Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880-1914 (review)

During the nineteenth century, Westminster enacted much legislation to protect factory and other workers from the harmful effects of industrial labor. Many measures sought to limit child exploitation and provide children in industry with some education. The Factory Act of 1844 included clauses for the prevention of accidents and the compensation of accident victims, some of which applied to all ages and both genders. From the 1880s the British government (not the nonexistent English one to which Carolyn Malone refers) addressed the problem of occupational health—initially in white lead manufacture, and later in other trades and industries.

Malone's comparatively brief study focuses on protective legislation for women, mainly in the lead industries, in the quarter-century preceding World War I. The core thesis is that public and scientific debate about the so-called dangerous trades, as well as the legislation that ensued, centered upon the perceived need to protect women and the offspring they would inevitably produce once they married. Thus, newspapers depicted occupational lead poisoning as a woman's problem "that could be resolved only through the elimination of women from those harmful trades" (p. 1). Although lead poisoning affected both male and female workers, "medical men reduced it to a 'woman's problem'" (p. 118). Some women's groups opposed protective legislation, but others, such as the Women's Trade Union League, supported it. "Convinced of the detrimental impact of lead work on maternity, the government created the legal apparatus for the regulation of the dangerous trades in 1891 and 1895" (p. 139). In an era of fierce economic and imperial rivalry, and driven by concern about the present and future health and fitness of the British people, the government sought "to limit or remove women from dangerous work" (p. 7); in so doing, it effectively implemented "measures that resemble what we today call 'foetal protection'" (p. 3). These are not entirely new arguments: Malone herself has previously developed them in articles; three of her seven chapters have appeared in journals in much the same form. Barbara Harrison too, as Malone acknowledges, has covered similar ground.¹ Does the thesis stand up?

In the late Victorian and Edwardian years women figured prominently in debates over occupational health and disease. They were, however, banned from few workplaces. Malone's argument best fits the white lead trade because women were excluded from its most dangerous processes, though not from the industry as a whole. The number affected was comparatively small: contemporary estimates indicate that a few hundred women may have lost their jobs. Those who were deprived of their livelihoods no doubt suffered, but compared with the total number of women in potentially hazardous industrial employment, this figure was tiny. For example, in 1907 some 359,000 females, 31,000 more than ten years earlier, worked long hours in hot, dusty, and noisy cotton mills full of dangerous equipment.² Tens of thousands more worked in other branches of the textile trade. In pottery manufacture, notwithstanding Malone's exaggerated contention that "lead poisoning was decimating" the workforce of Stoke-on-Trent (p. 52), measures to "safeguard women and their potential offspring" were "less drastic" (p. 53) than those applied to the white lead trade. Furthermore, in this and other industries, many safeguards covered men, women, and the young. In short, while there may have been numerous proposals to ban women from workplaces, generally, as Harrison has stated, "prohibition or the exclusion of women was not accepted as a legislative remedy."³

Malone has produced an interesting study within a fast-growing area of historical research. Ultimately, however, her central thesis is not entirely convincing. In particular, her claims for the existence of "foetal protection" policies in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain are overstated and anachronistic.