Gendered discourses and the making of protective labor legislation in England, 1830-1914

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 166-191

  Malone, Carolyn ^a  

^a BALL STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040333612     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386157     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833; reprint, New York, 1972), p. 68
2. Dr. Thomas Oliver, "Lead Poisoning and the Race," British Medical Journal 1 (May 1911): 1096
3. Ava Baron, "Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future," in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), p. 31
4. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 2
5. The movement for the ten-hour day has generated tremendous interest among historians, and they have interpreted it in several different ways. For an overview of the diverse interpretations, see Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860 (New York, 1996), pp. 5-9
6. Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population, pp. 63-5
7. John Deegan, a Chartist, spoke at a public meeting in Leicester. The proceedings were reported in the Northern Star (1 June 1839)
8. Thomas Malthus, On the Principle of Population, in Sources of the Western World, ed. Marvin Perry, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore Von Laue (Boston, 1995), 2:121
9. Dr. James Kay, The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (London, 1832; reprint, London, 1970), p. 62
10. For an analysis of the anxiety of reformers Kay and Chadwick, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 55-72, 98-131
11. Alexander, "Women, Class, and Sexual Difference," p. 137
12. and Robert Hall, "Unsexing the Male: Gender, Technology, the State, and Chartism in the Cotton District, 1830-1860" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Conference on British Studies, Orlando, Fla., November 1993)
13. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)
14. and Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)
15. Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York, 1992), pp. 75-107
16. and Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 1-23
17. see Sonya O. Rose, " 'From behind the Women's Petticoats': The Movement for a Legislated Nine Hour Day and State Protection of Working Women in Britain, 1870-1878," Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (March 1991): 32-51, and "Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Strategies of Male Trade Unionists in Nineteenth Century Britain," Social History 13, no. 2 (1988): 191-208
18. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, p. 59
19. J. H. Bridges, M.D., and T. Holmes, M.D., "Report to the Local Government Board on Proposed Changes in Hours and Ages of Employment in Textile Factories," C. 754, Parliamentary Papers, 1873, 60:840
20. Thomas Maudsley, letter and paper sent to the Home Office, Public Record Office (PRO), London, HO45/9308/12500, item no. 5
21. Manchester Guardian (11 June 1873)
22. The aims of the SPEW were outlined in Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 19 (Sep-tember 1859): 54-59
23. For more on the LNA activities regarding the Contagious Diseases Campaign, see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York, 1980)
24. Vigilance Association for the Defense of Personal Rights and the Amendment of the Law, Constitution and Rules (Manchester, 1871), p. 1
25. Richard Whately Cooke-Taylor, "What Influence Has the Employment of Mothers in Manufacturing on Infant Mortality; and Ought Any, and What, Restrictions to Be Placed on Such Employment?" in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, ed. Charles Wagner Ryllis (London, 1875), p. 574
26. See, e.g., Jessie Boucherett, "Legislative Restriction on Women's Labour," Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 16 (October 1873): 252-58
27. See Jessie Boucherett, Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 15 (July 1873): 209-11
28. Dr. William Acton, "The Perfect Ideal of an English Wife," in Strong Minded- Women, ed. Janet Horowitz Murray (New York, 1982), pp. 127-28
29. For this important development, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (New York, 1971)
30. and Anthony Wohl, The Eternal Slum (Montreal, 1977)
31. For more on sweating, see James Schmiechen, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860-1914 (Urbana, Ill., 1984)
32. and Jenny Morris, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades: The Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation (Aldershot, 1986)
33. Since the 1870s, male nail and chainmakers had regarded competition from women working in domestic workshops as the cause of their low wages and frequently proposed the prohibition or restriction of women's work in the trade as the answer to their low wages. For these developments, see Sheila Blackburn, "Working Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-sweating Legislation, 1880-1931," International Review of Social History 33, no. 1 (1988): 42-69
34. quot;Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System," C. 169, Parliamentary Papers, 1890 17:286
35. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England since 1830 (New York, 1987)
36. The various facets of this development have been considered in Joel H. Weiner, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalistic Press in Britain, 1850s-1914 (London, 1988)
37. See Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)
38. Daily Chronicle (21 December 1892)
39. Dr. Thomas Oliver, "Lead and Its Compounds," in Dangerous Trades: The Historical, Social, and Legal Aspects of Industrial Occupations as Affecting Health, by a Number of Experts, ed. Dr. Thomas Oliver (London, 1902), p. 296
