Women’s Work in Factories, Kitchens, and Relief Production, Photo Archive c. 1900–1915

Women in the Workforce

Photograph

[Women's History] Women’s labor photo archive documenting women at work across millinery, laundry, commercial kitchen, precision bench, and wartime relief settings, preserving a concentrated visual record of how female labor was publicly pictured in the years immediately preceding and overlapping World War I. Several photographs bear Brown Bros. New York stamps, placing part of the group within the sphere of press photography, while the verso inscription “Russian Women Filling Bandages for the front” situates one image within the culture of wartime female service and aid production. The photographs show women’s work as a visible and varied part of early twentieth-century public life, where skill, repetition, discipline, and service shaped how female labor was pictured.

Photo archive of 8 photographs, 7 silver gelatin and one mounted sepia photograph, ranging from 6 x 4 to 9.5 x 7 inches, including New York and other unidentified locations, circa 1900–1915. One Brown Bros. photograph shows a seated woman trimming or assembling hats at a worktable crowded with millinery forms and materials, framing decorative labor as skilled commercial production rather than private handiwork. Another image shows four women and one man gathered around tables stacked with folded cloth, corresponding to the handwritten verso note “Russian Women [Filling Bandages] for the front.” A larger photograph, inscribed on the verso “women workers / compass making,” shows a woman seated at a bench adjusting a circular instrument with tools and components arranged before her. Another workplace view pictures a woman handling a metal object beside machinery and a crate with partial printed text ending in “...products... Cleveland.” The photograph inscribed “women in Laundry” shows several women bent over long tables in a bright workroom lined with tall windows, while the mounted sepia image depicts six apron-clad women at long counters beneath a large hooded vent in a commercial kitchen. Across the group, aprons, work dresses, caps, tables, tools, and stacked materials recur, giving the photographs a shared emphasis on feminine labor as organized, visible, and socially legible.

The archive belongs to a period when women’s wage labor was expanding in both scale and visibility, and when photography increasingly circulated images of female work as part of modern urban and wartime culture. Its strength lies in the range of roles pictured: decorative trade work, industrial handling, laundry labor, food preparation, and aid work directed toward the front, all of which show how women’s labor was understood through service, dexterity, endurance, and collective effort. The bandage-making image is especially important because it connects ordinary workplace culture to the wartime recasting of women’s labor as patriotic and humanitarian duty. Light surface wear, scattered creasing, minor silvering and fading, and general handling wear; mounted sepia photograph with heavier toning. Overall good condition. A compact and pointed visual record of the cultural meaning of women’s work at the point where everyday labor and wartime service converged.

Item #23129

Price: $750.00