Leitrim Women Through Time: Voices from the Factory Floor

“Leitrim Women Through Time” (LWTT) is a collaborative community heritage project which records and shares the stories of everyday rural women from the county, previously neglected in the historical record.

Women played an important role in rural industry in Leitrim throughout the twentieth century, with the first factories to hire a mainly female workforce in the county established in the 1930s. Through their work on the factory floor, women helped Leitrim become an important hub of industrial activity, assisting to make a range of products that made their way across the world to millions of international customers. The underappreciated but highly skilled work carried out by the many women of the factories helped to put Leitrim on the map as a place of high-quality manufacture for almost sixty years.

In 2025, LWTT held a callout for former women workers of the county’s factories to get in touch to share their memories and experiences of their work. The project held a number of filmed reminiscence events and interviews with women who had worked in factories across the county, and recorded information relating to female factory activity and industry in Leitrim in the period of 1930 to 2000. This film shares some of the stories collected during this phase of the project.