40. For these and other developments, see Carolyn Malone, "The Gendering of Dan-gerous Trades: Government Regulation of Women's Work in the White Lead Trade in England, 1891-1914," Journal of Women's History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 15-35
41. "Dangerous Industries," British Medical Journal 1 (January 1893): 7
42. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 27 (16 July 1894), col. 1022
43. Dr. Thomas Legge, "Industrial Lead Poisoning," Journal of Industrial Hygiene 1 (1901): 103
44. Daily Chronicle (27 June 1898)
45. Mary Drake McFeeley, Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Belter Workplace, 1893-1921 (New York, 1988), p. 66
46. Petition from the Operative Potters' Association, 16 January 1893, PRO, H045/ 9851/B12393E, item no. 12
47. From the transcript of arbitration, November 1901, PRO, HO45/10120/B12393P, pp. 142-43
48. For more on the male breadwinner ideal, see Wally Seecombe, "Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Social History 2, no. 1 (January 1986): 53-76
49. Progressive medical men were writing about the generally dangerous nature of the pottery trade. For more on this subject, see Dr. Edward Greenhow, Papers Relating to the Sanitary State of the People of England (London, 1858)
50. or Dr. John T. Arlidge's testimony before the Children's Employment Commission (1863) when he testified to the general physical degeneracy of pottery workers male and female. Also see Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian London (London, 1983)
51. W. R. Lee, "Emergence of Occupational Illness in Victorian Times," British Journal of Industrial Medicine 30 (April 1973): 118-24. Arlidge's testimony is quoted in E. Posner, "
52. John T. Arlidge (1822-1899) and the Potteries," British Journal of Industrial Medicine 30 (April 1973): 246-70, esp. 266
53. Helen Ogle-Moore and Edith Hare, "The Work of Women in the White Lead Trade," in The Conditions of Women and the Factory Acts, ed. Jessie Boucherett and Helen Blackburn (London, 1896), pp. 77-84
54. Transcript of the deputation from the Women's Industrial Defence Committee to the Home Office, 22 June 1894, PRO, HO/45/9881/B16265, item no. 5, pp. 25-26
55. Herbert Spencer made this point in The Study of Sociology (New York, 1906). This work was based on a series of articles Spencer published in Popular Science Monthly (1872-73). For more on the subject, see Susan Sleeth Mosedale, "Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider 'The Woman Question,'" Journal of the History of Biology 11, no. 1 (1978): 1-56
56. Patrick Gcddes and J. Arthur Thompson, The Evolution of Sex (London, 1889); the quote is in Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression (London, 1981), p. 147
57. Dr. Thomas Oliver, "Presidential Address to the Conference on Industrial Hy-giene," Journal of the Sanitary Institute 24 (1904): 181
58. The gendered and repressive nature of science has been analyzed in Elizabeth Fee, "Science and the Woman Problem in Historical Perspective," in Sex Differences: Social and Biological Perspectives, ed. M. S. Teitelbaum (Garden City, N.Y., 1976)
59. Jill Conway, "Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution," in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, Ind., 1973)
60. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centu- tries (Hemel Hempstead, 1989)
61. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, 1989)
62. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1991)
63. See Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 6-66; and Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare Schemes in England, 1900-1939 (London, 1980), and "The Working-CIass Wife and Mother and State Intervention 1870-1918," in Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940, ed. Jane Lewis (Oxford, 1986). Also see Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898-1918 (London, 1987); and Sonya Michel and Seth Koven, "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920," American Historical Journal 95 (October 1990): 1076-1108
64. See Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1914 (New York, 1993), pp. 3-10, 195-221. She does carefully note that there had previously been organizations and activities in London concerned with the conditions of motherhood among the poor, but she clearly differentiates between them and developments during the early twentieth century. She argues that the difference is most clearly seen in the exclusive focus on mothers and child care, the sheer size and intensity of organizations, and, very importantly, the coercive laws which accompanied this activity
65. "See Carol Dyhouse, "Working-Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England, 1895-1914," Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 73-98
66. Anderson, Women in the Factory, p. 114
67. Oliver, "Lead Poisoning and the Race," p. 1096
68. William T. Stead, "Government by Journalism," Contemporary Review 49 (1886): 653-74
69. For more on the following campaigns, see Malone, "Sex in Industry," pp. 198-217. The long-standing controversy over women's pit brow work has been discussed in Angela V. John, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, 1980)
70. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, p. 48-49
71. Kathleen Canning, "Social Policy, Body Politics: Recasting the Social Question in Germany, 1875-1900," in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), p. 233
72. The tremendous anxiety about the declining birth rate in France has been amply illustrated in Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648-76
73. Judith F. Stone, "Republican Ideology, Gender, and Class: France, 1860s 1914," in Frader and Rose, eds., Gender and Class, p. 249
74. For an extensive analysis of the creation of French protective labor legislation, see Mary Lynn Stewart, Women, Work, and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879-1919 (London, 1989)