BOOK REVIEW: Carolyn Malone.WOMEN'S BODIES AND DANGEROUS TRADES IN ENGLAND, 1880-1914. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914 David W. Gutzke (bio) Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England, 1880–1914, by Carolyn Malone; pp. xi + 169. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003, £45.00, $90.00. Carolyn Malone argues that attitudes towards women's employment in hazardous trades reflected the gendered conception of dangerous work in late-Victorian England. Women, and not men, were singled out for attention, investigation, and finally legislation because [End Page 301] of male assumptions about their greater susceptibility to physical injury in unhealthy jobs, notably the manufacturing of white lead, the pottery trade, and the serving of alcohol. This, she argues, in turn betrayed convictions about women's proper role as future mothers rather than as wage earners supplementing their spouses' incomes. Women, in short, were biologically unfit for paid employment, and ought to be unpaid wives and mothers. While men were also exposed to dangerous conditions affecting their reproductive abilities, gendered notions of work and masculinity thwarted government intervention to protect males: Malone observes that male potters, for example, objected to any legal restraint on their work because it obstructed "their ability to fulfil their natural role as the family breadwinner" (140). Numerous factors—the emergence of the popular press, new medical research on lead poisoning and reproductive health, increasing female activism, and Edwardian fears of national deterioration—fostered this reorientation of attitudes. Heightened concerns about the threats of lead poisoning to women's bodies and their reproductive capacities prompted legislation that enabled the Home Secretary in 1898 to use discretionary powers to prohibit women and children from engaging in specific activities in white lead manufacturing. Because exposure of workers to lead in the pottery trade was seen as less harmful, no similar prohibitions were meanwhile placed on their employment; instead, women and children in the pottery trade were suspended from work if they failed their mandated monthly medical inspection. Malone's approach to studying this topic is, unfortunately, too narrowly concentrated on the medical community, Parliament, and the government. Legal changes came in part from pressure mobilized in the press and by public agitation. Activities of one key group, the Christian Social Union, which in a brief explanatory footnote she acknowledges spearheaded a leadless glaze campaign from 1897, are left undeveloped. (Neither the organization nor its journal, Commonwealth, appear in the volume's index.) Public indignation was also aroused by Robert Harborough Sherard's The White Slaves of England, an exposé of the hazardous trades with separate chapters on white lead and alkali workers, which was published in 1897 and soon in its third edition. Sherard is entirely overlooked as an important figure in the agitation, though ironically one of the photographs from his book graces Malone's dust jacket. Fur-pullers, typically women, who engaged in an unhealthy and sometimes fatal trade, hardly get a mention here (even in the index), yet the vileness of the work generated several sensational accounts—by Olive Christian Malvery and others—worthy of examination in any study of this topic. Women who worked with arsenic in the clothing trade and in producing emerald green (a popular type of paint) surprisingly are ignored altogether. Many of Malone's conclusions—published earlier in three journal articles and reprinted here—are disputed by P. W. J. Bartrip's contemporaneously published monograph, The Home Office and the Dangerous Trades (2002), which covers much of the same ground, with a broader focus and a better analytical framework for understanding the historical context. According to Bartrip, the state's efforts to protect women did not arise in the 1880s and 1890s, and female workers were not removed from the best paid jobs as a result of government intervention. Most critically, concern for females did not provide the chief impetus for restrictive legislation, owing to the fact that nearly all of the provisions affected men as well as women. Nor is Malone's masculinity thesis tenable. Men, Bartrip stresses, insisted on working in dangerous trades not out of a desire to assert their [End Page 302] masculine prowess, but out of a preference for employment over unemployment. As Bartrip notes, both the men's trade unions...