What in the hell …

No, not Badiou. Laundries again. This time British.

On June 28th, 1898, Laura Ellen Jones was at work at the Portmadoc District Steam Laundry in Portmadoc, Wales. Jones was helping Rose McCleod, the manager of the laundry, feed a sheet into a mangle, a machine which used steam-heated and steam-driven metal rollers to press and dry damp linens. Jones’ hand slipped into the machine, or perhaps the damp sheet stuck to her hand a moment too long and pulled her in.[1] The mangle both crushed and burned Jones’ fingers, ultimately resulting in the amputation of the ends of all four fingers on that hand.[2]

Many women experienced workplace injuries like Laura Ellen Jones. By 1898 the severity and frequency of accidents happening to women in the laundry industry were a matter of grave concern for reformers and factory inspectors. The research for this paper suggests that concern over women’s injuries was not simply the result of the sheer number of accidents, but a matter of to whom the accidents were happening. In what follows I lay out why the concern over injuries in the laundry industry was not the result of a simple quantitative calculation of injuries, then suggest some of the qualitative reasons for this concern.

Regulation of Laundries

In 1892 the Royal Commission on Labour appointed four women, as the result of years of agitation over the need for more information about women workers. These four women were to study all women workers in Britain.[3] Their report included a section on conditions in steam laundries in London, which led to studies of laundries elsewhere. Increased attention to laundries resulted in a push for regulation of laundries as well as for more investigation.[4] In 1893 the British government formed its Department of Labour. One of the Department’s primary tasks was to investigate working conditions. The department appointed two women factory inspectors and the London district of Kensington appointed two women as sanitary inspectors.[5] Reports from the women inspectors helped create support for including laundries under the Factory Acts for the purposes of health and safety in 1895. The 1895 Factory Act extended the powers of inspectors to visit laundries. “With the beginning of laundry inspection, in January 1896, came disturbing confirmation that a laundry could be a dangerous and unhealthy place to work.”[6] Inspection eventually led to changes in the industry in safety practices, through a combination of legislation, more inspections, and more stringent enforcement of rules such as placing guards on machinery.[7]

The 1899 factory inspectors’ report states that “[t]he absorption of the majority of the staff [of women factory inspectors] in special inquiries in 1898 prevented any very systematic inspection of laundries.”[8] 1898 being only the second year of work for which the Principal Lady Inspector reported, this meant that the attention paid to laundries in 1900 in the form of visits in person and conversations with laundry workers was rather new. The inspectors’ initial concerns focused on women workers’ occupational illnesses, such as rheumatism and sores resulting from standing in long periods in damp and hot rooms.[9]

Prior to 1900 the inspector Miss Tracey did mention “hear[ing] of the frequent accidents of the tops of fingers smashed in the rollers of the collar machine, and the more terrible accidents caused by the callenders [sic], where a moment’s inattention may result in the lost of one hand.”[10] Tracey used this mention of accidents to support her argument for limits on hours worked in laundries, rather than regulation of dangerous machinery or other measures to reduce accidents. This is not to downplay the long hours worked or the role of these hours in making accidents more likely, but only to note that the main concern here was time spent working rather than the destruction of bodies. Once the inspectors began to actually visit laundries, however, their attention rapidly shifted to accidents.[11]

Changes in the Laundry Industry

The industry underwent mechanization in the late 19th century, as well as tremendous growth. There were 1219 industrial laundries in Britain in 1897, making up about 1.5% of all factories. Factory inspector Miss Deane said that in 1900 “in some districts of London” laundry could “almost be called the ‘staple industry’.” The industry was at that time “in process of rapid transformation from a domestic into a regular factory industry,” involving extensive mechanization.[12] By 1902 there were 2075 industrial laundries, making up about 2.1% of all factories. Numerous observers noted the rapid and massive changes in the laundry industry.[13]

In 1902 the Fabian Society issued “Life in the Laundry,” a pamphlet presenting material culled from the reports of Chief Inspector of Factories throughout the 1890s. The pamphlet described a “remarkable and rapid economic development” that had happened in a few short years, which involved the replacement of “the elderly married woman or widow ‘washer’” with “skilled engineers in charge of a shed full of machinery (…) while scores of girls and young women from thirteen upwards ‘tend’” the various machines.[14]

