Unfeminine women and angry men: the Irish Post Office in 1902–1918

ABSTRACT

The Post Office was the United Kingdom’s single largest employer and possessed the majority of female workers in the Civil Service before the First World War. This article concentrates on the self-perception and trade union activities of the Irish women who became permanent postal staff by successfully qualifying in the public examination. It first examines the meaning of educational standard to these women by exploring the decline of open competition from 1902. In this process, it demonstrates their professional commitment and pride which was consolidated and amplified after the breakout of the First World War – attitudes sometimes denounced as inconsistent with feminine propriety. These “unfeminine women” constantly fought against discriminatory social norms amid the attacks from “angry men” and survived in the public sphere even after the war.

KEYWORDS:

• Post Office
• female postal servants
• Woman Clerk
• First World War
• war and women
• female labour

Introduction

This article sheds new light on a hitherto unexplored part of the Irish women’s history, by concentrating on Irish postal women, especially Sorting Clerks and Telegraphists, and Women Clerks, who secured a permanent position after entering the Civil Service through public examinations. Building on prior research on the relationship between extended education, broadened occupational opportunities and the importance of competitive examination to women in Ireland, this article will first assess the consequences of the decline of the open competition (a type of entrance examination for civil servants which was open to any applicant satisfying minimum qualifications) since 1902 and the reactions of the women in the service. It then examines how the First World War elicited a renewal of professional commitment and pride among female postal workers and how such behaviour also reflected the hope that wartime service might be rewarded with a more generous treatment after the return of peace. It will conclude that, though their aspiration was not fully accomplished, they still provide a new account on women who survived in the public sphere even after the war and kept on fighting for their labour rights.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Irish women witnessed improved educational opportunities with the enactment of the Intermediate Education Act (1878), which introduced a system of public examinations for both boys’ and girls’ schools. In the following year, the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) was established to open degrees to women and the demand for provision of women’s higher education increased as a result. The quality of women’s secondary education was also enhanced in this process since the Board of Education announced their plan to distribute subsidies to secondary educational institutions according to the result of examinations held by the RUI.¹

Extended education, in turn, facilitated a wider range of careers to women, including hitherto off-bounds professions which required thorough knowledge of the field like a medical doctor. This trend continued in the early twentieth century and in 1907 the Women’s Employment Bureau of Dublin was established with the aim to help well-educated middle-class women find suitable jobs. When the Bureau published a guidebook to introduce the professions available for educated women in Ireland, the Civil Service was portrayed as an appropriate choice for these women. Among government departments, it specifically focused on the Post Office which not only recruited women in a large number but also guaranteed a permanent (established) position if they succeeded in passing the entrance examination.²

According to the Bureau, there were three grades in the Post Office that would be of interest to educated Irish women: Woman Clerk; Sorting Clerk and Telegraphist (S.C. and T.); and Telephonist. Woman Clerk was a grade equivalent to male Second Division Clerk in other government departments and they carried out clerical duties in various postal branches such as the Savings Bank and the Returned Letter Office. As a rule, every Woman Clerk was first allocated to London once they entered the Civil Service and could be transferred to other regions when vacancies occurred. Therefore, though the Accountant General’s Department was the only postal branch in Dublin that employed Women Clerks, Irish women could also work in postal branches in London. S.C. and T. was the numerically largest group in the Irish Post Office, and Female S.C. and T.s were in charge of telegraph duties only while men belonged to both Sorting and Telegraph branches. Telephonists were the last one to join the department when telephone service was nationalised and absorbed into the Post Office in 1912. The competition for these posts was “extremely keen” and “only those who possess[ed] a thoroughly good general education” could pass the examination.³

One attractive aspect of this occupation, especially for middle-class women, was that success in a public examination, rather than patronage, was key to the application process. For a long time, the employment of civil servants depended on patronage rather than on the abilities and qualifications of the applicant. However, such custom was changed when the Northcote-Trevelyan report on the Civil Service suggested an entry system based on public examination in 1854.⁴ As a result, most applicants to the Civil Service were required to take either limited or open competitive examination though the nomination system was not entirely extinguished. The examination was of course limited to male candidates when it was first introduced, but the government began to extend it to women approximately 30 years after the initiation.

While limited competition was held among pre-selected candidates, open competition, as mentioned earlier, was available for any person who satisfied a qualification like the age limit. The Post Office was the pioneering government department in the United Kingdom to employ female labour on a large scale through competitive examination: Women Clerks and S. C. and T.s, first entering the civil service in 1874 and 1870 respectively, were as a rule employed through open competition and Telephonists were recruited through limited competition. The Irish Post Office has been incorporated into the British Post Office since 1830 and, therefore, the recruitment system was also applied to Irish women.⁵

As has been pointed out by Rosemary Cullen Owens and Anne V. O’Connor, the system of open competition helped to widen employment opportunities for middle-class women in both Britain and Ireland, where the occupational sphere was quite narrow.⁶ Since it was not necessary to obtain recommendation from senior civil servants, women who did not have personal connections or family background could apply for the open competitive examination and prove themselves to be capable candidates. The new system was particularly important in Ireland as it provided an opportunity to Catholics who had often been discriminated against in public sector appointments, based on their religion.⁷ Not surprisingly, Irish postal clerks constantly expressed their support for the open competition system, arguing that under the alternative system of nomination, English and Scottish staff who have personal connections with the Postmaster General in London would monopolise all the high-ranking posts.⁸

Moreover, participation in the open competition provided a unique experience to the women who entered the Civil Service. The competition to get into the British Post Office was so fierce that in 1884, 2,500 women competed for 145 clerkships, whilst there were 30 applicants for every vacancy in the Telegraph department.⁹ Therefore, successful candidates could gain confidence from the result and regarded themselves as more qualified than those who entered through nomination or limited competition. Some self-assured women thought that they were as competent as their male equivalents who took the same entrance examination. With this belief in mind, they actively participated in trade union activities in order to gain better wages and career opportunities.

