This courtroom persona was quite different from the experience of laundry work. Industrial laundry work was physically demanding, the women’s workplace culture was hardly demure or retiring, and most of the women had been working for several years, meaning they had both experience and skills. Women, likely as the result of their lawyers’ advice, deliberately represented themselves differently in court in order to get more sympathy from judges and jurors.

Though I don’t go into it in depth here, my research raises questions about Workmen’s Compensation’s effects for women workers. With the full implementation of Workmen’s Compensation in Minnesota in 1923, with more regularized and smaller awards, injured women workers lost an avenue through which they could seek higher damages by playing upon gender norms at the time.

Schematically, the employer defenses in injury cases prior to Workmen’s Comp involved a gendered notion of free individual man - one who entered into contracts knowingly and of his own volition, so to speak - which was used against injured workers. Those who could be portrayed in this light did not win damages. This seems to have hurt men workers more, at least from the cases I’ve looked at, because women had an easier time getting courts to perceive them as failing to live up this notion of free contracting individual, and courts did not penalize women for this ‘failure.’ The end of the reign of these legal defenses meant that women workers lost this relatively greater flexibility in pursuing compensation for injuries.

There. That’s something of an argument.

*

For future comparison’s sake, 9 cases I found from the same time period in which men got comparable injuries (involving amputation of fingers or hands)

1. WESLEY E. SMALL v. BRAINERD LUMBER COMPANY
95 Minn. 95; 103 N.W. 726; 1905 Minn.
June 2, 1905
- lost, appealed, won a retrial

2. EARNEST W. SHALGREN v. RED CLIFF LUMBER COMPANY
95 Minn. 450; 104 N.W. 531; 1905 Minn.
July 14, 1905
- won $1995, appealed, won

3. JOHN HAGERTY v. ST. PAUL BRICK COMPANY
98 Minn. 502; 108 N.W. 278; 1906 Minn.
July 13, 1906
- won $3500, appealed, won

5. MATT LARSON v. CHARLES F. HAGLIN
103 Minn. 257; 114 N.W. 958; 1908 Minn. February 7, 1908
- won $10500, appealed, won

6. JOHN G. MILLER v. CHICAGO, MILWAUKEE & ST. PAUL RAILWAY COMPANY and Another
103 Minn. 443; 115 N.W. 269; 1908 Minn.
February 28, 1908, Original Opinion Filed
- won $6500, appealed, won

7. WILLIAM A. SNYDER v. WALDORF BOX BOARD COMPANY
110 Minn. 40; 124 N.W. 450; 1910 Minn.
January 28, 1910
- lost, requested and was denied a new trial, appealed, won a new trial, I don’t know outcome of new trial

8. DAVID LUNDBERG v. MINNEAPOLIS IRON STORE COMPANY
115 Minn. 174; 131 N.W. 1016; 1911 Minn.
July 7, 1911
- lost, appealed for new trial, lost

9. ANTONE ZEULI v. FOOT, SCHULZE & COMPANY
130 Minn. 184; 153 N.W. 310; 1915 Minn.
June 25, 1915
- lost, appealed, lost

Again, no idea how representative these are (I searched specifically for cases with injuries I thought might be comparable, by looking for search terms like hand+amputation etc), but if they _are_ representative, the odds are better for the women who lost hands in mangles than for men who lost hands in various other industrial accidents. These particular men’s cases make the workers’ comp periodization stuff less convincing than the women’s cases do, but I realy have too small a sample to make any serious claims along those lines, too few cases and too narrow a stretch of time Need to learn to do whatsits with numbers… quant… before venturing that route, and would need to brush up on the histo’graphy again too. Back to the trial records…!