Irish women’s wartime networks: care work and female agency on the first world war home front

This article is a contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to recover the experience of women on the Irish home front during the Great War. We focus specifically on women who were involved in unpaid wartime supply production and logistics in the vast imperial network of wartime relief crucial to the British war effort. This article draws upon recent scholarship on care work, arguing that the British Expeditionary Force as a micro economy relied on the unpaid labour of women, particularly women of the middle and upper classes, who were prevented by societal norms from participating in paid labour, to ensure the efficient flow of medical supplies. This unpaid work was largely carried out via the Irish War Hospital Supply Organisation (IWHSO), part of a UK-wide network established during the war to furnish troops with medical supplies which could not be met via regular military channels. We argue that this industrialised care work needs to be analysed within the larger context of a professionalisation of private networks and with a view to Ireland's growing interconnectedness as a result of modernisation.