What in the hell …

Bits of this will be familiar to anyone who slogged through most or all of my november posts. Revision plan follows in a comment, after the notes. Feedback welcome.

“Mangled: Women’s Workplace Injuries in Industrial Laundries, 1900-1920”
Draft
Nettie pressed on the fabric with her palm to hold it flat as she inched it toward the spinning felt-covered rollers. The rollers took the edge of the tablecloth, pulling it, so that the fabric now moved on its own under Nettie’s hand. The wet linen clung to her skin for a moment too long; now her hand was between the rollers. Nettie screamed and tried to pull her hand free. The rollers pulled her forward with the linen tablecloth, grinding her palm against the steam-heated iron roller inside the machine. A co-worker rushed over, stomped on the foot-pedal to turn off the spinning rollers, and threw the lever to open up enough space between for Nettie to pull her hand free from the crushing and burning rollers.
She drew her hand from the machine, or what was left of her hand. The back of her hand was black and blue to the wrist. Bone stuck through the skin on her index, middle, and ring fingers. The flesh looked like boiled meat. Three of her co-workers fainted at the sight. After extensive and painful surgeries, Nettie could barely use her thumb and little finger, and lost her index, middle, and ring fingers (the middle was amputated entirely at the large knuckle, the other two were amputated at the next knuckle after, leaving small stumps).
The machine that took Nettie Blom’s hand on June 30, 1900 was called a mangle, a machine used in laundries in businesses across the United States.[i] Blom worked on a Troy mangle, made by the Troy Laundry Machine Company in Troy, New York.[ii] The mangle consisted of two rows of felt covered rollers and in the middle of the bottom row a larger metal roller which was steam-heated to approximately 375 degrees F. The purpose of the mangle was to dry and press linens. The felt rollers fed the cloth forward to the steam-heated roller. The upper row of rollers pressed the cloth down on the steam-heated roller. Rollers beyond the steam-heated roller continued to move the cloth through the machine to where it would be removed by a second worker. When mangles got a hold of hands instead of fabric the results were terrible.
Nettie Blom took her employer to court for her injury and lost. Many other women worked in similar conditions and some suffered similar injuries. In what follows I discuss the type of work women like Blom and other women workers did in laundries, to provide the context for mangle injuries. [iii] I then discuss Blom’s lawsuit and other women workers’ law suits for their injuries.

I. Women and Laundries
Nettie Blom worked in a laundry in the basement of a hotel, laundering bed linens, table cloths, and other items used in the hotel. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally hotels and hospitals were more likely than commercial laundries to provide lodging to their employees as they had beds on site. Restaurants, hospitals, prisons also often had their own in-house laundries as well. Those that didn’t have an in-house laundry made use of commercial laundries, as did many individuals and families. Industrial laundries, particularly commercial industrial laundries, were often known as steam laundries.
A 1909 census specifically aimed at commercial laundries “counted 5,186 establishments. Census takers ignored hand laundries, limiting their enumeration to facilities that used power-driven machinery. They also restricted their count to commercial establishments, leaving out the scores of laundries in hospitals, penitentiaries, and charitable establishments.” These “laundries clustered in the Northern states. As reported in 1910, New York ranked first with 508 laundries, 126 in New York City alone. Illinois was second with 448 and California, although twelfth in population, came in third with 321.”[iv]
Arwen Mohun writes that industrial “laundries were a substantial source of employment, especially for women,” with “124,214 persons employed at wage labor in laundries (excluding salaried employees such as clerks and managers), 71.2 percent (or about 90,000) of whom were women” in 1900.[v]
In 1924 the Saint Paul Association of Public and Business Affairs published A Cooperative Study of Women in Industry in Saint Paul, Minnesota done in conjunction with the YWCA, the Minnesota State Industrial Commission, and the University of Minnesota. The study found seven industries employed large numbers of women, employing a total of 14,468 women, “a very high percentage of all women in industrial establishments in Saint Paul.” Laundries ranked as the 7th largest of these industries, employing 697 women.[vi] Compared to other industries, laundries in Saint Paul had the highest percentage of women workers over the age of 30 with 41% of the women employed.[vii]
Unionization among laundry workers was very low. In an essay whose title asked “Can Women Be Organised?” Theresa Wolfson noted that the “Laundry Workers’ Industry, employing 72,675 women, of whom 2,199 are girls under 15, claimed a union membership of about 5,000 women in 1924 (6,200 in 1920), employed at skilled and unskilled work.” While the industry had many more women workers, more men were unionized: “The percentage of organised men in this industry is not more than 10 per cent. The proportion of organisation among women, however, who predominate in the industry, is less than 1 per cent.”[viii]
In Saint Paul, 63% of women in laundries were single. Approximately 17% received room and board while the rest provided their own lodging. Unsurprisingly, single women were much more likely to board than married women.[ix] The Saint Paul survey looked at the laundry industry and thus did not look at employers like Nettie Blom’s, but it appears that women who worked for hospitals and hotels boarded more often than women who worked for commercial laundries. Boarding made wages go further, but placed workers in an additional position of dependence on their employer.

II. Gendered Division of Labor
Steam laundries advertised in the female help wanted section of local newspapers, looking for “girls” who needed jobs.[x] Mohun described laundries as “unusual among industrial workplace” for their 70% female workforce. Not only did women do most of the work, but jobs were distributed along gender lines. Men ran the washing machines, tended boilers, and handled deliveries. Women did everything else. Mohun descried the “types” among women laundry workers as “the older, independent ironer” who used hand irons to press items too expensive or delicate to be run through the mangle, “the teenage “factory girl” operative, and the fastidious and polite clerical worker” [xi]
While the “girls” did the bulk of the work in steam laundries, the people in charge were men, laundrymen, as they called themselves.[xii] The laundrymen gave the orders and accumulated the profit made by the business. The laundrymen also had the technical knowledge, in their 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 Minnie Jensen’s lawyer questioned his knowledge of the machinery, O’Reilly, the superintendent at the laundry where Jensen was injured, O’Reilly indignantly replied that he was a “laundry man” which means he has repaired and modified his machines, knows “as much about laundry machines as most any” manufacturer did. (Jensen, paper book 1, 107.) When Kathryn Carlin was pulled into her mangle after being ordered by Charles Kennedy to help another employee 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 Carlin were.

III. Laundry Work
By all accounts laundry work was very taxing. Women workers endured high levels of physical exertion in hot and damp for very long hours. The combination left many women exhausted.
Carola Woerishofer wrote that despite open windows “the outside air does not come in very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. On going out at noon from a laundry” where she had worked “ all the morning at a breakneck pace,” I was struck by the coolness of the day. That night I discovered that the thermometer had been registering 96 degrees in the shade.”[xiii] While summer heat exacerbated the heat inside steam laundries, conditions were little better in winter. The Preliminary Report of the New York Factory Investigating Committee found that “[p]oor ventilation often meant discomfort at work: a study of New York laundries, for example, discovered that most were not equipped with heating systems, and in the winter they simply closed all fans and windows to retain natural steam heat. This meant, of course, that “the air of almost every steam laundry is oppressive.”[xiv]
Within laundries, “women’s part in the industry [could] be performed only by unusually strong women.”[xv] A co-worker told Dorothy Richardson, “If you ain’t strong as an ox it gits in your back and off ye go to the ‘orspital.”[xvi] Woerishofer said that “[n]early all laundry work is performed standing, and on heavy days, when the work is steady, except at lunch time, very few women get a chance to sit down during any part of the day.”[xvii]
Dorothy Richardson described the days of bending and lifting in the heat as causing “excruciating agony.” The workers felt “not only aching backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning floors.” Richardson’s time in the laundry, “from the view-point of mere physical labor, were the most brutal in all my experience.”[xviii]
Women workers not only worked hard in laundries, they worked for long stretches of time. The Senate report found hours long in laundries, “days of 12, 13, or even 14 hours being reported” and said that a “spokesman for the laundrymen in their effort to defeat the Illinois 10-hour bill declared that about 80 percent of the laundries of Chicago were working more or less in excess of 10 hours a day at least once a week” on a regular basis.[xix]
These long, hard, hot days were exhausting. “The loss of a finger, the maiming of a hand” were for Woerishofer, “though so much more salient, far less grave than the exhaustion” of women who went ostensibly uninjured in laundries.[xx]
Florence Kelley wrote that Chicago “laundries maintain hours which are regularly irregular, Monday being a short day and Friday and Saturday having neither a beginning nor an ending except as work is completed. It is no rare thing for girls to faint at their work. Girls have been removed from the laundry to the hospital suffering exhausting after working sixteen, eighteen and even twenty hours in heat and dampness in ill-ventilated laundries.”[xxi]
Elizabeth Howard Westwood and Mary Alden Hopkins worked in laundries in hospitals and hotels and found conditions the same. The three women’s reports were published together as a pamphlet by the National Consumers League. Hopkins described her co-workers as “tired all the time. They dragged themselves out of bed” in the rooms provided to them by the hotel “at the last possible minute” before work and many “lay in their beds again at noon.”[xxii] Sore feet and aching bodies plagued the women as well.

IV. Dangers at Work
Mohun writes that “[b]etween 1880 and 1900, large washing machines and mangles heated by steam became widespread” and non-industrial laundries became less common. The level of mechanization in steam laundries was such that by 1900 “observers were describing many [laundries] as factories.” For social reformer Elizabeth Butler, this meant in particular that there was a division of labor “specialization for speed.”[xxiii] Increased speed coupled with exhaustion in laundries created a condition in which industrial accidents were likely to happen.
Woerishofer described “continual risk of burns on hands and arms” in the hand ironing that mangles were largely designed to replace. “I received some slight burn every day. And when I asked the girls if this were because I was ‘green,’ they replied that every one got burned (…) all the time” in performing that task. If the workers “were to be careful” enough to avoid burns the would “have to work at a lower rate of speed than usual output of the laundries demands.”[xxiv]
Accidents on mangles, of course, were much more grave than “slight burns.” Charles Kennedy, owner of a laundry in Saint Paul for twelve years, described mangles as “extraordinarily dangerous.”[xxv] Grant Spicer, who for twenty year managed the laundry where Nettie Blom worked, said that mangles “are regarded as the most dangerous machine in the laundry.” He added that “[t]here are more accidents on mangles than any other type of machine, in fact more than all other types together, my experiences is.” The particular mangle Blom worked on had no guard at the front of the machine. Many mangles did. The guard consisted of a board or a metal rod that made the opening of the machine narrower, too narrow to permit fingers to come within the grip of the rollers. Working on a mangle without a guard posed “more danger to the fingers than any other department in the laundry.”[xxvi]
Mangles with guards were still dangerous, both on the feeding end and on the usually unguarded receiving side. On the receiving side a second worker would take the fabric that had come from the mangle and either carry it back around to the feeding side if it was still wet or if it was sufficiently dry and pressed take it to a folding table to fold it and put it away for removal from the laundry. Often linens went through the mangle three times in order to get them fully dry. Prior to being fed through the mangle, workers placed wet linens in an extractor, a machine that spun the linens to remove water from them. The longer the linens spun, the more water was removed and the less times they would need to pass through the mangle. Wetter linens not only need more passes, but were more likely to stick to the felt rollers and to wind around them, gumming up the machine. Wet linens also dripped onto the floor, making it slippery, and had a tendency to stick to the skin of the workers who worked the mangle. The more linens the workers had to launder in less time, the less time each item was in the extractor, which meant the wetter the cloth was when it was run through the mangle. This meant the workers were not only working faster - trying to accomplish more tasks in less time, stretching their energy and attention - but were working with materials that made the already dangerous machines even more so.
The dangers of mangles were well-known. Woerishofer described the “danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders too far under the cylinders in the process of feeding” the mangle, despite the mangle having a guard mounted on it, “a flexible metal bar about three-quarters of an inch about the feeding-apron in front” of the mangle’s rollers. Woerishofer claimed that the bar “acted as a warning rather than a protection.” One of her co-workers warned her “Once you get your fingers in, you never get them out.”
Some workers tried to assess the quality of the items they worked on in order to assess how much care to exercise with the item – which meant also how much risk of injury to take. Woerishofer’s co-workers distinguished “‘millionaire work’ – work that has to come out straight – in contrast with ‘boarding house work’.” Millionaire work “must be shoved up to within a quarter of an inch of the cylinder” to make sure the material was fed evenly into the mangle so that it would come out without any wrinkles ironed in to the fabric.[xxvii]
The New York Department of Labor found that 26 out of the 62 steam laundries in Manhattan “had either unguarded or inadequately guarded mangles” and other machinery. A mechanic in one laundry told a factory inspector that the mangle at that laundry “came pretty near finishing up the last girl we had here – caught her arm in an apron-string and got both hands under the roll (…) Fingers cut off one hand, and all twisted and useless on the other.”[xxviii]
Dorothy Richardson also worked in New York laundries. On her first day, a co-worker asked, “Ever worked at this job before?” Richardson said, “No. Have you?” Her co-worker “replied with a sharp laugh, and flinging back the sleeve of her kimono, thrust out the stump of wrist,” saying “It happens every wunst in a while, when you was running the mangle and was tired. That’s the way it was with me: I was clean done out, one Saturday night, and I just couldn’t see no more; and first think I know – Wo-o-ow! and that hand went right straight clean into the rollers.”[xxix] This co-worker received no compensation for her injury. She came back to the laundry industry out of need to make ends meet, and ended up getting work pushing the hand-trucks of laundry bundles, an activity she could do with her one hand and the stump of her other.
Richardson’s is a fictionalized account, so it’s not at all clear that this conversation actually happened or how common it was for women who were maimed came back to work in laundries. Even if the event is entirely made up, that Richardson would create such a scene in her reformer’s social-realist fiction speaks at a minimum to the perception of laundries and mangles in particular as extremely dangerous. Some women did go back to work at the laundries where they were maimed. Among its list of workers suffering occupational ailments, the 1910 Senate Report lists three women who were maimed in mangles. Two were still convalescing. A third had been hurt three years prior at that laundry and still worked there, operating a mangle.[xxx]
The likelihood of injury was further increased by lack of training. Woerishofer estimated that it took approximately two weeks “to learn the nicer processes of the ill-paid work of feeding and folding at the mangle – the passing of towels and napkins through the machine without turning in or wrinkling the edges, the passing of table-covers between cylinders in such a way that the work will never come out in a shape other than square.”[xxxi] The Saint Paul survey found that of 686 women laundry workers surveyed, about 64% (439) received no training for the job. 28% (190) had to have some kind of previous experience – ranging from two months to a year – as a condition of being hired. Only the remaining 8% (57) were trained by supervisors on the job.[xxxii]

V. In Court
Nettie Blom and other women who were mangled in laundry work took their cases to court. These laundry workers went from their gendered workplaces into gendered courtrooms, where male lawyers argued their fate before male judges and jurors.
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 that seem strange at first sight. 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.
The women’s 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.
Nettie Blom received no compensation. Since she was a “bright, intelligent woman” of 28 with experience working in laundries, she knew that the lack of a guard made the mangle very dangerous.[xxxiii] This knowledge meant that, according to the legal doctrine at the time, Blom had assumed the risk of working on this machine, meaning that she was liable rather than her employer. By continuing to work on a dangerous mangle, Blom had implicitly agree that the risk was her own or agree to waive her right hold her employer liable for injury resulting from the mangle. In this respect, Blom’s experience with the courts was common for workers at the time, prior to the creation of the Workers’ Compensation laws we have now.
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.[xxxiv]
Prior to the institution of Workmen’s Compensation, injured women laundry workers played a role of vulnerability, helplessness, and mild incompetence in the courtroom during injury suits, playing to a certain standard of femininity to which courts responded with paternalist protection. This persona was shaped in part by a need to get around employers’ legal defenses. Those legal defenses depended on portraying workers as intelligent, capable, and self-possessed. Since women who embodied those traits in the courtroom would not win damages, it was to women’s advantage to play the part of helpless “girl.” This courtroom persona was quite different from the experience of laundry work. Industrial laundry work was physically demanding as I have already noted, 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.

Appendix: Future Research Prospects
For this paper, I looked at nine injury cases, starting with Nettie Blom and ending with a suit brought by Hogan Graseth on behalf of his seventeen year old daughter Edith Graseth for her injury on April 30, 1913. In all of these cases, the injured worker was a woman who suffered a permanent disability to one hand, involving at least partial amputation. The table below provides a very brief summary of the cases, in order by the date of the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision. The column labeled “process” describes the course of the trials from the point of view of the plaintiff. For example, Nettie Blom lost her case, appealed, and lost again. Minnie Jensen won her first trial. Her employer appealed, and the final ruling was for her employer, a loss for Minnie.
Plaintiff
Process
Amount of damages
Decision year
Nettie Blom
Loss, Appeal, Loss
None.
1902
Minnie Jensen
Win, Appeal, Loss
$1500 initially then none
1904
Kathryn Carlin
Win, Appeal, Win
$7500
1906
Martha Ludwig
Win, Appeal, Win
$5000
1906
Clara Raasch
Win, Appeal, Win
$6222
1907
Lena Dahly
Win, Appeal, Win
$1500
1909
Mary McInerny
Win, Appeal, Win
$4000
1913
Hilma Maki
Win, Appeal, Loss
$750 initially then none.
1914
Hogan Graseth
Win, Appeal, Win
$12000
1915

Using the table, I can see two or three additional avenues for future research here. One is comparing women’s and men’s workplace injuries. Another avenue is comparing how women’s awards in this era, prior to Workmen’s Compensation, with how women fared after Workmen’s Compensation. This information in turn could be used to read whether or not policy debates over Workmen’s Compensation accurately reflected women’s interests. These are all topics which have not been discussed within the historiography of Workmen’s Compensation as far as I can tell, which has been written almost exclusively about men.

1. Comparison with men injured at work
After Nettie Blom in 1902, every woman injured on a mangle whose case wound up in the Minnesota Supreme Court had won her initial trial. With the exception of Hilma Maki, every woman who brought a case like this won in the Minnesota Supreme Court. Maki received an initial settlement of $1000 from her employer, St. Luke’s Hospital Association of Duluth in return for waiving her right to sue. Maki later claimed that she did not understand this and that she had been tricked into signing.
If I am correct that these are all of the Minnesota Supreme Court cases dealing with injuries on mangles prior to 1915, then women injured on mangles at 2/3 chance of winning in the end. The average award per woman who won in the end was $6037. I do not know how much all the women got paid, but I know some of their salaries. Mary McInerny, who held a supervisory position at St. Luke’s, was paid $30 per month plus board. Her award was equal to about 133 months of pay or just over eleven years. Kathryn Carlin was paid $6 per week. Her award was the equivalent to 1250 weeks or 24 years of pay. Assuming an average wage of $7 per week – which is higher than the typical pay for “mangle girls” listed in the 1911 U.S. Senate report – and using the figure of an average of $6037 per award, the average award for women injured on mangles equaled about 862 weeks or just under 17 years of pay.
Below is another table, listing cases of men who suffered somewhat similar injuries at work, injuries that resulted in the permanent disability of one hand and at least partial amputation. I searched for any men’s workplace injury cases in the same time period involving similar injuries to those suffered by women. I realize this is highly abstracted, but the comparison is interesting.[xxxv]

