Invisible labours: Mill work and motherhood in the American South

Social History of Medicine

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 235-251

  Hill, Patricia Evridge ^a  

^a SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

1930s; Infant welfare; Maternal welfare; Occupational health; Physicians; Public health; South Carolina; Southern medicine; Textile mills; Women in medicine

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; MATERNAL WELFARE; OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH; POVERTY; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIOECONOMICS; TEXTILE INDUSTRY; UNITED STATES;

HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MATERNAL WELFARE; OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH; POVERTY; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; TEXTILE INDUSTRY; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0030207164     PISSN: 0951631X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/shm/9.2.235     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. Preparation of this paper was supported by a 1993 Gloeckner Fellowship from the Medical College of Pennsylvania and a 1994 summer research fellowship from the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. The author is grateful for assistance provided by the staffs of the Archives and Special Collections on Women and Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania and the University of South Carolina's South Caroliniana Library.
2. J. Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950 (Toronto, 1990), pp. 23, 29-30. Forty per cent of Penmans female employees were wives in 1936.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, vol. IV, Population, 1910 Occupation Statistics (Washington, 1914), p. 37.
4. D. Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984 (Chapel Hill, 1992), p. 350. Generally, southern textile mills employed African-Americans only as bale openers and scrub women - the least desirable positions for men and women respectively - until the civil rights activism of the 1960s.
5. See for example G. Freeze, 'Poor Girls Who Might Otherwise Be Wretched: The Origins of Paternalism in North Carolina's Mills, 1836-1880,' in J. Leiter, M. Schulman, and R. Zingraff (eds.) Hanging by a Thread: Social Change in Southern Textiles (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 21-32.
6. For information on the development of the textile industry in South Carolina, see D. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge, 1982)
7. and I. Newby, Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915 (Baton Rouge, 1989).
8. C. Howard, 'Sowing the Seeds of "Welfare": The Transformation of Mothers' Pensions, 1900-1940', Journal of Policy History, 4 (1992), p. 204.
9. Quoted in A. Kohn, The Cotton Mills of South Carolina (Columbia, 1907), p. 23.
10. J. Hall et al. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987), p. 310.
11. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Federal Writers Project, South Carolina Interviews (hereafter FWP-SC), Microfiche #3709, pp. 11656-71 (quotation p. 11667).
12. FWP-SC, Microfiche #3709, pp. 11429-39 (quotation p. 11433).
13. C. Kizer, 'Trends in Annual Birth Rates among Married Women in Selected Areas According to Nativity, Age, and Social Class', Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 15 (1937), pp. 54, 60. The dissemination of contraceptive information had been banned in the United States since the 1870s. In 1936, a federal judge ruled that physicians had the right to give and receive contraceptive information. The following year, the American Medical Association passed a resolution allowing its members to dispense contraceptive advice to patients on request.
14. See L. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1990)
15. or J. Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York, 1978).
16. L. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980 (Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 83, 99.
17. See also A. Kessler-Harris's provocative A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, 1990).
18. D. Rosner and G. Markowitz (eds.) Dying for Work: Workers' Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington, 1987), pp. xii-xiv.
19. A Bale, '"Hope in Another Direction": Compensation for Work-Related Illness Among Women, 1900-1960 - Part I', Women & Health, 15 (1989), p. 89.
20. Quoted A Bale, "Hope in Another Direction": Compensation for Work-Related Illness Among Women, 1900-1960 - Part I, Women & Health, 15 ( 1989), ibid. p. 84.
21. See also A. Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D. (Boston, 1943).
22. See for example D. Rosner and G. Markowitz, 'The Early Movement for Occupational Safety and Health, 1900-1917', in J. Leavitt and R. Numbers (eds.) Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, (2nd ed., Madison, 1985), pp. 507, 509, 515. 'Stretch-out' was the mill workers' term for management's practice of assigning operatives to tend ever greater numbers of machines in order to keep labour costs low during the post- First World War textile slump and again during the Great Depression.
23. L. Rosa Hirschmann Gantt was a 1901 graduate of the Medical College of the State of South Carolina (now the Medical University of South Carolina), where Hilla Sheriff received an MD in 1926 and Gertrude Ryan Holmes graduated in 1933. Hallie Rigby was a 1917 graduate of Johns Hopkins and Lonita M. Boggs received an MD from the Medical College of Virginia (Richmond) in 1924.
