There were propaganda posters that also encouraged Women to do their part in the war effort. The poster on the left; On her their lives depend, shows the British government’s effort to recruit women to work in munitions plants during World War 1. Focusing on the images and ideas represented in this poster, it reveals that the poster was made to persuade women that they ought to work in jobs that were previously considered "men's jobs." Women appeared as powerful, strong figures here. Additionally, they appealed to women's sense of patriotic duty and conveyed the idea that women could play a main role in fighting the enemy through this war work. These images were apparently effective recruiting tools as thousands of women went to work in the crucial munitions industries. This poster is highly significant because, for the first time that the British government supported the entry of women into the workforce. Women filled many jobs brought into existence by wartime needs. As a result the number of women employed increased from 3,224,600 in July, 1914 to 4,814,600 in January 1918 and nearly 200,000 women were employed in government departments. The greatest increase of women workers was in engineering. Over 700,000 of these women worked in the highly dangerous munitions industry. After the war however, men took back their jobs and most women returned to the family but the War did bring about political and social changes: Women over 30 years old got the vote in 1918. Women over 21 years old got the vote in 1928. Women were also allowed to stand for election as MPs, but there were only eight women MPs in 1923. Women also became more liberated. Short skirts and short hair became fashionable and many women smoked in public. Women also worked in agriculture a lot more and trained as nurses and were allowed to drive ambulances due to war casualties.
"I wanted to do my bit for the war so I volunteered to drive an ambulance. We had to meet the troop trains at the big London railway stations - Waterloo and Victoria. The trains had hundreds of wounded soldiers packed on them. Their wounds were were frightful. Young men with no arms or legs. Many had been gassed. Others blinded. I had two nurses with me, we made a good team. One day I saw this young man on a stretcher. It was my brother, so I said to the soldiers who were carrying him: "Put him in my ambulance, I am his sister." When he died the next day I was with him, holding his hand." - Catherine Cathcart-Smith was 24 when she joined the VADs in 1914. She was interviewed about the war in 1993 when she was 104 years old.