Women's lives before WW1

There has been a lot of research into suffragettes and women’s work during the First World War. In order to assess how much they impacted on the role of women it is important to try and build up a better picture of how women lived in the period leading up to the First World War. This activity gives students the opportunity to use photographs, buildings and documents to find out more about the lives of women from a range of social backgrounds. Students look through a selection of images and choose ten photographs that they feel give a clear picture of an aspect of women’s lives. They can paste copies of the thumbnail sized images into the table in the worksheet and add information from the photograph. They can then link what they have learned to information from textbooks and the teacher’s notes to decide their standpoint, backed with evidence, on the key question: ‘To what extent were womens lives already changing before WW1?’