Portsmouth’s WWI Railwaywomen: How Gendered Labor Gaps Exposed Systemic Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
Original framing: “Portsmouth's wartime Railwaywomen: Postcard documents women who kept railways running during WWI” — Phys.org
The WWI railwaywomen phenomenon was not unique but part of a broader pattern of women’s labor force integration during crises, followed by systematic exclusion post-crisis (e.g., WWII’s ‘Rosie the Riveter’ and the 1946 ‘Return to Normalcy’ policies). This cyclical pattern reveals how industrial systems are structurally dependent on gendered labor hierarchies. The post-war backlash in Portsmouth likely mirrored national trends, where women were pushed out of ‘men’s jobs’ to make room for returning soldiers.
The Portsmouth railwaywomen case exemplifies how crises expose the fragility of systems built on exclusionary labor models, yet mainstream narratives frame their contributions as temporary aberrations rather than evidence of systemic failure.
This erasure is not accidental but structural, rooted in patriarchal labor policies that treat women’s labor as auxiliary and disposable. Cross-culturally, the pattern repeats: from Aztec trade networks to Soviet female tank crews, women’s integration into critical sectors is either erased or framed as exceptional, reinforcing the myth of their ‘natural’ exclusion. The trickster here is Hermes, who reveals the absurdity of systems that depend on women’s labor during crises but deny them agency in peacetime. To break this cycle, solutions must move beyond nostalgia to institutionalize protections, decolonize labor histories, and redesign infrastructure sectors to center gender equity—not as a wartime stopgap, but as a permanent feature of resilient systems. The University of Portsmouth’s postcard, while a valuable archival tool, risks becoming a monument to erasure unless paired with deliberate policy interventions that honor these women’s structural contributions.