Women's Munitions Workers, Sheffield

Highly-skilled women defy 1940s gender prejudices and produce munitions in one of Sheffield’s many wartime factories.

This film showcases the indispensable contribution that British women made on the home front during the Second World War. The Sheffield women show mastery of complex machinery with little care for their own personal safety. The film also contains an intriguing and unusual mix of black and white and colour film, which seems to have been selected deliberately for aesthetic purposes.

During the war, Sheffield’s munitions factories were a prime target for Nazi Germany. A few short months after this film was produced, Sheffield was severely impacted by a handful of raids from the Luftwaffe in December 1940. In what came to be known as the “The Sheffield Blitz”, over 570 civilians were killed and 78,000 homes were either destroyed or suffered damaged.