A Rare Look At Women During WWI

By Sadie Stein  |  November 5, 2010 | 4:47pm
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We love these rarely seen images of women working for the war effort during World War I in London and America. Here’s a spirited look at some of our favorites.

Says the excellent John Ptak, from whom these images hail:

All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918 (save for a very few made in 1919) , in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption. There’s really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer.

Women in WWI—Rare Photographs, 1918 [Ptak Science Books]

 
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