24. Hall, Like a Family, see Map I.
25. Hall, Like a Family, Ibid. p. 319;
26. C. Taylor and C. Taeuber, 'Constructive Rural Farm Population Policies', Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 16 (1938), pp. 240-1.
27. R. Botsch, Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics, and the Brown Lung Association (Lexington, 1993), p. 19;
28. Bale, 'Hope in Another Direction', p. 89.
29. E. Beardsley, A History of Neglect: Health Care for Blacks and Mill Workers in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville, 1987), p. 62.
30. In a fundraising letter, AWH Director Esther Pohl Lovejoy asserts that the maternal death rate in South Carolina was the highest in the nation averaging 9.8 per 1,000 live births between 1929 and 1938. For comparison, the maternal death rate in Flint, MI, an industrial area employing many mothers, was 4.4 per 1,000 live births in 1937. See Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, American Women's Hospitals Records (hereafter AWH Records), letter from Lovejoy, 28 May 1938, Box 34, Folder 320, and M. Burnell, 'Mothers in Industry', The Mother, 6 (1944), p. 13.
31. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, Hilla Sheriff Papers (hereafter HSP), 'History and Development of Services to Mothers and Children in South Carolina, 1878-1929', 1975 typescript, pp. 9-10, Box 4, Folder 129.
32. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, pp. 2-3, 62.
33. Kohn, Cotton Mills of South Carolina, pp. 46, 54, 76, 84.
34. The figures in Table 1 were calculated from a list of names provided by the mill itself. The table demonstrates the presence of large numbers of women among the long-term work force of a typical southern mill corporation (Greenwood Mills has been the largest employer in Greenwood County, South Carolina throughout most of the twentieth century). Over 95 per cent of the women listed as active, retired, or deceased members of the Quarter Century Club in 1967 used 'Mrs' in front of their names. As the figures indicate, many women retired due to poor health. Disability here refers to an employee who retired before the age of 65 because she could no longer do her job. The company accepted no responsibility for the causes of these disabilities. See G. Robinson, The Character of Quality: The Story of Greenwood Mills (Columbia, 1967), pp 136-61.
35. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, pp. 210-11. Southern business leaders and landowners who looked to the textile industry to diversify the region's economy after the Civil War are typically referred to as New South boosters.
36. The Federal Writers Project interviews for both North and South Carolina (in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) contain many oral history interviews with female textile operatives. Published accounts based largely on oral history interviews of working women in North Carolina include Hall's Like a Family
37. and V. Byerly's Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca, 1986).
38. A. Tullos's Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill, 1989) draws from oral history interviews of both North and South Carolina male and female textile operatives.
39. FWP-SC, Microfiche #3709, pp. 11684-700 (quotations pp. 11689-91).
40. When southern states belatedly established workers' compensation systems, female mill workers could not prove that poor nutrition, frequent pregnancies, and sheer exhaustion contributed to their disabilities. See Rosner and Markowitz, Dying for Work, p. 97.
41. Quoted in Beardsley, A History of Neglect, p. 67.
42. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, Ibid. pp. 68-71.
43. Both quoted in Flamming, Creating the Modern South, pp. 175-6.
44. See B. Levy and D. Wegman (eds.) Occupational Health: Recognizing and Preventing Work-Related Disease (Boston, 1983), pp. 281-2;
45. P. Raffle et al. (eds.) Hunter's Diseases of Occupations (Boston, 1987), pp. 690-705;
46. and W. Gafafer (ed.) Occupational Diseases: A Guide to their Recognition, Public Health Service Publication No. 1097 (Washington, 1964), pp. 56-8.
47. For the history of byssinosis since the 1940s, see Botsch, Organizing the Breathless,
48. J. Corn, Response to Occupational Health Hazards: A Historical Perspective (New York, 1992),
49. and C. Levenstein, D. Plantamura, and W. Mass, 'Labor and Byssinosis, 1941-1969', in D. Rosner and G. Markowitz (eds.) Dying for Work, pp. 208-23.
50. Botsch, Organizing the Breathless, quotation p. 39;
51. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, p. 230.
52. Botsch, Organizing the Breathless, p. 38;
53. Hall, Like a Family, pp. 67-72.
54. During the mid 1930s, for example, South Carolina led the nation in reported cases of pellagra. It shared this leadership with Mississippi throughout much of the 1930s. See W. Sebrell, 'The Nature of Nutritional Disease Occurring in the South', Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 17 (1939), pp. 360-1.
55. AWH began as a committee of the Medical Women's National Association (now AMWA), established during the First World War to address the needs of wartime refugees in Europe. For biographical data on Gantt, Sheriff, and Rigby, see the 1965 American Medical Directory; Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association, Special Issue: Pioneer Women Physicians in South Carolina, 89 (1993), pp. 20-3, 35-10;