One of the primary changes which mechanization brought about was speeding up the rate of work. Not only could more linens be laundered with the same effort, but workers had a harder time setting the pace of their work. Workers on mangles had to keep up with the machine, for example, rather than work at the pace that made the most sense to them.[15]

Employers’ demand for speed could result in increased injuries. Workers also reported that employers urged them put their hands closer to the mangles if the linens being handled were more expensive. The longer women held linens before it fed into the mangle – that is, the shorter the gap they left between their finger and the rollers – the better the odds of the linens entering the mangle perfectly straight and thus being perfectly pressed.[16]

As Deane wrote in her report, this transformation involved the supplanting of “the old-fashioned ‘washerwoman (…) superceded by the young ‘laundry proprietor’ (…) ready to deal with six times the amount of work that his predecessor could hope to cope with.”[17] In other words, there was a transition from an industry consisting largely of older women who were self-employed or worked in the homes of other people to an industry of male owners who hired young women to work for wages in large industrial facilities. Mohun describes the popular conception of “the married, hard-drinking, sewer-mouthed laundress,” and notes that some observers thought that industrialization might work a positive moral influence by imposing new discipline on women in laundries.[18] Whether recognized as such or not, this new discipline also meant the increased control of the industry by men.

Alongside the shift toward male owned large firms, the shift in machinery broke women workers into job classes with different skills and types of risk for injury. Older women tended to work as washers and in the skilled work of using hand irons on fancy or delicate linens, while younger women and girls were more likely to be employed shaking the water out of damp sheets or feeding linens into mangles. In these new conditions the younger workers in particular were “ordinary machine-minders” like in other factories, “more or less skilled according to the class of machines they control.”[19]

In 1888 the head factory inspector described steam laundries as “full of dangerous machinery, the work almost entirely done by women, its nature very trying, and the hours worked excessive.”[20] Machinery involving rollers – ironing machines and drying machines – accounted for a significant majority of injuries.[21] “Accidents due to indrawing rollers comprise two-thirds of the total number.”[22] The report said that “young workers engaged on ironing machinery” were “the victims who most need protection.” The report also states that “[i]n some recent cases taken before the West London Police Court, in consequence of occurrence of accidents, support was given by the magistrate for the opinion that (a) the machines are dangerous, (b)efficient guards are to be had.”[23]

Numbers of Accidents

The Factory Acts required workplace injuries to be reported to doctors. These doctors, know as certifying surgeons, would confirm and record injuries resulting from “machinery moved by steam, water, or other mechanical power, or (…) through a vat, pan, or other structure filled with hot liquid or molten metal or other substance, or by explosion, or by escape of gas, steam, or metal” were counted provided the injury “prevent[ed] the person injured by it from returning to his work (…) within 48 hours after the occurrence of the accident.” Certifying surgeons were expected to sort injuries into those involving fatalities, amputation of all or part of hand, arm, leg, foot, broken bone, facial and head injuries, lacerations, and contusions.[24] Factory inspectors kept statistics on these reported injuries, and used them in producing their own reports.

Table 1: Injuries in factories, 1897-1902[25]
All Industry Laundry Industry
All Injuries Fatal Injuries All Injuries Fatal Injuries
Year Total Females Total Females Total Females Total Females
1897 15985 2667 658 14 202 137 2 1
1898 19227 3496 727 10 217 170 0 0
1899 22771 3155 871 13 242 190 1 0
1900 27704 3293 1045 19 304 228 3 2
1901 29267 4089 1035 25 351 246 0 0
1902 30076 4097 1110 44 352 254 1 0
Total: 145030 20797 5446 125 1668 1225 7 3

Based on calculations using the numbers in table 1, in this period, across industry about 14 percent of all injuries and about two percent of fatal injuries happened to women. Of the total reported accidents in this period, about four percent of them were fatal. Of reported injuries to women, about one percent of them were fatal. In the laundry industry 74 percent of all injuries and about 43 percent of fatal injuries happened to women. This is a significantly higher percent of injuries for women, but women made up a much, much higher proportion of the total work force in laundries than men, as table 3 below shows. In the laundry industry in this period, about 0.4 percent of reported injuries were fatal, and about 0.2 percent of reported injuries to women were fatal.

