WAAF: Freedom and Suppression: Military Women Working at Rathmines

It is widely accepted that World War II was a watershed event for the development of women’s rights in Australia. Long before the feminist movement, it was the individual women supporting the war effort who were most significant in changing the way Australians treated women who wanted to work.

During World War I, Australian women had been able to serve in the Australian Army Nursing Service which was established in 1902. There was a social understanding that some jobs (such as nursing, typing, domestic service and secretarial work) were appropriate for women, but most were not. With the establishment of the first of the Women’s Australian Defence Forces – the Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force (WAAAF) in March 1941, women were given access to work they had been denied previously.

By the end of the war, the WAAAF were offering 73 ‘musterings’ (jobs) to women recruits, far beyond the cooking and typist jobs offered initially. At Rathmines, one of the vital jobs worked by many of the WAAAF women was as a fabric worker. Iris Steele explained her job:

"I was a fabric worker at Rathmines and we made the wings of planes out of material. We covered the wings tautly on the wing frame and top sewed along the wing’s edge. Then we applied paint (called "dope") and gave it a few coats before putting tapes on the ribs and painting that over. One person would then get inside the wing and another person would be on the outside. The outside person, using a curved needle with string, would then push the needle through and the person on the inside would loop the string around the rib, push the needle through to the outside and knot the string. Each rib would be done like this and finished with several coats of paint. The last coat was always a silver coat. It looked like metal when we were finished and was very light weight. We were always so proud of our finished work and felt we were helping the war effort."

The women working at Rathmines were not oblivious to the fact that their work in areas not traditionally "women’s work" was a challenge to the contemporary Australian social order, and this was reflected in the behaviour of some men at Rathmines.

N. Griffins’ recount shows us that these women were willing to defend their right to escape the confines of "women’s work," and their officers, having also lived with such behaviour in their own careers, were willing to explicitly support them in this defence of their working rights:

"I got sick of being over with 2 FBRD [Flying Boat Repair Depot] so I went over to see our people at 3 OTU (Operational Training Unit) and then went over to work in the dinghy hut. We had not been there long when I was told to sweep the offices out. Well, this is not what I was in the Air Force for, so I put the dirt under the mat. Then, I saw red! It was the old thing coming out. Women’s work – on the other end of a broom! I then went to the WAAAF Officer and told her that I was a fabric worker and there were general hands [people responsible for jobs such as cleaning offices] walking about the station! I told her that she did not have to clean out men’s offices. She sat up very tall and said that she had done it many times but I never had to do it again."

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License