56. E. Bass, 'L. Rosa Hirschmann Gantt, MD', Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, 11 (1956), p. 109;
57. M. Phifer, 'L. Rosa H. Gantt, MD', Bulletin of the Medical Women's National Association, 33 (1931), pp. 9-10; HSP, Biographical Data, Box 3;
58. and 'Family Planning Clinic Started Here in 1935' in Spartanburg Herald-Journal, 14 October 1973.
59. AWH Records, L. Boggs, 'The Maternity Shelter', p. 72, Box 16, Folder 136.
60. E. Lovejoy et al. 'American Women's Hospitals', Medical Review of Reviews, 39 (1933), pp. 211-12;
61. E. Lovejoy, Women Physicians and Surgeons: National and International Organizations (New York, 1940), p. 198.
62. E. Lovejoy, Women Physicians and Surgeons: National and International Organizations 1940), p. 198. Ibid.
63. See also Boggs, 'The Maternity Shelter', pp. 72-4;
64. E. Lovejoy, 'Medical Service of the AMWA: Maternal and Child Health Service, the AWH in South Carolina', Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, 4 (1949), pp. 300-2;
65. and AWH Records, 'Dedication of the Maternity Shelter', 1954 typescript of Hilla Sheriff's speech at the opening of a new shelter facility, Box 23, Folder 226.
66. HSP, 'Spartanburg County Department of Health Annual Report', 1931, p. 45, Box 4, Folder 130.
67. On Little Mothers' Leagues, see S. J. Baker, Child Hygiene (New York, 1925), pp. 230-9.
68. Lovejoy, 'American Women's Hospitals', pp. 211-12;
69. Lovejoy, 'Medical Service of the AMWA', pp. 301-2.
70. HSP, typescript of slide presentation, p. 6, Box 3, Folder 103.
71. 'Spartanburg County Department of Health Annual Report', 1931, pp. 38-9.
72. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, pp. 198, 216, 221.
73. For typical forms of mill-sponsored welfare work and workers' views of these efforts, see Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harriet L. Herring Papers, #4017;
74. Hall, Like a Family;
75. Flamming, Creating the Modern South;
76. and Tullos, Habits of Industry.
77. AWH Records, Report of the Spartanburg County Department of Health, June 1934, Box 16, Folder 137.
78. AWH Records, 15 March 1934 letter, Box 16, Folder 137.
79. AWH Records, quotation in 14 March 1932 letter, Box 16, Folder 137. See letters of 9 September 1935, Box 16, Folder 137, and 28 November 1945, Box 23, Folder 226 for examples of Sheriff's views on the issues mentioned here.
80. Baker, Child Hygiene, pp. 133-4, 174-5, emphasis in original.
81. Baker, Child Hygiene, pp. 133-4 Ibid. See the British Ministry of Health's 1932 'Final Report of the Departmental Committee on Maternal Mortality & Morbidity', Maternal and Child Care section, American Medical Women's Association Records, Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA for another example of confusing findings on the effects of industrial work on women of childbearing age.
82. FWP-SC, Microfiche #3709, pp. 11701-15 (quotation p. 11715).
83. Ibid. p. 11668.
84. Ibid. pp. 11672-83 (quotation p. 11672).
85. Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Oral History Program, Interview #4007, quotation pp. 10, 14.
86. Ibid. p. 20.
87. Rosner and Markowitz claim that by the mid 1930s, public health officials 'derided what they saw as the "unscientific" approach of earlier generations of reformers.' See Dying for Work, p. 88.
88. HSP, 'Suggestions and Recommendations of the Committee appointed to Investigate the Activities of the Spartanburg Health Department', Box 4, Folder 130.
89. HSP, see Sheriff's Spartanburg County Health Department Annual Narrative Reports, 1937 and 1938-1939. Box 4, Folder 130.
90. For biographical information on Gantt, see Bulletin of the Medical Women's National Association, 29 (1930), p. 7;
91. 'Second Annual Meeting of the Association of Southern Medical Women', Woman's Medical Journal, 25 (1915), pp. 15-16;
92. Bass, 'L. Rosa Hirschmann Gantt, MD';
93. and Phifer, 'L. Rosa H. Gantt, MD'. For topics of interest to the South Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs, see the programme of the Club Institute on Public Affairs, June 1939, a three-day meeting focusing on ways to improve the South Carolina economy in HSP, Box 4, Folder 130.
94. In The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890-1920 (Tuscaloosa, 1992), Mary Martha Thomas links the Alabama Federation of Women's Clubs' ambivalence on the child labour issue with many of its members' financial interests in cotton mills.
95. AWH Records, Minutes, 18 February 1942, Box 31, Folder 298.
96. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, p. 235.
97. Botsch, Organizing the Breathless, p. 20.
98. Beardsley, A History of Neglect, pp. 223, 352.
99. J. Antler, 'Having It All, Almost: Confronting the Legacy of Lucy Sprague Mitchell', in S. Alpern et al. (eds.) The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, 1992), p. 110.
100. See also Antler's 'Feminism as Life Process: The Life and Career of Lucy Sprague Mitchell', Feminist Studies, 7 (1981), pp. 134-55;
101. R. Morantz et al. (eds.) In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians (Westport, 1982), especially pp. 125-8;
102. R. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York, 1985);
103. and B. Sicherman, 'Working It Out: Gender, Profession, and Reform in the Career of Alice Hamilton', in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye (eds.) Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington, 1991), especially pp. 142-3.
104. B. Grigg, compiler, Medical Woman's Directory, (2nd ed., Cincinnati, 1949), p. 183.