Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
As with the other ranks, though, there are much fewer first person accounts of the canary girls, for example. As hard and grim and tragic as service on the front was for women, there was a romance, a thrill to it, that Vera discusses. Not so much for a factory worker, although it was equally liberating for those who performed it.
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I didn't realize that munitions workers were referred to as canary girls because of the poisonous effects of working with the hazardous materials for which today we would have numerous safety precautions. Tragic that women died from these jobs for these reasons and yet during those times the women saw it as honorable that they too could die in service to King & Country like the men. Some even gave birth to yellow babies. Here is an article I found that interviewed a canary baby and has lots of info and photos on these women.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...abies-WW1.html