While trade unions in other industries did not welcome women into their membership in the nineteenth century, the Association of Irish Post Office Clerks (AIPOC), the only postal trade union based in Ireland which comprised mainly of the S.C. and T.s, was active in recruiting female members.¹⁰ Enrolling approximately 75% of the S.C. and T.s in 1912, the Association allowed women to become executive members in local branches and provided them with chances to make a speech at annual conferences and write their own column in the union journal.¹¹ On the other hand, Irish Women Clerks joined a British union, the Association of Post Office Women Clerks (APOWC), which was founded in 1901 “to protect and promote the interests” of Women Clerks.¹² It built local branches all over the United Kingdom and Women Clerks working in Ireland could participate in its activities as Dublin branch members.

As such, postal women who entered the department through open competition stood out from other female workers in terms of their educational background, confidence in their own capacity and active pursuit of their rights. Of course, there existed women who complied with conventional gender roles and considered their paid employment merely as a brief experience before getting married, especially because female civil servants had to retire upon marriage after a marriage bar was implemented for the Civil Service in 1876.¹³ However, it is important to observe that there were also a substantial number of passionate women who either participated enthusiastically in the mixed-sex union or established and maintained the women-only association.

A thorough investigation on these women can also shed new light on Irish women’s labour during the First World War. Prior research on this topic has often focused either on Irish women’s voluntary wartime work performed by upper and upper-middle class women, or on manual labourers, like munitions factory workers.¹⁴ Such focus on wartime conditions may give the impression that women’s increased presence within the labour market was ephemeral and did not last after the Great War. Civil servants, though they provide an example of female labour who have been continuously employed before, during and after the First World War, have attracted little attention among historians of Ireland. Even when British female civil servants have been explored by scholars like Helen Glew and Meta Zimmeck, historians have tended to emphasise that few changes introduced during 1914–1918 endured in the interwar period.¹⁵

While it is true that women civil servants failed in achieving equal wage at the end of the war, it should be kept in mind that postal servants with a permanent position had a different experience from both female workers in private industry and civil servants in other government departments which employed women only after the First World War began. Though many women who got their jobs during the war were forced to return home to make space for disbanded veterans, permanent women employees had existed in the Post Office ever since 1870 and, as the government had guaranteed occupational stability on their appointment, they were not compelled to leave their posts even after the war.

Abolition of open competition

On 12 February 1897, H. O. Arnold-Foster, a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for West Belfast, complained about the dearth of employment opportunity amongst discharged soldiers. He lamented that 20,000 Army Reserve men were out of work and that such gloomy employment prospect for ex-servicemen would have a negative impact on the recruitment rate.¹⁶ The significance of the problem identified by Arnold-Foster was immediately recognised and action was taken by the War Department through the Post Office. It was decided that half of the vacancies for Postmen and Porters in the Post Office would be reserved for ex-soldiers and ex-sailors.¹⁷

The implementation of this new policy was delayed until 1902 due to the outbreak of the Second Boer War. When it was finally initiated, it soon had a negative effect on existing Boy Messengers in the Post Office. The Boy Messengers was a class of unestablished workers who entered the Post Office at the age of 14, hoping to be promoted to a permanent position such as Postmen or S.C. and T.s. The department was supportive of their aspiration and a certain proportion of vacancies for these classes were earmarked for successful candidates of a limited examination held among Boy Messengers. However, as ex-servicemen were given priority, many Boy Messengers who could not expect any permanent position in the future had to leave the Post Office. Therefore, it was reported in 1910 that 6,700 Boy Messengers out of the total number of 15,400 had to be discharged from the Post Office every year.¹⁸

In 1910, a Standing Committee on Boy Labour in the Post Office was appointed in order to discuss the solution to this problem. To minimise the number of dismissals, the Standing Committee proposed to reduce the number of Boy Messengers in the first place. This, they reckoned, would be possible through (1) substituting other labour for that of boys – for instance, Girl Probationers to replace Boy Messengers; (2) greater use of electrical and mechanical appliances to assist female labour and (3) to help as many Boy Messengers as possible to become employed either in other government departments or on the open market. Furthermore, to absorb as many existing Boy Messengers as possible into other classes within the Post Office, it was encouraged to reduce the number of open competitions for male S.C. and T., a process that was already underway.¹⁹

Before the end of the Second Boer War, most employees of the Post Office were recruited through a mixture of open and limited competitions. Generally, open competition was more popular than limited examination among Irish postal workers who reckoned that any form of pre-selection would be more favourable to English or Scottish applicants who were more likely to have access to patronage from higher officials in London. By this reasoning, some postal workers went as far as criticising limited competition to be “pernicious practice” that should be restrained.²⁰

To the disappointment of Irish postal servants, however, the number of open competitions began to decrease throughout the United Kingdom after 1902 as vacancies had to be preserved for both ex-servicemen and existing Boy Messengers to compete through the limited competition system. Whereas approximately 50% of Sorters in London had been recruited by open competition before 1902, the proportion decreased to 25% in 1905 and to 15% in 1909.²¹ In trying to counteract such tendency, Irish postal servants argued that abolition of open competition was detrimental not only to them as a category, but also to the public, seriously decreasing the quality of the service. They insisted that the efficiency of the Civil Service could only be maintained through employing talented postal servants who had been recruited through open competition.

