Women Ropeworkers in an Unidentified Factory, Probably in Dundee

In 1918, the Women’s Work committee for the Imperial War Museum commissioned a specific series of photographs from Lewis on the women who had worked in the heavy industries and transport during the war. The intention was to offer a positive, heroic view of the women’s labours – equivalent to the men’s fighting spirit and endurance. The pictures were designed more for posterity than for propaganda, and Lewis’s photographs present the women as positive and engaging personalities. While the pictures are not evidently political, they are taken against a background of the industrial militancy, in response to the privations of war and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which focused in Scotland on ‘Red Clydeside’.

Updated before 2020