Table 2: Number of facilities, 1897-1902
Year Total Laundry
1897 79279 1219
1898 85942 1401
1899 91571 1567
1900 95664 1804
1901 97845 1972
1902 100424 2075

Combining the information from table 2 with information and calculations from table 1, from 1897 through 1902, there were about 1.6 accidents per factory, or about 3 accidents for every two factories. There were about 0.06 fatalities per factory or about 1 fatal accident for every 17 factories. In the laundry industry, there were about 1.2 accidents per factory laundry and very few fatalities.

Table 3: Employees in laundry work[26]
Men Women
Total Home work Out work Total Home work Out work
8874 3251 5623 196,141 22,404 173,737

It is difficult to assess the rate of accidents per work without access to figures on men’s and women’s workforce participation in industry over all and in laundries. Still, a few different estimates are possible. These estimates allow at least some general sense of men’s and women’s comparative safety at work. In what follows I make one estimate of the number of men in the industry and three estimates of the number of women working in factory laundries using three different calculations.

As table 1 shows, there were 105 accidents to men in the laundry industry in 1901. To arrive at an estimate of the accident rates for men in laundries, I assumed that all 5623 men listed in table 3 as working outside of their homes in the industry were employed in factory laundries. This is undoubtedly a higher estimate than was really the case. These figures provide an estimate of one accident for about every 54 men working in the industry. Men probably suffered accidents at a higher rate than this.

Malcolmson’s analysis of census data from 1901 found that 72.8 percent of the laundries in London were hand laundries.[27] Treating these numbers as if they were the number of employees in factory laundries nationally allows one provisional estimate of the rate of accidents per worker. If 173,737 worked outside their homes in laundries and 27.2 percent of laundry workers worked in factory laundries, then about 47,256 women would have been employed in factory laundries in 1901.

The factory inspectors’ reports list 1972 factory laundries in 1901. Using data for 1904, Malcolmson estimates that factory laundries employed 33 people per facility on average. [28] Assuming the number of employees per facility in 1901 was the same as in 1904 and assuming that all of these employees were women, I arrive at an estimate of 65,076 women working in factory laundries in 1901.

For the third estimate, I again assume both that Malcolmson’s numbers of 33 women in each factory laundry and 8 women in each hand laundry apply in 1901 and that the figure of 72.8 percent of London laundries being hand laundries applied nationally. Using those numbers and the 1901 census figure of 196,141 women employed in laundries over all, I set up the following equation: 0.272n * 33 + 0.728n * 8=196,141 with n being the total number of laundry facilities. Using this equation, I estimate the number of women working in factory laundries in 1901 at 118,957.[29]

Using these three estimates of the number of women working in laundries allows some estimates on the rates of accidents for women. As table 1 shows, there were 246 accidents to women in factory laundries reported in 1901. Using this number of accidents with the three preceding estimates of the number of women working in factory laundries offers a few possible rates of injury. Estimating the number of women working in laundries in 1901 at 47,256 puts the injury rate at one injury for every 192 women workers. If there were 65,076 women working in laundries, then there was approximately one accident for every 265 women workers. If there were 118,957 women working laundries, then there was one accident for every 484 women workers. All of these estimates suggest that male workers suffered accidents significantly more often than women in the laundry industry.[30]

These numbers calculated are only very general approximations, as noted already, but they are suggestive. Women appear to have worked in safer jobs than men over all, with the laundry industry being no exception. Laundries had a lower rate of fatalities and of injury than industry in general and women in laundries suffered fatalities and non-fatal injuries at lower rates than their male co-workers.[31]

Attitudes of Courts

Laura Ellen Jones and her parents took the Portmadoc District Steam Laundry Company to court for her injuries, arguing that the company had violated the Factory and Workshop Acts provision requiring guards on dangerous machinery. A factory inspector had previously recommended that a guard be installed on the mangle to prevent workers from getting their fingers caught in the rollers. A guard was installed but later removed by the laundry’s management.

The laundry owner, Captain Davies, argued in court that the machine was not dangerous to employees who exercised proper care. Davies claimed that the manager Rose McLeod, who had subsequently left the laundry, said Jones was injured due to Jones’ own negligence. The North Wales Chronicle summarized Davies’ point that “[a]nyone meeting with an accident” on this machine “must be guilty of negligence.” [32] That is to say, the machine was safe for any competent user. Despite the loss of Jones’ fingers, the judge dismissed the case, citing insufficient evidence to show that the mangle was indeed a dangerous piece of machinery. This decision probably resulted in part from the argument that Jones was negligent.[33]

Jones returned to court in May of 1900, suing for compensation for her injuries under the recently implemented Workmen’s Compensation Act. In this case, the judge found for Jones, instructing her employer to pay her 2s per week.[34] These rulings may appear paradoxical, in that the courts affirmed that Jones had indeed been injured and deserved compensation, yet her employer had done nothing wrong and so owed no debt for infraction. The reason Jones succeeded in the second case is that she did not have to prove any wrongdoing on the part of her employer, rather “the point now was whether the girl was able to work or not.”[35] This is because Workmen’s Compensation involved no claims to fault. Jones had not worked again since her injury the previous June. Jones provided a doctor’s certificate stating her inability to work.

As I will demonstrate below, factory inspectors came to take injuries like Jones’ much more seriously than courts did. Linzi Manicom’s article “Ruling Relations” offers a partial explanation for this difference between two government bodies. Manicom asks historians to move “away from the more over-arching instrumentalist conceptions of the state toward a more nuanced understanding of the conflicts and divisions within the institutions of the state.” Such a move requires looking at the “actual institutional working and conflicts of state departments and the elaboration and transformations ideologies which guided these.”[36] Manicom believe historians have a need for the “disaggregation of ‘the state’ into its institutional diversity” in order “to gain a more historically and empirically grounded understanding of state policy and struggles between different state bodies.”[37] This understanding could be characterized as the relative autonomy of different portions of the state from each other.

Manicom dubs this perspective “state formation,” which when carried out correctly should be “neither economically reductionist nor instrumentalist” nor should it be gender blind. I cannot fully take this perspective into account in this paper, but the disaggregation that Manicom suggests is useful. Rather than looking at courts and factory inspectors as simply an arm of the state and thus having the same outlook, both must be considered in more nuanced and historicized fashion.

Issues With Reporting

In addition to the legal doctrines, the court may have simply considered Jones’ injury not a very serious matter. This attitude was certainly prevalent among laundry owners and certifying surgeons, at least according to factory inspectors’ complaints. The 1901 factory inspectors’ report mentions 8 accidents in London “either inaccurately reported as “slight” or only discovered after special investigation.” Of these, “five had ended for the victims in amputation of the hand or fingers, while the remaining three were cases of severe laceration, burning, or contusion.”[38] The 1902 report stated that from visiting

persons who had been injured by calendars nine or twelve months previously (…) it was found that a large proportion of accidents which from the report of the occupier and the certifying surgeon might have been classified as “slight” or causing temporary injury, proved on subsequent enquiry to have resulted in amputation or permanent injury to the hand or fingers.

Injuries often involved “the combination of crushing and burning of the flesh as the hand or fingers are drawn under the burning rollers,” a combination

so destructive that even where the results are at first not apparently severe a form of mortification follows, necessitating amputation. The occupiers and certifying surgeons’ reports gave no indication of this. Thus we have a case reported as ‘Fingers of left hand lacerated and burnt – slight,” which when revisited a year later was found to have resulted in amputation of the hand.

Miss Deane reported that “injury to a finger is quite commonly regarded as a very slight matter by those unthinking persons who fail to realize how terribly dependent working girls are on these very members for a livelihood.”[39]

In 1900 the Principal Lady Inspector argued against the very category of “slight injury,” stating that

no injury by accident to the worker is minor or unimportant that in any way impairs her wage earning capacity, and (…) nothing short of complete reporting and close scrutiny of all accidents causing such injury will give control of their causes. The loss of a finger or part of hand may be as serious a loss to the manual laborer as impaired mental strength to the brain worker.[40]

The inspector Miss Vines suggested that one reason why laundry injuries were reported as less serious than were might have been because with accidents in laundries “the full effect often does not show itself till after a considerable period of time has elapsed.” In order to gauge the full extent of injures, therefore, “visits to the homes or private interviews with the persons interviewed are as important as inspection of the laundries.”[41] As a result, only visits with each woman reporting injury in a laundry could provide knowledge of the full extent of injuries. By visiting “persons who had been injured by calendars nine or twelve months previously (…) it was found that a large proportion of accidents which from the report of the occupier and the certifying surgeon might have been classified as “slight” or causing temporary injury, proved on subsequent enquiry to have resulted in amputation or permanent injury to the hand or fingers.”[42]

Failure to take women’s injuries seriously may have resulted in many injuries going unreported. Miss Deane wrote “I can not flatter myself that the few [accidents] which are reported represent anything like the number which actually occur.”[43] Factory inspectors certainly believed that many injuries went unreported. The 1901 report states that despite “two years of somewhat concentrated effort in this area (…) there is failure at times on the part of the occupiers to notify serious accidents.”[44] As a result, the inspectors did not “nearly know the full extent of the injury being done.[45]

Additional reasons for the underreporting of women’s injuries exist. Injuries in unionized workplaces were more likely to be reported than those in non-unionized workplaces, and women worked in industries with lower rates of unionization. Some women may have been afraid of employers’ retaliation. The 1897 report mentions a woman fired for speaking to a factory inspector. The report states that the woman tried to hide information to protect her employer, but the employer found out and fired her nonetheless. The inspector wrote that there was a great “need of protecting witnesses against the intimidation direct or indirect of those who employ them.”[46] The report mentions other cases of male employers bullying female employees in general, and attributes to this a hesitation on the part of some women workers to report employers’ infractions or assist inspectors.

Failure to take women’s injuries seriously, low rates of unionization, and fear of retaliation by employers all probably contributed to under-reporting of women’s injuries. While these factors must be considered, I would nonetheless argue that the injury rates are so different that, even taking into account underreporting, women’s workplaces were still much safer than men’s, particularly in the laundry industry.[47] Using my estimates of injury rates above, women’s underreporting of injuries would have to have been between four and nine times the level of underreporting of men in order for women and men to have had the same injury rates. While possible, this vast difference in underreporting seems improbable.

Reasons for Attention to Laundries

Marcus Rediker recently decried what he calls the “violence of abstraction” characterizing historians’ work on slavery. He writes that “[i]t is as if the use of ledgers, almanacs, balance sheets, graphs, and tables – the merchants’ comforting methods – has rendered abstract and thereby dehumanized, a reality that must, for moral and political reasons, be understood concretely. (…) Numbers can occlude the pervasive torture and terror” involved in slavery.[48] A similar claim could be made about my calculations about rates of injury for women workers.[49]

To be clear, then, I do not mean to minimize the dangers women industrial workers faced. Laundries were very dangerous for women. Injuries in laundries happened with unacceptable frequency. Indeed, is hard to imagine anything like an acceptable frequency for maiming. The injuries were horrific and altered women’s life course tremendously. Purely or overly quantitative accounts of workplace injury would miss the human meaning of workplace injury. My point in suggesting that a quantitative consideration finds lower rates of injury for women than might be expected is not to minimize the dangers and injuries women faced. Rather, my point is that the attention to injuries laundries did not result from the sheer quantity of injuries but from the meaning that the number of injuries had at the time.[50]

In her essay, “The Body As Method?,” Kathleen Canning identifies various ways in which bodies have figured in her own scholarship. These include the social body as a matter of concern for state agencies, representations of bodies, bodies as objects of regulation, and bodies as sites of experience.[51] Obviously there is a great deal of overlap between these types or modes of bodies or corporeality. Drawing on Canning and Manicom, I would like to suggest a hypothesis about the reasons for the growing concern with laundries at the end of the 19th century.

Using Canning’s typology of bodies or corporeality, the factory inspectors can be characterized as investigating the social body, specifically the bodies of laundry workers, in order to make recommendations about the regulation of these bodies. Making these recommendations and argument to support them involved the production of representations of the laundry workers’ bodies in the form of reports and talks. Creating these representations, in turn, often required face to face encounters with injured women as well as physical entry into – that is, bodily experience of – the laundries where the workers were injured. This experience appears to have been a powerful one, given the amount of attention which inspectors gave to the issue of injuries in laundries. The experiences of injured women, and inspectors’ experiences of speaking with them and viewing their injuries, led the inspectors to become advocates for greater regulation of laundry work and women’s work in general. This would explain the attention inspectors paid to laundries despite what from a quantitative perspective seems to be a lower rate of injury for women in laundries.

The relative youth of the injured female workers undoubtedly played a role as well. Rose Squire referred to the growth of steam laundries as a “terrible tale of maimed girls.”[52] I believe some of the terrible nature of this “tale” has to do precisely with the fact that young girls were being maimed. Both the workers’ gender and age most likely figured in the inspectors’ horror. The injured workers were referred to as “girls” and sometimes “little girls” throughout the factory inspectors’ reports. The 1902 report from the chief factory inspector decried “the heavy incidence among young girls of serious accidents” in laundries.[53] The 1901 report stated that laundry accidents happened “mostly to quite young girls,” particularly “in the serious class of accident occurring on calendars and ironing machines.”[54]

As Manicom’s work would suggest, the function of the factory inspectors was not set in stone ahead of time. I believe the experience of meeting injured workers face to face changed the inspectors’ understanding of laundries. Laundries changed from being sites in need of sanitary regulation in order to prevent occupational illness to being sites in need of intervention in order to lessen the incidences of sudden and disabling injuries. The factory inspectors’ experiences of speaking with injured young women kept the laundry industry a focus of the women inspectors in a way in which a purely quantitative accounting of injuries might not have. Inspectors’ reports and their advocacy for injured women and girls led to greater inspection which in turn produced more reports and advocacy which in turn helped change the legal environment for injured workers.

Notes:
[1] The rollers in mangles at this time turned at a rate of about 25 feet per minute. Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 143. That is approximately five inches per second. This is probably about one hand length per second for a girl of about 14, Jones’ age at the time of her injury.

[2] “Portmadoc - Case Under the Factories Act,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, November 18, 1899; Issue 4830. “Portmadoc County Court,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, May 19, 1900; Issue 4856.

[3] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 58.

[4] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 59.

[5] Kensington was a center of the laundry industry. Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 60.

[6] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 89.

[7] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 95.

[8] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1899, (London: 1900), 178.

[9] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 61. Inspectors, Focus on health rather than safety, something in common between both factory and smaller laundries. 36-37. The 1897 report spends one paragraph on laundries, focusing on the number of hours worked. The focus on sanitary conditions made a good deal of sense in that it spanned both factory laundries and other laundries. Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897, (London: 1898), 73.

[10] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1899, (London: 1900), 169. “Calender” and “mangle” were names for the same type of machine. Arwen P. Mohun, Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Britain, 1880-1940. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 86.

[11] Interestingly, in their study of the effects of inspections on workplace safety as measured in terms of fatality rates, Bartrip and Fenn found that inspection was not very effective. P. W. J. Bartrip and P. T. Fenn, “Factory fatalities and regulation in Britain, 1878-1913,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 25, no. 1 (1988), 60-74. Inspection and prosecution became more vigorous between 1878 and 1913, particularly after 1892, but the rate of fatalities continued to increase. (64, 71). The authors suggest that inspection and prosecution had little positive impact on workplace safety as a result because there were not enough inspectors and penalties were too low. They also speculate that the passage of Workmen’s Compensation in 1897 probably created a higher rate of reporting by creating effectively a financial incentive to report injuries. This increase in reporting may have offset actual gains made by increased inspection and prosecution. (71.) The authors do not give any indication as to whether or not inspection made workplaces safer with regard to the chances of non-fatal injuries.

[12] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1900, (London: 1901), 381.

[13] See for example “Laundresses Past and Present,” The Pall Mall Gazette, (London, England), Saturday, July 11, 1885, Issue 6341.

[14] George Frederick McCleary, Life in the laundry (London: Fabian Society, 1902), page 2.

[15] Mohun, Steam Laundries, 107.

[16] Mohun, Steam Laundries, 87.

[17] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1900 (London: 1901), 382. See also Mohun, Steam Laundries, 106.

[18] Mohun, Steam Laundries, 100.

[19] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1900 (London: 1901), 382. See also Mohun, Steam Laundries, 106.

[20]Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1888 (London: 1889), 96.

[21] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1902 (London: 1903), 163.

[22] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1902 (London: 1903), 166.

[23] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1902 (London: 1903), 165.

[24] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1889 (London: 1890), 217.

[25] The data in this table and table 2 below are taken from the tables in the factory reports from 1897-1902. Prior to 1896 the reports did not list the number of accidents in laundries and prior to 1897 the reports did not include the number of factory laundries. All calculations in the following paragraphs are mine unless otherwise noted.

[26] These figures are drawn from the 1901 census for England and Wales. The census lists the occupational category “laundry and washing service.” Great Britain, Census Office, Census of England and Wales,1901: General Report with Appendices (London: 1904), 83.

[27] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 8. Malcolmson notes that London laundries made up 35 percent of the total laundry employment in Britain.

[28] Malcolmson, English Laundresses, 137.

[29] In this equation n is the number of laundries, 0.272n is the number of factory laundries, 0.728n is the number of hand laundries, 0.272n*33 is the number of women working at factory laundries, 0.728n * 8 is the number of women working in hand laundries, and 196,141 is the total number of women working in laundries of any sort. The equation 0.272n*33 + 0.728n*8=196,141 reduces to 14.8n=196,141 which gives a value of 13252.77 for n. Putting that number back into the equation for the number of factory laundries (0.272n*33) equals 118,956.86.

[30] My estimate of the number of men working in factory laundries is high because it assumes that all men working in laundries outside their own homes were employees in factory laundries. No doubt some of these men worked in hand laundries and some may have been laundry owners. Because I make a high estimate of the number of men working, my estimate of the rate of injuries for male employees is probably lower than the actual rate. Male laundry workers probably got hurt even more frequently than my estimated rate of 1 accident per every 54 male workers.

[31] Barbara Harrison argues that in some industries, particularly those with health risks such as poisoning, “there was a differential construction of risk to women, despite the greater number of men sufferers.” Barbara Harrison, “Are Accidents Gender Neutral? The Case of Women’s Industrial Work in Britain, 1880-1914,” Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (1993), 253-275. (258.) Harrison’s calculations, based on a 1911 Labor Department report, list laundries as not among the most dangerous workplaces for either men or women, and suggest that laundries were much more dangerous for men in the industry than women. (259.) Harrison rightly notes that rates such as these “may obscure real instances of suffering and permanent incapacity” suffered by women, due to under-reporting and to the greater impact of injuries on some women as the result of economic constraints women faced. (260.) I discuss these issues in the next section of this paper.

[32] “Portamadoc - Case Under the Factories Act,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, November 18, 1899; Issue 4830.

[33] Contributory negligence was one of the key legal defenses used by employers against law suits by injured workers in both Britain and the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jamie Bronstein argues that British courts held to this doctrine even more strictly than U.S. judges. Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: 2008), 25. Contributory negligence amounted to the doctrine that if an employee bore any responsibility for a workplace injury then the employer bore no responsibility to compensate the employee and could not be found guilty of wrongdoing. As Bronstein points out, this doctrine involved a contradiction in that an employer was arguably negligent in hiring a person who the employer believed was so irrational as to knowingly endanger life and limbs by acting in a careless fashion around heavy machinery. To the best of my knowledge, this argument was never made in court in this period.

[34] Jones’ previous wage had been 4s 6d per week. Her employer had voluntarily paid her 2s 3d per week between the time of her injury in June, 1899, until November, 1899. I believe Jones eventually found other work. Census records for Wales from 1901 list two different Laura Ellen Jones of about 15 years of age. Both are listed as working as domestic servants in towns about twenty miles from Portmadoc and Tremadoc, Llanddeiniolen and Llanengan. Censuses accessed via Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com citation - Class: RG13; Piece: 5281; Folio: 27; Page: 9. and Class: RG13; Piece: 5267; Folio: 29; Page: 6.

[35] “Portmadoc County Court,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, May 19, 1900; Issue 4856.

[36] Linzi Manicom, “Ruling Relations: Rethinking Gender and State in South African History,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1992), 441-456, (459).

[37] Manicom, “Ruling Relations,” 463-464.

[38] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1901 (London:1902), 169.

[39] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1902 (London: 1903), 166.

[40] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1900 (London: 1901), 379.

[41] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1900 (London: 1901), 167.

[42] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1900 (London: 1901), 166.

[43] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1900 (London: 1901), 379.

[44] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1901 (London: 1902), 168.

[45] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1901 (London: 1902), 169.

[46] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year 1897 (London: 1898), 96.

[47] I mean this measured strictly in quantitative terms, in the chance of an injury or fatality happening to an individual body. In the next section of this paper I discuss some of the limits of this way of measuring safety.

[48] Out of his interest to avoid or to criticize this “violence of abstraction” Rediker attempts to carry out what he calls an ethnographic approach to slave ships. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 12-13.

[49] I do not mean to be reductive in making a cavalier parallel between waged women workers and chattel slaves. There are important differences here that should not be covered over. On the other hand, there are at least two areas of similarity which merit further inquiry. First, women at this time were legally disqualified in a way which was not identical to but does bear some similarity to the status of slaves. The same could be said about child workers. Second, just as Rediker rightly insists that the legacy of slavery is a relevant and pressing issue in the present, so too is workplace injury a pressing issue in the present.

[50] Sufficient attention to the meaning of injuries, while beyond the scope of this paper, is critical for understanding women’s workplace injuries. This point may be obvious or instinctive to historians after the discursive/cultural turn and after the increase in attention to gender. If nothing else, I hope my quantitative calculations help provide further evidence for this point. Among other things, attention to the human meaning of injuries suggests that the very definition of what constitutes injury is historically specific. For example, depending on the gender norms of the day, an injured man may have felt emasculated due to the loss of the ability to earn sufficiently high wages to support a family. An injured woman may not have had a corresponding response to her injury, but may instead of have felt defeminized due to a sense of disfigurement, since women’s successful performance of womanhood has often been linked to their appearance. An important part of understanding workplace injury from a gendered perspective would be to investigate the marriage prospects of disabled men and women. This would not only address the different meanings of injury for men and women, but would also ask questions about what constitutes injury. For example, to the degree that marriage was (relatively speaking) economically beneficial for working class women, and to the degree that appearance shaped women’s marriage prospects, the ostensibly cosmetic aspects of injuries were in part economic injuries analogous the loss of the ability to work for wages.

[51] Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (New York: Cornell, 1996), 168-169.

[52] Rose E. Squire, Thirty Years in the Public Service, an Industrial Retrospect (London: Nisbet) 1927, 149.

[53] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1902 (London: 1903), 163.

[54] Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the Year1901 (London: 1902), 169.

Works Cited
Primary Sources:
George Frederick McCleary, Life in the laundry, London: Fabian Society, 1902.

Rose E. Squire, Thirty Years in the Public Service, an Industrial Retrospect, London: Nisbet, 1927.

Newspapers -
“Laundresses Past and Present,” The Pall Mall Gazette, (London, England), Saturday, July 11, 1885, Issue 6341.

“Portmadoc - Case Under the Factories Act,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, November 18, 1899; Issue 4830.

“Portmadoc County Court,” North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), Saturday, May 19, 1900; Issue 4856.

Parliamentary reports -
Great Britain, Home Office, Annual Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops, for the years 1888-1902.

Great Britain, Census Office, Census of England and Wales,1901: General Report with Appendices, London, 1904.

Secondary Sources:

Bartrip, P. W. J., and P. T. Fenn, “Factory fatalities and regulation in Britain, 1878-1913,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 25, no. 1 (1988), 60-74

Bronstein, Jamie L., Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Stanford: 2008.

Canning, Kathleen, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship, New York: Cornell, 1996.

Harrison, Barbara, “Are Accidents Gender Neutral? The Case of Women’s Industrial Work in Britain, 1880-1914,” Women’s History Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (1993), 253-275.

Malcolmson, Patricia E., English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Manicom, Linzi, “Ruling Relations: Rethinking Gender and State in South African History,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1992), 441-456,

Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Viking, 2007.