Irish postal servants believed that the reliability of open competition had been proven when both open and limited competitions were held simultaneously in January 1911 to employ four male Learners for General Post Office in Dublin. Of these, two were selected from open competition while the other two were recruited through limited competition. Indeed, there was a huge difference in the number of candidates coming forward for these positions: 79 candidates applied for the open-competition jobs, while only 11 did so for the limited-competition ones.²² Irish workers insisted that a larger pool of candidates in the open competition would bring much better qualified applicants to the Post Office.

As the Table 1 shows, the eleventh successful candidate in the open competition received a better score (1,371) than the most distinguished limited-competition candidate (1,366).²³ This result was utilised by postal servants to assert that open competition was a fairer and more efficient way of recruitment. When a Select Committee of Enquiry for the Holt Commission was held in 1912 in order to review the postal servants’ wages, the AIPOC sent delegates with the aim to revive the open competition, but their effort did not result into a positive outcome.²⁴

Table 1. The result of open and limited competitions held in Dublin to employ male learners in the G.P.O. (January 1911).

Open Competition		Limited Competition
Rank	Score	Rank	Score
1	1,502	1	1,366
2	1,490	2	1,315
3	1,463	3	1,236
4	1,458	4	1,227
5	1,457	5	1,222
6	1,452	6	1,185
7	1,440	7	1,177
8	1,429	8	1,090
9	1,391	9	1,015
10	1,387	10	1,005
11	1,371	11	795

Source: The Irish Postal and Telegraph Guardian, May 1911, British Postal Museum Archive, Post 115/257.

While Irish postal servants expressed their strong support for open competition, decision makers of the department held a different view towards it:

… though abandonment of open competition might reduce the likelihood of getting candidates of conspicuous merit, and though the [limited competition] system would tend to restrict the area of recruiting, it was doubtful whether in the aggregate there was much difference between officers recruited by the two methods … possibly open competition attracted men of too high an intellectual standard, who might be discontented owing to having no opportunity to show their capacity.²⁵

While it was generally admitted that open competition attracted more well-educated men compared to the limited competition, senior officials regarded that classes like that of the Sorters did not require “too high an intellectual standard.” It was also mentioned that high score in examinations did not guarantee the practical skills necessary in the workplace.

Using these arguments, it was not difficult for the Post Office to increase the proportion of limited competition openings to secure enough opportunities for Boy Messengers and ex-Servicemen. Moreover, there were certain advantages for the department in increasing the number of jobs reserved to limited competition. It was much easier for the Post Office to control recruitment if they employed temporary workers whenever labour shortage occurred, instead of holding regular open competitions. Also, in this way they could reduce the general expenditure on labour.

From the 1630s the postal service has been a department whose revenue and expenditure were part of the national budget.²⁶ Therefore, both the Treasury and the Post Office were susceptible to the employees’ demands for higher wages. Postal trade unions, which received their first official recognition by the Postmaster General in 1906, organised demonstrations and relentlessly sent petitions and lobbied MPs in pursuit of increased wage and welfare. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the grievances of postal servants were handled by a series of parliamentary commissions: Tweedmouth (1895–7), Bradford (1904), Hobhouse (1907–8), and Holt (1912–13).

After each commission, the Post Office was asked to raise the salaries of almost every member of the service. Though it was a recommendation rather than a mandatory order, the Postmaster General could not simply dismiss the recommendations of the commissions, as both the public and some MPs were sympathetic to the postal workers’ plight. The Post Office often chose to compromise and applied a slight increase in wages – far short of the amount suggested by committee members but still resulted into a substantial increase in total expenditure as the Post Office possessed the biggest number of civil servants. For instance, the proportion of wages to the total revenue of the service in the Telegraph department increased from 67.75% in 1901 to 97.12% in 1914.²⁷ To keep its status as a revenue-earning department, the Post Office had to cut its costs. One easy way to do so was to employ more “flexible” labour – the temporary workers – through nomination.

As open competitions were considered to be very demanding, the Post Office was persuaded to promise permanent posts to successful applicants, as a recognition of the time, money and energy which they had spent on their education. For the Post Office deeply worried about raising costs, this was not a satisfactory situation. Hence the decision to employ temporary workers, which would also secure a further saving on the costs of holding regular examinations. In addition, the government could pay lower wages and did not have to worry about pensions. There was another advantage to reducing the number of open competitions – it could weaken the power of the trade union, as temporary labour poured into the Post Office through the link to higher officials, not by their own talents passing the examination.²⁸

For the same reason, the number of women increased steadily in the Post Office during this period. Women were paid only two-thirds of their male equivalents and deemed to be more “docile” and “less disposed than men” to combine for trade union activities though the Post Office was often wrong on this count.²⁹

While the number of permanent staff generally exceeded that of temporary workers in the nineteenth century, the tendency was reversed in 1903. In that year, the number of workers on the establishment of the Post Office was 79,552, of whom 10,702 were women. On the other hand, the number of workers in the unestablished situation was 104,043, of whom 27,401 were women.³⁰ Also, the number of women employed in the Post Office increased constantly throughout the early twentieth century, the figure increasing from 35,377 in 1901 to 60,659 in 1914. In Ireland, the number of women during the same period increased from 3,337 to 4,799.³¹

Irish male workers became angry and fearful of such phenomenon and searched for efficient ways to prevent female labour. At this moment, the open competition for Female S.C. and T. was abolished, providing a great excuse to stigmatise women as “unqualified,” though male temporary workers were immune from such criticism.

