Changes on the wartime home front did not always translate into permanent
shifts in European society. Many of the women who went into factory
work during the war in Britain, France, and Germany returned to their
homes following the Armistice. The expanded role of government in such
areas as censorship went back to peacetime norms.
However, inflation and, for a time, food rationing continued into the
postwar years. After the war, France found itself with a permanent immigrant
presence that had begun with the foreign laborers brought in to help
run the wartime economy. The moral laxity of the wartime years was
evident—at least to many worried observers—in areas like the divorce rate
in the 1920s. The effects of prolonged malnutrition were evident in the
German population long after the war had ended.
The experience of factory workers in the war did not lead to the postwar
upheaval some feared. Despite instances of labor unrest as the war went on,
high wages and plentiful jobs eased the discomforts of working in a
semi-militarized environment, and patriotism remained a powerful adhesive
force. In Britain, organized labor enthusiastically supported the war effort
even at the close of the long conflict. Moreover, the presence of Labour
party officials like Arthur Henderson in the wartime cabinet from spring
1915 onward probably encouraged workers to believe that their party might
some day take power. In the postwar period, the growth of unemployment
removed much of the unions' bargaining power, and the basic structure of
Britain's industrial society remained intact. In Germany as well, unions
cooperated with the wartime government even as it became a military
dictatorship. When Germany passed into revolution in the final months of
1918, the unions took an equally moderate stance vis-a-vis the country's
industrial leadership. Here too the old social order survived. In France, as
well, a surge of labor militancy during and immediately after the war soon
gave way to relative peace in industrial relations. The rivalry between
France's Communist and Socialist parties divided the political influence of
even militant labor groups. A conservative majority in the postwar French
parliament stood firm against the wave of strikes that hit the country in late
1919 and the spring of 1920, and French labor unions, swelled by new
recruits during the wartime years, declined in strength equally fast as the
newcomtrs abandoned them.
World History
