The intersections of industrialization: Variation in skeletal indicators of frailty by age, sex, and socioeconomic status in 18th- and 19th-century England.

Abstract

Intersectionality theory argues that various categories of identity and forms of systemic oppression interact and produce inequalities in resource access, economic opportunities, and health outcomes. However, there has been little explicit engagement with this theory by bioarchaeologists examining disparate health outcomes in the past. This study examines the associations among frailty, age at death, sex, and socioeconomic status (SES) in 18th- and 19th-century England. The sample for this study comes from four industrial-era cemeteries from England, ca. 1711-1857. The associations among adult age (18+ years), SES, sex, and three skeletal indicators of stress (dental enamel hypoplasia [DEH, n = 293], cribra orbitalia [CO, n = 457], periosteal lesions [PNB, n = 436]) are examined using hierarchical log-linear analysis. Significant interactions existed among the variables examined for two skeletal indicators: high SES females had lower frequencies of CO relative to other groups and males between ages 30-45 years exhibited higher frequencies of PNB compared to females or males of older or younger ages, regardless of SES. Additionally, sex and SES were consistently associated with age at death. These results suggest that patterns of stress indicators cannot be examined solely across unilateral axes of age, SES, or sex. Intersecting axes of privilege, marginalization, and structural oppression may have buffered high SES females from some negative health outcomes (CO) while predisposing them to others (risk of maternal mortality). Likewise, the hazardous working conditions relegated to adult males may have heightened the risk of injury, infection, and death for middle-aged men in industrial-era England.