Wartime Labor Policies and Married Women

: Social Status of Women’s Employment during the Wartime Period

Abstract

This paper shows the effects of wartime labor policies on married female workers forced by economic necessity to work. It points out the problems they faced in the workplace and in raising children, and describes how such problems were dealt with.In the wartime period, the government considered married women employed as wage workers for economic reasons prior to the mobilization policy as part of the labor force, although this was not clearly legally encoded in law or imperial edict. As the war situation worsened, the government had no choice but to mobilize unmarried women who had not previously been forced to work, so it gave them special consideration. For this reason, conflicts erupted in workplaces between the women’s volunteer corps and the regular female workers. The differences in treatment accorded to the two groups of women were reduced in order to resolve conflicts, and it became possible to improve the work conditions of unmarried women. But the government expected married women forced to work by economic necessity to continue working without special consideration, and therefore did not improve these workers’ conditions despite their continued employment.