In accordance with the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Boy Labour, the number of boy messengers employed inside the telegraph offices and in departments where a female clerical staff is employed has been decreased, and girl probationers substituted for them. It is proposed to recruit a part of the female indoor manipulative staff by limited competition from girl probationers, and to this extent to reduce the number of this staff recruited by open competition.³²

Following the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Boy Labour and of the Holt Report, the Post Office increased the number of Girl Probationers, the temporary female workers who were in charge of miscellaneous work in the Telegraph branch, to take the place of Boy Messengers. They entered the Post Office under the nomination system without examination and could ultimately become Telephonists or Telegraphists after years of working as temporary labourers. It meant that the Post Office had to cut down the number of open competitions previously held for female S.C. and T. in order to preserve enough vacancies for these temporary workers to be promoted in future. This way, the suppression of the open competition, which had been confined to men at first, was extended to female workers.

The members of the AIPOC – both women and men – protested against this decision. They suspected that “favouritism” played a major role in the selection of Girl Probationers. Such suspicion seems to have been well-founded as the first two Girl Probationers were nominated through personal connections: one was a daughter of the Secretary of the Dublin Telegraph Messengers’ Institute, and the other of the Inspector of Telegraph Messengers.³³ During annual conferences of the AIPOC in the early 1910s, resolutions requesting the reintroduction of open competition were raised and approved every year. Women delegates were particularly vocal. For example, at the ninth annual conference which was held on January 1913, a deputy, named Eleanor Jones from Dublin Ladies’ branch, insisted that the abolition of open competition was scandalous. She asserted that from an “educational point of view,” there was a high possibility that future women employees would be much inferior to the current ones who had been recruited through open competition.³⁴

The decline of open competition was especially detrimental to women because, as we have seen, it had been used as a means for talented female applicants to prove themselves against engrained gender and religious bias, such as the oft-repeated claim that women were both physically and psychologically weaker than men. Established female clerks tried to consolidate their position inside the trade union by using open competition as a means to differentiate themselves from temporary staff. They blamed postal servants who have been recruited through nomination or limited competition as sneaking into the Civil Service via “back-door.”³⁵ They argued that female clerks who had entered through open competition – in contrast to nominated candidates – had a strong title to full membership of the Civil Service. Male members of the AIPOC were at first encouraging such attitude.

The importance of open competition to women can be even more clearly demonstrated by examining the activities of a women-only association. The APOWC, ever since its initiation, firmly asserted that men and women should be paid the same amount of salary for the same amount of work and that women should be permitted to enter all Civil Service appointments, not deterred from promotion on the basis of their sex.³⁶

For them, the argument for equal opportunity and equal wage was based on two grounds: that Women Clerks were doing the exact same duty as Male Clerks and that both groups have entered the Post Office through the same kind of examination.³⁷ The department denied their claim and insisted that men were entitled to earn “breadwinner wage,” unlike women who were working for “pocket money.” Instead of being disheartened by the objection, female postal servants refuted it by arguing that there were many single women who had to support their parents and that they could perform the exact same duties as men, if given chances. They argued that, indeed, they were already successfully carrying out physically arduous duties like the Savings Bank and Ledger ones.³⁸

As mentioned above, the open competition functioned to guarantee their educational qualification and worked as a means to require higher status. These Women Clerks often criticised temporary labourers who entered the Post Office without such qualification. The Dublin members of the APOWC were no exception and, on one occasion, a letter was sent to the Headquarters of the Association by a Dublin Woman Clerk named A.T. Murphy. In the letter, she blamed the employment of temporary clerks as “ever present and ubiquitous evil.” She insisted that temporary clerks were less qualified as many of them entered the Post Office after having applied for the open competitive examination for Women Clerks only to fail in getting a good score. According to her, they were only capable of easy routine work though they still made many mistakes even when carrying out these simple duties.³⁹ What worried her the most was that these clerks could “degrade” the position of women clerks as a whole. This was a peculiarly female concern: by contrast, men did not worry about any perceived “degradation” of the whole male staff when open competition was abolished for male S.C. and T.

In the AIPOC, just as Women Clerks in the APOWC had feared, the status of women inside the trade union began to be undermined. Though male members insisted that they were only blaming temporary female clerks who creeped into the Post Office through personal links, it was clear that they wanted to remove women as a whole. For them, women were not only “stealing” male vacancies, but also lowering the wage of male workers by providing the government with cheaper substitutes. On the surface, male workers were just complaining about the increased amount of work caused by women’s influx. They especially insisted that the presence of women was inherently detrimental to the interests of men as women were banned from night duties. According to the Post Office, women were not capable of working late at night. However, as Samuel Cohn has argued, such “paternal” concern functioned as a discriminatory policy against women and kept down their salaries.⁴⁰

That notwithstanding, discontent among male staff was mounting, and was strongly expressed at the 1912 annual conference of the AIPOC, when a resolution was moved to criticise “the practice of creating female appointments and of nominating women to female vacancies at offices where the nature of the work warrants additional male force.”⁴¹ In addition to ordinary members, the executives of the AIPOC also shared in the general antipathy towards female labour. In an Enquiry for Holt Committee in 1912, the Honorary General Secretary reiterated the view that the employment of women was a cause of split attendances and excessive night duties for men. He also went as far as arguing that recruitment of women should be limited if their existence harmed the interests of male members.⁴²

