It has long been accepted that the rise of women in the workforce during World War II corresponded with an increased acceptance of women who worked.  The desperate need for workers, common sense suggests, required an allowance for a female workforce.  However, Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth complicates this view by showing a major conflict in British society's need to expand their medical workforce while simultaneously maintaining traditional female gender roles.
 
There have always been women who worked for their living, especially by necessity among the lower classes.  However, the prolonged conflict that came to be known as The Great War exacerbated the needs of particular business sectors, particularly that of medicine.  Many women, who were barred en masse from joining the armed forces decided, like Brittain, to do the next best thing:  become a medical professional to help treat the wounded.
 
Those who were the first to make this decision were met with very little opposition.  When Brittain told her principal about her intention to leave Sommerfield College to join the Red Cross, the woman encouraged her to do so, saying "that in the end [Brittain's] work would benefit greatly from this experience of the deeper and more serious side of life" (154).  Because much of Britain was still under the illusion that the war would only be very temporary, the idea of leaving a women's college to serve in the war effort was accepted as an enrichment experience rather than an extended leave from a traditionally accepted path for women.  Although the path to becoming a nurse was littered with bureaucracy-created hurdles (169), there were no major obstacles to those who chose to volunteer their efforts.
 
As the war dragged on, the need for medical workers became increasingly more desperate.  However, once it became apparent that this war would last far longer than originally expected, positions regarding a woman's entrance into the medical field became much more averse to that notion.  The author Brittain, who is writing this memoir from hindsight, reveals to the reader that while her younger self lamented over the shortage of doctors, a group of medical women who wished to offer their services were told by the British War Office that "all that was required of women was to go home and keep quiet" (195).  When one of her students left Sommerfield to join the WAAC, the same principal who approved of Brittain's leave of absence in 1915 held "a Sunday-night address...on the duty of remaining at college" (154) in 1918.  Now that becoming a medical worker was not a temporary adventure for young women, the British public became concerned that the traditional role of middle- and upper-class women as the homemaker was in jeopardy.  Although there was a desperate need for more workers in the positions these women wished to fill, gender expectations caused them to be turned away against the nation's best interests.