Book Reviews 183 Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xiv + 241 pp. In this meticulously researched study of women munitions workers in Brit- ain during World War I Angela Woollacott provides a rich picture of that aspect of wartime life that most closely approximated the experiences of working-class men at the front. Munitions work became available to wom- en after mid 1915, when a shortage of shells combined with the need for more men at the front to create a huge demand for women workers. By late 1918, over 800,000 women performed heretofore exclusively male skilled and semiskilled work in munitions factories. Dangerous, difficult, dirty, and tedious—the similarities to descriptions of "Tommy's" work in the trenches are striking—munitions work nevertheless provided women with previously unheard of wage levels and opportunities, scope for auton- omy, and, for many, an exhilaration derived from their new-found impor- tance to the nation. It transformed their lives, and, Woollacott argues, "constituted their distinct vantage point of the war" (36). The standard labor histories of women in Britain during World War I, Woollacott notes, largely have focused on changes that survived into the postwar period. The debates concern the extent to which the war trans- formed women's lives, with one side claiming liberation, the other defeat by the renewed forces of patriarchy. Woollacott's study, by contrast, limits itself to the years of war. Regarding the munitions industry not exclusively as an opportunity for women's employment that both far exceeded and differed in kind from the pre- and postwar periods but as exemplary of women's participation in the Great War, she seeks to uncover and analyze women's experience of the war to show "what was of significance to women munitions workers during the war" (15). This is an important undertaking, for, as Woollacott claims, "people's responses to changes and events in their own lives and circumstances re- constitute their self-identities and their understanding of their positions in relation to others" (11). In order to appreciate just how much and in what ways the war changed individuals' lives, we must go beyond the conven- tional measurements of employment, of wage levels, of rights. Woollacott has presented us with moving and suggestive evidence of how munitions work boosted women's self-esteem along with their wages; enlarged their sense of imaginative possibility along with their geographic mobility; added a patriotic dimension to their identity as workers that transformed their work life from one of drudgery, hard work, and danger to one of drudgery, hard work, danger, and awareness of their significance as vital members of the nation; and thus strengthened their positions vis-a-vis men in both the industrial and familial setting. Unfortunately, Woollacott too often must rely upon the testimony of middle-class women about the behavior and attitudes of working-class mu- nitions workers, or upon interviews with munitions workers themselves conducted more than fifty years later, to make her case. As a consequence,