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


Book Description

Legislation to protect women is explored in the context of contemporary ideas on women's work, popular journalism and the advance of scientific knowledge.




Bodies and Lives in Victorian England


Book Description

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.




Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920


Book Description

This first major study of girls' health in modern Britain explores how debates and advice on healthy girlhood shaped ideas about the lives of young women from the 1870s to the 1920s, as theories concerning the biological limitations of female adolescence were challenged and girls moved into new arenas in the workplace, sport and recreation.




Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914


Book Description

This book explores the emergence and growth of state responsibility for safer and healthier working practices in British mining and the responses of labour and industry to expanding regulation and control. It begins with an assessment of working practice in the coal and metalliferous mining industries at the dawn of the nineteenth century and the hazards involved for the miners, before charting the rise of reforming interest in these industries. The 1850 Act for the Inspection of Coal Mines in Great Britain brought tighter legislation in coal mining, yet the metalliferous miners continued to work without government-regulated safety and health controls until the early 1870s. The author explores the reasons for this, taking into account socio-economic, environmental, medical, technical, and cultural factors that determined the chronology and nature of early reform. The comparative approach between the coal and metalliferous mining sectors provides a useful model for exploring the significance of organized labour in gaining health and safety concessions, particularly as the miners in the metalliferous sector, in contrast to the colliers who unionised early, placed a high value on independence and self-sufficiency in the workplace. As an investigation into the formation of health and safety legislation in a major industry, this work will be valuable to all those with an interest in medical history, occupational health, legal history, and the social history of work in the nineteenth century.




Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Volume 14


Book Description

The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society publish an annual collection of major articles representing some of the best historical research by some of the world's most distinguished historians.




Not Only The Dangerous Trades


Book Description

Using original research and focusing on occupational ill-health in relation to women workers, this book presents a perspective for the analysis of both gender and work and work and ill-health. The author gives a critique of traditional theoretical accounts of gender relations, state intervention and industrial ill-health. The chapters examine the extent to which feminist activists got involved in debates about health and industrial work, and show how activists went beyond the concerns of suffrage.; The book presents a historical period which was marked by a change in the role of the state with respect to intervention in industrial conditions, and analyses the coincidence of this with three other significant developments: the growth of expertise in industrial disease; the employment of women in the factory to take on responsibilities in relation to other women; and changes in the direction of feminist activism. In light of this analysis, the author suggests that some theoretical approaches to both gender relations and health and safety requirements require modification.




Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899


Book Description

Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899 unlocks the hidden history of working-class child care during the second half of the nineteenth century, seeking to challenge those historians who have cast working-class women as feckless and maternally ignorant. By plotting the lives of northern women whilst they grappled with industrial waged work in the factory, in agriculture, in nail making, and in brick and salt works, this book reveals a different picture of northern childcare, one which points to innovative and enterprising child care models. Attention is also given to day-carers as they acted in loco parentis and the workhouse nurse who worked in conjunction with medical paediatrics to provide nineteenth-century welfare to pauper infants. Through the use of a new and wide range of source material, which includes medical and poor law history, Melanie Reynolds allows a fresh and new perspective of working-class child care to arise.




Women and Violent Crime in Enlightenment Scotland


Book Description

This book offers important new insights into the relationship between crime and gender in Scotland during the Enlightenment period. Drawing on rich and varied court records, it explores female criminality and judicial responses to it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, against the backdrop of significant legislative changes that fundamentally altered the face of Scots law. Using a series of case studies of homicide, infanticide, assault, popular disturbances and robbery, the author argues that Scottish women were more predisposed to violence than their counterparts south of the border, and considers how far this intersected with and reflected a wider drive to `civilise' popular behaviour and to promote a more ordered society. Challenging feminist interpretations that see women principally as the victims of male-controlled economies, institutions, and power structures, the book calls for a major re-evaluation of the scope and significance of female criminality in this era. ANNE-MARIE KILDAY is Principal Lecturer and Head of the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University.




Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain, 1780-1850


Book Description

A comprehensive study of the occupational health of employed children within the broader context of social, industrial and environmental change between 1780 and 1850.




England's Great Transformation


Book Description

With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line. Building his argument on three case studies—the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers—Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England’s Industrial Revolution.