Are accidents gender neutral? the case of women's industrial work in Britain, 1880-1914

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines two principal issues in the study of accidents: first, the conceptual and measurement problems in arriving at any historical understanding of the incidence and prevalence of accidents; and second, the thesis that accidents are not neutral in terms of gender and gender relations. Using evidence for the period 1880-1914, the paper focusses on the industrial accident and examines these questions in relation to official discourse and regulation around accidents. In mounting the argument that industrial accidents were indeed gendered, machines are given a central locus in explaining the debates about cause, prevention and the nature of sufferers of industrial accidents. The paper concludes that the alienation of women from machines in general, and from industrial accidents and from factory regulation concerned with them in particular, was central to a marginalisation of this form of threat to women's health and livelihood