Women in Labor: Mothers, Medicine, and Occupational Health in the United States, 1890-1980 (review)

Ideas about gender and workplace health evolved in twentieth-century America in a discussion shaped by conflicts and alliances among business interests, health officials, physicians, workers, and feminists. The consideration of women as workers meant an ongoing reconsideration, not only of motherhood in its biological and social dimensions, but also of definitions of the workplace. The "double duty" of working women—inside and outside their own homes—presented home life as an integral part of occupational health.

Alison Hepler's well-conceptualized, carefully researched, and eminently readable study does a different sort of double duty: it is a valuable and original scholarly contribution at the crossroads of the history of public health, labor history, women's studies, and environmental history. At the same time, it makes important concepts in these fields accessible to students, and should find wide classroom use.

Women in Labor concentrates on controversies over gender-based (and often inconsistent) protective labor legislation. Such legislation fell into two broad categories: restrictions on women's hours of labor, and the exclusion of women from certain jobs or industries. Hepler highlights the differences between these types of measures, the arguments for and against them, and the ways in which the failure to attend to them often led to feminists' talking past each other. The book deepens, in subtle and complex ways, our understanding of the diversity among feminisms with respect to the "woman question in science." Hepler also highlights the tensions of "environmentalist" perspectives versus the view often promoted by industrialists who sought to place responsibility on the individual laborers. She situates this debate within the transformation of public health in a way that will help the neophyte to understand the shift in emphasis from broad causal factors to bacteriology. She then extends it significantly with a richly detailed account of how advocates on both sides represented connections between home and workplace environments. For instance, she contrasts industrial models of housework proposed by Americans versus Asian and European women in the 1950s.

The focus on protective legislation does, however, marginalize some important issues. Hepler notes that several major occupational groups of low-paid women workers—domestic and farm workers, for example—were consistently overlooked by labor reformers. They are correspondingly neglected in this volume. In particular, black women were excluded from most office, retail sales, and factory jobs for most of the period under consideration—yet their concerns overlapped those of the white occupational health reformers. In 1911, for example, Mary McLeod Bethune's high-school students studied living and working conditions in the Florida turpentine camps. Earlier, black women domestic workers in Kansas City organized for a shorter workday. Women were, of course, active in an immense, vibrant labor movement throughout most of this period, pressing for (among other things) shorter hours. A detailed consideration of their statements regarding gender and occupational health, while not impossible, is beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate that their distinct voices—which on occasion transcended the bounds of legal reformism—are nowhere to be heard.

Other omissions are more troubling. "Motherhood" was a racialized, as well as gendered, concept. A judge who upheld restricted hours for the "mothers of our race" (p. 23) was speaking in the argot of a contemporary (and very race-conscious) eugenics movement. The implications of this warrant exploration. Another example: Hepler has uncovered documents indicating that Dr. Alice Hamilton's pivotal conversion to support of the ERA immediately after World War II was influenced by Eleanor Roosevelt's concern that the United States be seen as a champion of equal rights. Yet she does not follow up, as one might expect, by...