However, it seems clear that male clerks were not protesting against the employment of women just because their working conditions had deteriorated. There was one more group of postal staff who “monopolised” preferred duties in local offices. In the Post Office, the writing duty was a much desired one, as it often resulted in promotion. It offered a chance to Sorting Clerks to show off their talent since this duty was focused on clerical work. Also, the staff in charge of the writing duty were privileged with regular working hours, exemption from the night duties, and a half-day off on Saturdays.⁴³ The writing duty was limited and often suspected of being filled by the “favourites” of high officials. Nevertheless, even when few male clerks were dominating this duty, they were not as harshly criticised as women workers or being generalised as “taking advantage in the workplace based on their sex.”⁴⁴ This suggests that objection to women did not arise merely from practical grievances, but also from gender bias and fear of female competition.

Though female staff in the Post Office could no longer resort to open competition to prove their own abilities, there were still other ways to improve their position in the Post Office: in particular, by emphasising that they could carry out so-called “male duties.”⁴⁵ As the number of women increased in the early 1910s, they were allowed to take charge of duties from which they had previously been excluded. Various tasks including sorting, parcel and counter work were newly opened to them on the eve of the First World War. For instance, in the College Green branch in Dublin, where the proportion of women was high, women were employed in parcel duties and counter work.⁴⁶ The Counter Clerk was especially important as it had been regarded as “the eyes and the ears of the Postmaster General” and it involved a huge responsibility in dealing with approximately £1,000 a day.⁴⁷

The employment of women in counter duty was criticised both by men and women, but for different reasons. While male members of the AIPOC insisted that women were not capable of carrying out this stressful task, female members, represented by Eleanor Jones, argued that it was the discrepancy between wage and intensity of labour that was objectionable. As an illustration, she pointed out that in the College Green branch junior female officers were in charge of the counter duty though they were poorly paid and not sufficiently trained to perform such demanding work.⁴⁸

All these examples show that, before 1914, the Post Office was already experiencing what used to be pointed out as the result of the First World War. The number of female labourers was increasing, the kind of duties allowed to women expanded, and male clerks were already afraid of the “feminisation” of the Post Office. During this period, permanent female servants did not embrace newly employed temporary women under the apprehension that their existence might negatively affect the general welfare of women in the Post Office. Such tendency continued and amplified after the breakout of the First World War.

The impact of the First World War on female postal staff

Postal servants during the war were placed in a different position from factory workers, nurses, or charity workers who could volunteer for the war work rather than to join the anti-war campaign.⁴⁹ Unlike other women in private industries, civil servants had no choice but to help the war work as they were the employees of the government. The strategic significance of their duties was further increased by the war as the Post Office monopolised the communicative means of the state, which were crucial in conducting the war efficiently.

Also, as skilled labourers, many telegraphists and engineers were summoned to regiments and deployed in France to connect wires and deliver telegrams. Immediately after the war broke out, up to 11,000 men in the British Post Office enlisted with the armed forces and the number of recruits increased rapidly to record 68,000 by November 1916.⁵⁰ Therefore, it was imperative for women to fill the vacancies resulting from the recruitment of the male staff to keep the means of communication intact.

The amount of Post Office work itself had also noticeably increased. The Army Postal Service was established to handle mails between Britain and the forces abroad and to transmit information between units at the front. At the local level, the Post Office functioned as a local branch of the War Office benefit department, for it paid allowances to soldiers’ and sailors’ dependents and distributed leaflets to promote recruitment.⁵¹ The increased amount of work was handled by temporary labourers who were mostly women. The total number of women employed in the British Post Office amounted to 170,000 in 1919 compared to 65,000 in 1914.⁵² As the department clearly stated in 1915, female postal servants were best serving the state during the war in the performance of their ordinary duties.⁵³

Despite the lack of conscription in Ireland, the hiring of temporary women surged in the Irish Post Office just as it did in England. For one thing, as Niamh Gallagher has mentioned, many Irish men – both Protestants and Catholics – volunteered for the army even without conscription: among 900 Irish postal servants engaged in telegraphic work, nearly half of them volunteered for the active service by 1916.⁵⁴ Still, Irish male postal workers insisted that there was no need to “employ females to any great extent, as circumstances [were] entirely different from those obtaining in England.”⁵⁵Answering to them, the Postmaster General firmly stated that it was necessary to employ more women as even men ineligible for the Army and Navy could be assigned to military duties which were not suitable for women.⁵⁶ Due to the shortage of male labour, women had to take “male” duties such as delivering mails and opening returned parcels, tasks which had hitherto been reserved to male employees.⁵⁷ In this way, the Great War provided a good excuse for the Post Office to continue its “feminisation” of recruitment and staff profile, which was already underway before the war.

