Women metalworkers during the First World War: the material activism of the Imperial War Museum's Women’s Work Sub Committee, 1917-1920

This multidisciplinary research investigates the way in which female smiths and metalworkers are portrayed and understood in the historical narrative and how this influences an understanding of archaeometallurgy. It seeks insights into women's perceptions of their own metalworking skills in a craft often perceived as masculine, examining the portrayals of female metalworkers over the last two hundred years to discover who recorded their work and how.
This thesis uses an assemblage of metal objects in the Imperial War Museum’s collection that had originally belonged to the Women’s Work Collection and was acquired by the Women’s Work Sub Committee from 1917 onwards, as a case study. The research identified the items using archives, exhibition catalogues and minutes of meetings, before locating the surviving objects across two sites. The resulting study reunited orphaned artefacts with their data, enabling questions to be answered about the significance of all-female curation, and how it may constitute a form of activism for women's representation in industry during the early twentieth century. The research also drew on the visual culture relating to metalworking, which was generated and exhibited by the Women’s Work Sub Committee. It examines how the gender provenance of a metal object can endure, even if the maker is perceived as atypical by the narrative.
This multidisciplinary research combines archaeology, material culture, social and industrial history, and museum studies with additional metalworking insights from the author’s own coppersmithing practice.