March 8th is International Women's Day, so we figured it was a good time to show some rare, color images from WWII...where women played an incredibly important role and came out in droves to support both the war effort and the economy. These were taken by Alfred T. Palmer, who was an Office of War Information (OWI) photographer for the United States from 1941 to 1943. It was during this time that he, along with other photographers working for the government, captured some 1,600 images.

Palmer was most known for his portraits of men and women working in the war industry - most of which were taken on 35mm or 4x5 inch color transparency film. Palmer was partial to 4x5 giving his images a tremendous amount of detail. Notably, his images were also lit with artificial light, hence the almost cinematic quality to them.







Images from the Library of Congress via Lifehacker