What in the hell …

I gotta figure that out, and fast. About the laundry stuff, I mean.

The laundry was a gendered space. The workers who did the laundry were all women. The laundries advertised as such, seeking “girls” to do the washing, drying, mangling, and folding. Men might work there as deliverymen, and the owners were usually male, but the work was done by the “girls.” The men, or as they called themselves, the laundrymen, were in charge. The laundrymen gave the orders and accumulated the profit made by the business. The laundrymen also had the technical knowledge, in their own heads and in the heads of their engineers - some of whom later opened up their own laundries. It seemed to be a point of pride for some laundrymen that they knew their machinery well enough not only to install and repair it but to modify it as well. When Kathryn Carlson was pulled into her mangle - after being ordered by Charles Kennedy to help Delia Lynch place a new muslin cover on a felt roller - it was a man, Kennedy, that had the technical know-how to remove the rollers from the machine to free her so that she could go to the hospital. This was not derived from their gender, of course, but rather the laundry involved and reproduced a gendered division of labor in which activities involving control - installation, modification, and any serious repair of machines - was a function taught to men rather than women. Had the women who worked on the machines also done the repair and modification they might have installed additional safety features, like a guard on the receiving side of the mangle to prevent themselves or their co-workers being pulled into mangles in the way that Mary McInerny or Kathryn Regan were.

These laundry workers went from their gendered workplaces - which had been a source of relative economic power, in that they earned more than in some other work available to them and where they worked in an industrial setting among all female coworkers but took orders from a male employer - into gendered courtrooms, where male lawyers argued their fate before male judges and jurors.

Nettie Blom and other women who were mangled in laundry work took their cases to court. Lawyers for the laundrymen who ran the laundries used defenses typical at the time: contributory negligence, fellow servant, and assumption of risk. Contributory negligence was the doctrine that if an employee had played a part in their own injury then the employer could not be held liable. The fellow servant rule was the idea that if anyone other than the employer contributed to the workers’ injuries then the employer was not liable. Assumption of risk was the idea that if the worker knew the work was dangerous but did the work anyway then the employer was not liable.

These legal doctrines made for arguments in court which seem strange at first. Employers’ lawyers aimed to show the competency, experience, and intelligence (defined as reasoning capacity) of the workers who were injured. They stressed the amount of time that the women had worked at these and other laundries, stressed the knowledge that women had of the mangles and their dangerous components. In doing so, they could show that the women were the type of rational independent adults who did what they did willingly such that they did not merit protective from courts. They also discussed housework, asking each of the “girls” to what degree they were now helping around the house at the home of whatever relative they stayed with. Establishing that the “girls” were helping around the house would establish the ability to do manual labor - this was an implicit recognition that housework is work - as well as establishing that the “girls” could work as domestics for wages outside of the homes of their relatives.

Employees’ lawyers, on the other hand, emphasized the inexperience of the “girls,” in order to work against any notion that the “girls” had the knowledge that they were at risk and in order to portray them as needing the protection of the men on the jury and of male judges. Kathryn Carlson’s lawyer asserted that Kathryn had neither the education nor the mental faculties to get a job that did not involve manual labor, and the loss of her hand meant that Kathryn was not capable of any work. The “girls” also all stressed on the witness stand that they were not currently doing housework, to further dramatize the extent of their injuries and to show that they were totally incapacitated.

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By taking away their ability to work for wages, their source of income, the “girls” were forced to rely on their families. Each of the injured “girls” returned to live relatives after their injury, often with their parents but sometimes with a sister. The relatives helped care for the injured “girls.” Their injuries rendered them more dependent and vulnerable, more stereotypically feminine.

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The lawyer for each “girl” stressed the suffering they had endured, and each made sure to have the injury uncovered and presented to the jury for visual inspection. The display of the injured hand coupled with narration of the great pain of the injury and description of the loss of function of the hand served to dramatize the need of the “girl” for protection. The court was effectively asked to serve in the same role as the family, to help the vulnerable “girl” now that she had suffered such a loss and was no longer able to help herself.