Labour member of parliament (MP) and founder of the Women’s Home Defence Corps in Great Britain during World War II. Born on April 19, 1901, Edith Clara Summerskill trained as a medical doctor, gaining political experience on the Middlesex County Council before entering the House of Commons in 1938 as a Labour MP representing Fulham West and then Warrington. An advocate of women’s rights during the war, in the postwar years she served as parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Food (1945—1950), as minister of national insurance (1950—1951), and as chair of the Labour Party (1954-1955). In 1961 Summerskill was granted a life peerage and entered the House of Lords. She died on February 3, 1980.
Summerskill’s involvement in the issue of home defense stemmed from the British response in May 1940 to the threat of invasion: the establishment by the government of the Local Defence Volunteers. Renamed the Home Guard by Winston Churchill, this was a part-time, armed, volunteer defense force of men not in military service. By November 1940 female MPs from across the political spectrum were asking why women were excluded from the Home Guard. The most consistent and determined advocate was Edith Summerskill, who first raised the issue in June 1940. Her demands, however, were ignored, trivialized, or met with arguments pertaining to matters of principle, organization, or the supply of the force.
Summerskill’s response was double-pronged. She maintained pressure on the War Office and the government, repeatedly demanding the right for women to learn to defend themselves and their homes through membership in the Home Guard. In the absence of any satisfactory response, she founded the Women’s Home Defence Corps (WHD). This was a force in which women were trained to handle weapons and learned field craft in order to permit them to play a role in the defense of Britain in the event of an invasion.
Although there is evidence of women’s units in the summer of 1940, the first references appear in War Office files from December 1940. In January 1942 the Times reported that women were learning to shoot in 30 WHD units, and by December 1942 there were said to be 250 such units with 10,000 members in London alone (Summerfield and Peniston-Bird 2000, 244). The WHD was not only an unofficial organization but also technically illegal because it was a uniformed force that provided weapons training and hence constituted a private army outside the authority of the Crown. The War Office chose not to instigate legal proceedings, however, to avoid public controversy, which could only result in raising the WHD’s profile.
When conscription was introduced for the Home Guard in December 1941 and single women aged twenty to thirty became liable for service in the women’s auxiliary forces, the illogicality of the exclusion of women from the force in a time of labor shortages was underlined. There is evidence that some Home Guard units had from the outset incorporated women, either in auxiliary capacities or by training them alongside men. In November 1941 the War Office issued an order reiterating that training of women as unofficial Home Guard units had not been authorized and stating explicitly that women were not to be instructed with Home Guard weapons or ammunition. In the face of localized practice, continued political pressure, and the labor shortage, however, the War Office drew up a scheme during 1942 to admit women to the Home Guard under specific terms.
Implemented in April 1943, the scheme involved "nominated women" who were to be suggested by recognized organizations such as the Women’s Voluntary Service. These women were to be between the ages of 18 and 65 (preferably older than 45); they were not to wear uniforms apart from a plastic badge; and they were not to receive weapons training. Their role was to undertake noncombatant duties, including clerical work, cooking, and driving. With the assimilation of women from the WHD into the Home Guard, the pressure to train women for combat roles had successfully been thwarted. In spite of a subsequent name change to Home Guard Auxiliaries, women were never permitted membership under the same terms as men. Their numbers were officially capped; nonetheless, there were 32,000 Women Home Guard Auxiliaries when the Home Guard stood down in December 1944 (Central Statistical Office 1995). Despite women’s ultimate inclusion in the force, the gender boundaries surrounding combat had been firmly redrawn.