During this period, as implied above, male members of the Irish postal service tried to undermine female labour in various ways. They queried the quality of newly employed female civil servants. The AIPOC argued that many temporary workers were daughters of Service officials who secured employment on their personal connections. Also, it mattered that senior officers deemed it a waste of money to provide them with sufficient training, as these women were supposed to be employed only for the duration of the war.⁵⁸ The AIPOC criticised not the department but the temporary women for lacking appropriate skills and insisted that there were candidates who were more qualified to take their position. In Queenstown in May 1916, for instance, it was lamented that while there were several female learners who had passed open competitive examination, a vacancy was filled by a woman who had passed a “secret” qualifying examination.⁵⁹

However, the opposition of male workers to female labour was not confined to temporary women workers. It happened that even when a qualified woman was doing the work provided by the office, men opposed female labour, asserting that women were too “weak” to carry out “male” duties. For instance, the AIPOC in September 1918 challenged the employment of woman on the counter duty when there was an available male clerk to carry out the work. Their objections fell apart when, after an investigation, it turned out that Miss Kirwan, the woman in charge of paying army allowances at the counter (which was considered a “male” duty by the AIPOC), already had considerable familiarity with this duty, while the male candidate was comparatively inexperienced. The government added that this work was done by women in many offices in both Ireland and Great Britain and there was no reason for her to cease her duty.⁶⁰

After receiving this answer, the Association changed their line of argument, saying that Miss Kirwan was receiving less salary compared to her male colleagues and that it was unfair for her to be asked to handle large amount of money, a task which was stressful and should be better remunerated. Also, according to the Association, she was working in an environment which was “disagreeable” even by the standards of male workers, because her office was too cold, badly ventilated and draughty: allegedly a woman could not withstand such severe and undue hardship.⁶¹ The last argument was hardly defensible, as lack of ventilation, excessive heat and inadequate lighting in local branches were a common plight for postal workers, and women members of the AIPOC had long been complaining about them.

The male-employees’ lobby showed more aggressive form of opposition when the sorting duty was extended to women in the Belfast Sorting Office. The Resident Executive in Belfast sent a petition against the introduction of female labour on sorting and a deputation consisting of the executives of the AIPOC visited the Secretary of the Irish Post Office to discuss the matter.⁶² The possibility of hiring women sorters in Dublin was also discussed during this visit, and the Secretary had to assure the deputation that women would not be employed where male labour is available.⁶³

Even when female members themselves were confident in performing out new duties hitherto not allow to them or volunteering to work for longer hours to share the burden of war, postal trade unions did not allow such active attitude. For instance, when female staff in Galway sent a paper to the Postmaster and offered their services to do all the male duties including night duties and Travelling Post Office duties, they were mocked by male members to be “displaying their Amazonian qualifications.”⁶⁴

Despite such concerted campaign, Irish women postal workers benefitted from the war in various ways and tried hard to use this opportunity to enhance their rights or consolidate their position inside the Post Office. The most important change for women postal servants was that more posts and positions were allowed because the war lasted much longer than anticipated. While their employment opportunities had already expanded before the war, from 1914 the relevant changes were quantitatively larger and officially implemented throughout the whole country. By 1916 women were allowed late-night duties, split duties, and Sunday duties which had hitherto been banned to them. In some instances, even the regulation of the marriage bar was broken when there were not enough eligible applicants.

More importantly, some Women Clerks attained long-waited promotion by taking newly opened chances in other departments of the Civil Service. The stagnation in promotion has always been a concern for female postal servants as there were few senior posts available for women. Since administrative and executive classes were still unavailable to women, promotional dead end came too fast for them.⁶⁵ Many women at their maximum salary had to wait until their superiors retired upon old age, marriage or bad health before they could be promoted.

Such difficulty was slightly mitigated when several government departments like the War Office which had hitherto been closed to women opened their doors to fill the vacancies caused by the enlistment of male clerks. As it was difficult to thoroughly examine candidates through open competition during the war, these departments asked for the transfer of competent Women Clerks from the Post Office. When the Post Office began to recruit volunteers to other departments, many Women Clerks whose promotion has been delayed due to the lack of vacancy applied for it. In this way, 19 Women Clerks were transferred to permanent appointments in other departments of the Civil Service during the First World War while 55 more Women Clerks were temporarily on loan to relieve wartime difficulties.⁶⁶

As such, female postal servants’ duties extended both within and outside of the Post Office. In this process, they actively pursued new opportunities and gained confidence by successfully replacing men’s positions. These women showed pride in their own abilities and such an attitude can best be illustrated by the way they reacted towards their salary and war bonus. The wage issue was an important element as women in the Post Office were clearly relating their value as a worker to the salary they received. Such an attitude could be glimpsed by a Woman Clerk in the Post Office who argued that employers would not offer high wages if they did not think her services were worth it.⁶⁷

Support for equal wage for equal work had already been raised by postal trade unions even before the war.⁶⁸ Still, the breakout of the war provided women with more concrete basis for such argument. The government and the press were praising women for their excellent war work, and it was more clearly seen by the public that women were taking over the duties from recruited men. Also, previous hurdles to equal wage such as the prohibition of night duties for women and lack of female facilities were eliminated during the war.

Some women openly resented the gender pay gap. One Miss Heap of AIPOC’s Dublin branch, was outraged that the advertisement on the Postmastership of Whitby Post Office said that “women applying for appointments advertised for Postmasters or Sub-Postmasters should understand that the pay for a woman is normally less than that advertised for a man.” She expressed her anger towards such discrimination and argued that, where the responsibility and work were the same for both sexes, women should be paid the same wage as men.⁶⁹ Male members of the AIPOC were also in strong support for “equal wage for equal work,” but this was with a view to discouraging the employment of women. Male members thought that women were employed only because they were cheaper and expected that, if women were paid the same wages as men, the government would not have any reason to prioritise women.⁷⁰ Though women were well-aware of such intentions, they showed confidence that they could successfully compete with men both in the entrance examination and their given tasks and that the government will still employ women based on their merit.⁷¹ In 1916 women in Waterford insisted that “if they did the work of men they should be paid in proportion” and such an attitude persisted during the war period.⁷² However, at this crucial moment, a striking decision for female clerks was made by the government regarding the payment of the war bonus.

