Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914

Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914, by Carolyn Malone (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003; pp. 169. £45). Opposition to women's industrial work, a persistent feature of the century following the Factory and Mines Acts of the 1830s and '40s, had various rationales. Mid-Victorian evangelicals were shocked by sexual immorality in mixed workplaces. Later generations were more concerned by the neglect of children of working mothers. Male trade unionists with a vested interest in avoiding competition from low-paid women workers lost no opportunity to promote the ideal of the male breadwinner. In the decades before 1914 a major preoccupation was however the effect of industrial work on women's child-bearing capacity and the health of their unborn and infant children—here the history of workplace discrimination overlaps with the history of industrial health and safety. Powers acquired by the Home Office in the 1890s to designate trades as ‘dangerous’ and impose

Criminology · Factory (object-oriented programming · Immorality · Morality · Neglect · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology