”[8]

This was typical of the way in which the WVS was represented in government publicity material during the war: as a distinctly feminine organisation which drew on the ‘natural’ skills and experiences of women.

Another film in the IWM’s collections, Women’s Voluntary Services, similarly surveyed a broad range of work done by the organisation and stressed the ‘womanliness’ of a Women’s Voluntary Service. In one scene, for example, over a clip of a young volunteer making a bed, setting a table, and preparing a pot of tea in a billet for a blitz victim, the narration read:

“When we are bombed out, the government finds us new shelter, a room, a table, a bed, chairs, bare essentials. It takes more than that to make a home. The little things, the sort of things a woman understands. This is where the WVS can help.”[9]

An emphasis on ‘women’s’ work and expertise tells us about more than just the gendering of wartime citizenship. It also shows that even the most quotidian, daily tasks could be imbued with the value of wartime service. Films like Women’s Voluntary Services and Willing Hands stressed that dealing with ‘the simple human problems’ was a significant national duty in ‘total war’:

“One of the most important jobs done by the WVS is looking after the people who have been bombed out of their homes. This has happened all over Britain, in villages and small towns as well as big cities. Where a bomb has fallen, the mobile canteen manned by the WVS arrives with that inevitable prop to British morale, the cup of tea.”[10]

Service was in the eye of the beholder and the WVS was proud that its members were largely ‘unspectacular women doing unspectacular jobs’.[11]

Bringing attention to the story of the WVS goes further than simply asserting the importance of an overlooked group or building a more inclusive picture of wartime Britain. It also offers a unique and much-needed opportunity to re-think our understandings of wartime citizenship. While women of the WVS were neither official ‘servicewomen’ or paid workers, they were clearly seen as performing work in service of the nation. The gendering of their service did not challenge dominant or ‘traditional’ constructions of femininity by drawing women into ‘men’s roles’, but rather confirmed and bolstered them. The everyday and informal nature of the work performed by the WVS shows that service was defined, first and foremost, by the meaning given to tasks by governments and by volunteers themselves – not by specific jobs or formal roles. Despite the ubiquity of concepts like the ‘people’s war’, we require a broader understanding of what citizenship and ‘service’ could mean in order to integrate women like Anne Lee Michell, Winifred Marshall, and Hilda Appleby into the picture.

Dr Charlotte Tomlinson is a social and cultural historian of modern Britain and works across academic and public history platforms. This blog is based on her 2021 PhD thesis A Million Forgotten Women: Voluntarism, Citizenship and the Women’s Voluntary Services in Second World War Britain. A specialist in gender, memory, identity, and place, she is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Lincoln and delivers community-engaged heritage programmes for Hull City Council through the £30 million Hull Maritime project. She tweets @charltommo.

[1] IWM, Documents.1661, Private Papers of A Lee Michell.

[2] IWM, Documents.119334, Private Papers of Miss W Marshall.

[3] IWM, Documents.3507, Private Papers of Mrs H Appleby.

[4] IWM UKY 341, ‘Women’s Voluntary Services’, Ministry of Information and Verity, 1941.

[5] IWM MGH 171, ‘Britannia is a Woman’, Twentieth Century Fox, 1940.

[6] IWM MGH 171, ‘Britannia is a Woman’, Twentieth Century Fox, 1940.

[7] IWM UKY 585, ‘Willing Hands’, Ministry of Information, 1944.

[8] IWM UKY 585, ‘Willing Hands’, Ministry of Information, 1944

[9] IWM UKY 341, ‘Women’s Voluntary Services’, Ministry of Information and Verity, 1941.

[10] IWM UKY 585, ‘Willing Hands’, Ministry of Information, 1944.

[11] IWM UKY 341, ‘Women’s Voluntary Services’, Ministry of Information and Verity, 1941.