This online exhibition explores how women’s work changed dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century, and highlights the essential role women played in keeping the county (and country) going during the first and second World Wars.

At the start of the twentieth century, women in Britain had little involvement in the industrial workplace. Where they did, it was usually in less physically demanding tasks, for instance stoking the fires at the Lion Salt Works in Marston.

However, with a shortage of workers arising from the huge numbers of men being sent off to fight, women quickly became vital figures in wartime industry.

The First World War was an incredibly transformative period for women in the workplace. For the first time in British history, aspects of mechanical labour that had formerly been limited to men were undertaken by women on a large scale.

Between 1914 and 1918, the employment of women in Britain rose from around 24% of the working age population, to somewhere between 37% and 46%.

The biggest difference besides the increase in numbers was the range of work undertaken and the social background of those women put to work. Employment spread beyond poor, working-class women to middle and upper-middle-class women.

In 1915, Britain was gripped by a `Shell Scandal`, where troops on the front line had no ammunition with which to fight the enemy. In response to this, Emmeline Pankhurst and David Lloyd George organised the `Right to Serve` March on 17th July 1915, where large numbers of women marched demanding a greater role in the war effort.

The demonstration, which featured banners reading `The British lion is awake, so is the lioness`, led to the government allowing women to take on a prominent role in arms manufacturing.

As a result of the march, women took on a vast range of new jobs in which they had no previous experience.

Cheshire played a very important role in munitions production during the First World War, with women making up a large portion of the contributing workforce. Brunner Mond & Co. were Cheshire’s greatest producers of munitions and explosives during the period, and by 1918 they employed around 2,400 women.

Between 1915 and 1918, the company produced 191,619 tons of ammonium nitrate, which was a 4800% increase on annual production prior to the war.

From a sickness register for the company dating from 1916, we can find some of the names of the women employed by Brunner, Mond & Co. during the war, and using the 1911 Census we can see the dramatic change of occupation for many of them. Some had been dressmaking assistants, and many had been domestic servants or housewives. It may have been hard for them to imagine themselves involved in such heavy mechanical work only five years on.

One of the most important munitions sites in Cheshire during the First World War was Brunner, Mond & Co.’s Gadbrook Works in Northwich. The site was one of the most active producers of T.N.T. during the war, with an output of sixty tons per day by the end of the war.

From its opening, the Gadbrook Works was “manned” almost entirely by women, with 545 female employees. However, T.N.T. production was a deadly profession.

In May 1917, Florence Gertrude Gleave, a Northwich resident of only twenty years old, became one of 104 women to die nationally from T.N.T. poisoning, in her case from her exposure to the chemical at the Gadbrook Works. She was dubbed the `Heroine of the Factory` in the Northwich Guardian.

Though following the end of the First World War the presence of women in industry dropped to almost pre-war levels, the Second World War marked another surge in their involvement. Government figures show that women’s employment rose from around 5.1 million (26% of the female population of working age) in 1939, to around 7.25 million (36%) in 1943.

90% of all able-bodied single women between the ages of 18 and 40 were engaged in some form of work or National Service by September 1943. Many of those were employed once again in industrial roles, especially munitions production.

Cheshire was once again an important county in the productions of arms and other essential war materials. The New Cheshire Salt Works was taken over by the ministry of munitions and these images show women hard at work in the repurposed factory.

Ethel Gabain (1883 – 1950) was one of six female artists selected as official war artists during the Second World War.

Her work has been noted as having been strongly inspired by women, who were the subject of many of her portraits and lithograph scenes. When she was made a member of the War Artists Advisory Committee, she found new ways to capture the lives of women at a time of great change to their place in society.

Besides the mechanical work undertaken by women at companies such as Williams & Williams to produce munitions for the war effort, women in Cheshire were also essential to keeping the nation strong in areas less directly related to the war itself.

At the College of Agriculture at Reaseheath, some 1,200 Land Girls were trained in arable farming, poultry keeping and animal husbandry, before being sent out to help farmhands short of labourers.

The formation of the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War was indicative of a strong desire to work, much like the Right to Serve March organised at the outset of the First World War.