Due to the soaring cost of living during the war, wages were too low to offer the living standard which the profession required, as various postal trade unions complained. The government did not want to permanently raise the wage and they decided to give war bonuses instead. There was a prolonged discussion on the exact amount and in September 1916 the Treasury granted a general war bonus, the recipient of which was confined to civil servants whose salary was less than £3 a week. The result shocked many women in the Post Office in that women would be paid only half the amount of male equivalents’ war bonus.⁷³

When it was announced, female postal servants felt betrayed, for they thought that they had served the government faithfully during the war and indeed had often been praised for their efforts. They adopted an “unfeminine” course of action: they protested and challenged the prevalent gender discrimination. One Miss Murphy, of the Dublin Telephones Branch, referred to it as an “insult.”⁷⁴ Dublin Telegraphists insisted that “there is not the slightest justification for a differentiation between men and women.”⁷⁵ Also, female members of the Association strongly argued that high cost of living affected women in the same way as men, and, in some cases, it was even harder for them to cope.⁷⁶

Irish women, in addition to this blatant sexism, had to fight against another discrimination, one apparently based on their residency. Female telephonists were angry at the fact that while their sisters in England were granted additional 3s. per week for the war bonus, Irish members were excluded from this measure.⁷⁷ Women Clerks were also struggling from differentiation in the scale. As a rule, Irish Women Clerks were paid less than their London equivalents and they have persistently struggled to correct what they regarded as an injustice. Already in 1911, Dublin women sent a deputation to the London Secretary of the General Post Office to complain about this unfair treatment, and they constantly asked the executives of the AWPOC to fight on their behalf to solve this problem. The AWPOC did represent Dublin clerks’ opinion and asked for equal pay for London, Dublin and Edinburgh when they sent a deputy to the Holt Committee. Yet, the recommendation of the Holt Committee in 1913 was not satisfactory to the Irish clerks as the maximum salary of the Second-Class Women Clerks still showed £10 differences between London and Dublin.⁷⁸

It was a more serious concern for Irish women than Irish men. The problem was that when Women Clerks working in London were transferred to Ireland, those in their maximum wage experienced pay cuts. Strangely, this rule was not applied to men in the same situation. As Irish Women Clerks were already suffering from such differentiation in wage, their only hope was that the war bonus would be generous. When such prospect was frustrated, and when differentiation in the treatment of civil servants in England and Ireland was proposed regarding the war bonus, Dublin Women Clerks entered a formal protest against the department, but with no result.⁷⁹ In this way, the granting of war bonus showed that the state was not yet ready for what they must have regarded as a revolutionary action.

Though female postal clerks failed in securing equal wage with men, they could still enjoy an advantage compared to female workers in other industries. At the end of the war, to provide vacancies for returning soldiers, the government and industries forced women to return home. However, permanent postal servants had been guaranteed a lifetime workplace and pension on their entry to the Civil Service, and the government could not dismiss these women even amid hostile attitude of the society towards female labour. Also, due to the marriage bar, there might have been less pressure for the government to lay off all the women at once, as it was expected that some of them would soon retire upon their marriage.

Even temporary postal women could stay in the Post Office due to the peculiar characteristic of their workplace. Mark James Crowley, who has provided specific research on postal clerks during and after the First World War, has argued that, unlike other government departments, the Post Office did not experience any large-scale dismissal of female servants after 1918. According to Crowley, it was difficult to obtain a sufficient number of skilled male employees in the Post Office due to the complex nature of the duties required. Therefore, it proved necessary to retain female workers even after the war, in order to smooth the transition from wartime to peace footing.⁸⁰

In Ireland, the need for female labour actually increased where the self-governing dominion was established in 1922. The Irish Free State which was built upon the ruin of the civil war desperately needed to balance the budget. The Irish Post Office, which had just become independent from the British government for the first time since 1830, was targeted as a source of revenue. Female labour was a precious resource in the sense that they provided cheaper labour compared to their male equivalents.

As such, Irish postal women defended their position as civil servants after the Great War and the establishment of the Free State. They remained underpaid and debarred from high-ranking positions. However, they did not quietly succumb to what they perceived as injustice. In September 1922, the first major industrial dispute occurred in the form of postal strike and female employees participated, holding pickets with their male colleagues.

Conclusion

The Post Office was the biggest employer for women before the First World War. Here, women were employed as permanent clerks who enjoyed occupational stability and pension rights if they remained in the Post Office until their retirement. Two elements – that they entered the Civil Service through open competition and that they were guaranteed with a permanent position on their entry – placed established workers in the Post Office in a unique position.

These well-educated women believed that they were as competent as their male colleagues and requested to be treated as such even before the First World War began. This idea was consolidated when more areas hitherto closed to them opened up after the beginning of the war. Believing that the last barrier that prohibited them from receiving equal wage as their male colleagues, they strived to get what they wanted. Although this effort resulted in failure, the strengthened self-confidence became a great resource after the war. These women were not removed from employment and the government could not force them to “return home.” In a society which celebrated patriarchal values and family duties, this was a victory of sorts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For the improvement of female education in Ireland during the nineteenth century, see Parkes, A Danger to the Men; Cullen, Girls Don’t Do Honours; Raftery and Parkes, Female Education in Ireland; and O’Connor and Parkes, Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach.

2. Bradshaw, Open Doors for Irishwomen, 5.

3. Ibid.

4. Ferguson, The Post Office in Ireland, 295. For the changes resulting from the Northcote-Trevelyan Report, see Sutherland, Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-century Government.

