A New Workforce in Wartime

With men at the front, women (at right in this French photograph) moved into factory work at jobs from which they had been unofficially barred before the war. In addition, tens of thousands of forced laborers from the colonies were moved to Europe also to replace men sent to the front. The European experience of forced labor and service at the front politicized colonial subjects, fortifying independence movements in the postwar period. (Roger Viollet / Getty Images.)