Plaintiff
Process
Amount of damages
Decision year
Wesley Small
Lost, appealed, lost
None
1905
Earnest Shalgren
Won, appealed, won
$1995
1905
John Hagerty
Won, appealed,won
$3500
1906
Matt Larson
Won appealed, won
$10500
1908
John Miller
Won, appealed, won
$6500
1908
William Snyder
Lost, appealed, unknown
None
1910
David Lundberg
Lost, appealed, lost
None
1911
Antone Zeuli
Lost, appealed, lost
None
1915

Of these eight cases, four won and four lost, worse odds than the 66% win rate for women. The average award for men who received damages was approximately $5624. This is about $400 less per person the women received. I do not know the amount these men received in wages, so I can’t speak to how much time this meant. If we assume higher wages for men, then the awards for men would be proportionately lower. [xxxvi]

2. Comparison of women’s cases prior to Workmen’s Compensation with Workmen’s Compensation and debates about Workmen’s Compensation
Nettie Blom lost her case based on argument of assumption of risk. Minnie Regan lost her appeal based on an argument of contributory negligence. These are two of the three main employer defenses against injury suits during this era, with the third being the fellow-servant rule. With the exception of Hilma Maki, all the other women win and while Maki loses, she does so because she had previously settled, not because of one of the three above named defenses.
I do not currently have much information about the size of awards for similar injuries (permanent disability of one hand involving at least partial amputation) during the initial stages of Workmen’s Compensation, while the compensation rates were being set. Comparison of the above awards with awards under Workman’s Comp would be interesting. More interesting would be comparison of larger numbers of women’s injury compensation before and after Workmen’s Compensation was implemented.
The above information and comparison would open up the possibility for an interesting comparison of women’s awards with arguments made during debates over Workmen’s Compensation. Many people argued during the initial stages of debating and implementing Workmen’s Compensation that the program would be good for both industry and labor. This argument was made by both representatives of trade associations and labor unions (to the best of my knowledge, these union representatives were all men and the vast majority if not all of the membership represented by these union leaders were also men).
The argument about workers was that Workmen’s Compensation would make for faster compensation, guaranteed payment, and some people argued that court awards weren’t very high anyway. The first point is true from the mangle cases I looked at. The final decision in Nettie Blom’s case, for instance, came two years after her injury. The second point about cases being a gamble is true but equivocal. I don’t know what the win rates were for plaintiffs in non-mangle cases, for mangle cases below the Minnesota Supreme Court level, or for cases in other states. But the odds don’t seem too terrible for the mangle cases: a 66% win rate over all, increasing over time. The third point, about award size, also can’t be addressed without further research, but initially from using these mangle cases as a sample – again, admittedly an imperfect one – the awards look reasonably good to me for women hurt on mangles, ranging to upwards of 20 years pay.
Arguments that Workmen’s Compensation was good for employers had three main components as well. First, advocates argued that Workmen’s Compensation would regularize the cost for workplace injury and make the expense a matter of routine. Workmen’s Compensation involved proposing standardized compensation rates by injury as opposed to the gamble of what juries might award. Furthermore, these costs would be broken up into small payments made on a regular basis by all participants in Workmen’s Compensation, a form of payment much less disruptive of businesses’ purchasing and production schedules. Second, advocates argued that lawsuits over injuries were acrimonious. Third, advocates argued that juries and legislators and judges were becoming less sympathetic to employers’ long-standing legal defenses and more generous with awards.
The first argument that Workmen’s Compensation was good for businesses because it made for greater predictability seems unarguably true. The second argument, that lawsuits were acrimonious, is true in one sense but trivially so: lawsuits over whether or not an employer will compensate an employee injured at work obviously involved an emotionally charged disagreement between the two parties and had relatively high stakes financially. The implication in these arguments was that not only were lawsuits an acrimonious affair between employers and individual injured workers, but that these lawsuits also fed into industrial strife and possible political radicalism. I have not seen any evidence for this cited anywhere. (Looking for some would be another interesting research avenue.)
The third argument, that Workmen’s Compensation was better than a legal climate which was increasingly less favorable to employers, seems to be true as well. Using the women’s mangle cases as a sample again, this argument seems to be even more the case, as juries may have been more generous with women workers than men. If that turns out to be true in general, it would mean that jurors’ favorable awards to injured women helped at least to some degree to create the climate in which Workmen’s Compensation became more desirable to business owners. Finally, if women did receive higher awards in general as a result of jurors’ disposition then it might also be the case that policymakers and others were more favorably disposed to injured women than they were to injured men. It would be interest to search for any invocations of women’s injuries by Workmen’s Compensation advocates.