5. Since the incorporation, the Irish Post Office has been subject to the regulations imposed by the British Civil Service which was often “English centric” until its independence in 1922 with the establishment of the Free State.

6. See Cullen-Owens, “Women and Work”; and O’Connor, “The Revolution in Girls’ Secondary Education.”

7. See Daly, “The Formation of an Irish Nationalist Elite.”

8. The Dual Workers Guardian, March 1903.

9. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, 444.

10. For the history of trade unions in Britain, see Reid, United We Stand. For the development of postal trade unions in the UK including Irish one, see Clinton, Post Office Workers; and Humphreys, Clerical Unions in the Civil Service.

11. Clinton, Post Office Workers, 248.

12. Association Notes, January 1911.

13. A marriage bar, which made it compulsory for women to retire on marriage, was first instituted in the British Post Office in 1876 and was removed as late as in 1946. In Ireland, it was briefly removed with the establishment of the Irish Free State but was restored in 1924 under Section 9 of the Civil Service Regulation Act. For the marriage bar in the Irish Civil Service, see Foley, “Their Proper Place.”

14. For the prior research on Irish women during the Great War, see Gallagher, “Irish Women and War-Relief”; Walsh, Irish Women and the Great War; “We Work with Shells”; Reilly, “Women and Voluntary War Work”; McIntosh and Urquhart, Irish Women at War; Horne, Our War; O’Riordan, “Titled Women and Voluntary War Work”; Pašeta, “Waging War on the Streets”; and Thom, “Women, War Work and the State.”

15. Glew, Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation; Zimmeck, “Get Out and Get Under”; Zimmeck, “Jobs for the Girls”; Zimmeck, “The New Woman.”

16. House of Commons Debate (hereafter, HC Deb) 12 February 1897, vol. 46, cc. 319–368.

17. First Report of Standing Committee, 3.

18. HC Deb 23 June 1910, vol. 18, cc. 507–75; In the Post Office, when Boy Messengers reached the age of 16, a weeding-out system was operated to retain only those whose conduct and health were thoroughly satisfactory. It was originally aimed to provide a chance to boys who were not talented enough to secure their places in the senior position to find a job opportunity in the market as early as possible.

19. First Report of Standing Committee, 2.

20. It was lamented as such with the proportion of limited competition exceeding that of open competition in 1909. The Irish Postal & Telegraph Guardian (hereafter, IPTG), June 1909.

21. First Report of Standing Committee, 6.

22. IPTG, May 1911.

23. Ibid.

24. “Holt Committee Report,” IPTG, September 1913.

25. Ibid.

26. Clinton, Post Office Workers, 21.

27. Report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1913–14, 124.

28. IPTG, July 1911.

29. Scudamore, “Report on the Re-organisation,” 78.

30. Forty-Ninth Report of the Postmaster General, 1903, 23.

31. Forty-Seventh Report of the Postmaster General, 1901, 20–21, 49–50; and Report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1913–14, 25, 61.

32. See note 24 above.

33. IPTG, February 1912.

34. IPTG, February 1913.

35. The Dual Workers Guardian, October 1903.

36. See note 12 above.

37. Association Notes, October 1911.

38. Association Notes, November 1911.

39. Association Notes, July 1911.

40. Cohn, The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing, 118.

41. See note 33 above.

42. Evidence Submitted to the Select Committee, The British Postal Museum Archive (hereafter BPMA), Post 115/258.

43. IPTG, December 1918.

44. IPTG, April 1913.

45. There was no clear definition but works that required physical strength or involved sensitive materials were often referred to as “male” duties. For instance, returned parcels had to be handled by men for the fear that they might contain “immoral” items. Sorting was also a male duty as there were no “special stools for women to sit on.”

46. IPTG, May 1910.

47. See note 42 above.

48. See note 34 above.

49. See Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War; and Horne, Our War for the debate on Ireland and the First World War.

50. Report of the Postmaster General, 1915–16, 1.

51. Pall Mall Gazette, October 1914.

52. Martindale, Women Servants of the State, 75.

53. Association Notes, January 1916.

54. Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War; IPTG, July 1916.

55. IPTG, December 1915.

56. Ibid.

57. See note 45 above.

58. IPTG, January 1916.

59. IPTG, May-June 1916.

60. As in the case of Kirwan, it became more common for postal women to perform duties that had previously been considered as male ones. Such change pressured higher officials to reconsider the value of female employees, but it did not lead to the grant of equal pay for both sexes. For similar situations in Britain, see Crowley, “Inequality and Value Reconsidered.”

61. See note 43 above.

62. IPTG, March 1916.

63. IPTG, April 1916.

64. See note 62 above.

65. Postal women during this period belonged to clerical (Woman Clerk) and manipulative (Telegraphist and Telephonist) grades and the former was considered to be senior to the latter. Administrative/executive grade was confined to men and women were admitted to the administrative grade through open competition in October 1922 for the first time. See Takayanagi, “Sacred Year or Broken Reed?”

66. Association Notes, July–Sept, 1918.

67. Ibid., April-June 1918.

68. See note 37 above.

69. IPTG, September 1918.

70. IPTG, September 1917.

71. Association Notes, April 1911, October 1913.

72. IPTG, February 1916.

73. IPTG, October 1916.

74. IPTG, December 1916.

75. IPTG, June 1917.

76. IPTG, April 1917.

77. Ibid.

78. Association Notes, September 1913.

79. Association Notes, April 1917.

80. Crowley, “Inequality and Value Reconsidered,” 18.