Primary sources that were gathered
Images
When visiting the Flanders Field museum in Ypres and also the trench museum and the other museums we looked at we were able to gather many images of women in action in the first world war. These images can be seen across our website as one of them is featured on each page and we used solely the images that we personally took to make up the website for this gives a more personal feel. These images managed to give us a feel of the kind of occupations that the women took on and also what they would wear while doing these jobs.
Podcasts
We also utilised a podcast in which elderly women who were young at the time of the first world war, talk about their experiences in contributing to the war, the type of work and occupations that they had and how they felt about it all of the changes that were taking place. This was really interesting and useful as a source for this allowed us to hear some first hand information and about experiences from the first world war rather than gathering this information from less reliable secondary sources on the internet. Watching this podcast allowed us to have some insight into what the war was truly like for women and we were able to fully understand and put ourselves in the situation assisting us in creating the fashion paintings and also helped us with creating our fictional character Lillian Groves, from who's perspective we wrote diary entries from before during and after the war.
Museum Visits
At the museums we visited in Ypres as previously mentioned we were able to gather mainly picture sources but we were also able to find some interesting information along with these pictures about the employment of women, registry books of when they were employed and the types of jobs that they were employed to do. This information gave us inspiration for the types of roles that women took on, at these museums we also watched a few educational videos on nurses and what they contributed to the war. Although we did not choose to focus on a nurse as an occupation this still allowed us to see what type of thing nurses would wear and how they personally experienced the war.
Secondary Sources that were gathered
Websites
In regard to websites we used a total of 21 for our research all of which we selected carefully and ensured that they were suitable by doing a quick mental evaluation each time we decided to consult a website. From these websites we gathered quite a lot of information
Videos
As for videos that we were able to gather information from we found a great BBC video describing in detail how women got involved in the war and what they did, not just taking into account the physical working jobs that they got involved in. What is really helpful about this source is that it doesn't just talk about the glory of women getting involved it also discusses the limitations of their involvement, which shows a non-bias perspective. This video also goes into how women gained rights from this experienced and how this developed the mentality of women in the long run.
Images
We found many photographs online of women before, during and after the war. This gave us an insight on what they wore while they were doing their jobs which helped us incredibly with the art piece as the three art pieces were based off of the images that we found and observed.