Workmen’s Compensation bibliography I used in my original outline.[xxxvii]

Asher, Robert, “Radicalism and Reform: State Insurance of Workmen’s Compensation in Minnesota, 1910-1933,” Labor History, No. 14. (1973), 19-41.

Asher, Robert, “Business and Workers’ Welfare in the Progressive Era: Workers’ Compensation Reform in Massachusetts, 1880-1911,” The Business History Review, Vol. 43, No. 4, (Winter, 1969), 452-475.

Go, Julian, “Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance: Discourse and Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1880s-1910s,” Social Science History, Vol. 20, No. 3. (Autumn, 1996), 401-438.

Howard, Christopher, “Workers’ Compensation, Federalism, and the Heavy Hand of History,” Studies in American Political Development, No. 16, (Spring, 2002), 28-47.

Kantor, Shawn Everett and Price V. Fishback, “Did Workers Pay for the Passage of Workers’ Compensation Laws?,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 110, No. 3. (August, 1995), 713-742.

Kantor, Shawn Everett and Price V. Fishback, “How Minnesota Adopted Workers’ Compensation,” The Independent Review, Vol. 2 No. 4. (Spring, 1998), 557-578.

Lubove, Roy, “Workmen’s Compensation and the Prerogatives of Voluntarism,” Labor History, No. 8. (Fall 1967), 254-79

Nelson, Barbara, “The Gender, Race, and Class Origins of Early Welfare Policy and the Welfare State: A Comparison of Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” 413-435 in Louise Tilly and Patricia Gurin, Women, Politics and Change, New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1990.

Rogers, Donald, “From Common Law to Factory Laws: The Transformation of Workplace Safety Law in Wisconsin before Progressivism,” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 39, No. 2. (April, 1995), 177-213.

Weinstein, James, “Big Business and the Origins of Workmen’s Compensation,” Labor History, VIII (Spring, 1967), 156-74.

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Table of cases:

Case Name
Case Citation
Library call number for locating transcript
Blom v. Yellowstone Park Association
86 Minn. 237; 90 N.W. 397; 1902 Minn.
LAW KFM 5445.9 .M56 1902 124-130
Jensen v. Regan
2 Minn. 323; 99 N.W. 1126; 1904 Minn.
LAW KFM 5445.9.M56 1904 104-108
Carlin v. Kennedy
97 Minn. 141; 106 N.W. 340; 1906 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.1905.140-147
Raasch v. Elite Laundry Co
98 Minn. 357; 108 N.W. 477; 1906 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.1906.139-143
Ludwig v. Spicer
99 Minn. 400; 109 N.W. 832; 1906 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.1906. 70-73
Dahly v. Auxer
108 Minn. 531; 122 N.W. 1135; 1909 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.1909.Apr163-167
McInerny v. St. Luke’s
122 Minn. 10; 141 N.W. 837; 1913 Minn
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.122:14
Maki v. St. Luke’s
122 Minn. 444; 142 N.W. 705; 1913 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56.126:15
Graseth v. Northwestern Knitting Co.
128 Minn. 245; 150 N.W. 804; 1915 Minn.
LAW KFM5445.9.m56. 128:9