Gendered Discourses and the Making of Protective Labor Legislation in England, 1830–1914

Abstract

The crowding together of numbers of the young in both sexes in factories, is a prolific source of moral delinquency. The stimulus of the heated atmosphere, the contact of the opposite sexes, the example of the lasciviousness upon the animal passion—all have conspired to produce a very early development of sexual appetencies. (Peter Gaskell,The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833)The prolonged absence from home of the wife and mother caused an enormous amount of infant mortality and it must cause the elder children to be more or less neglected. It deadened the sense of parental responsibility. (Thomas Maudsley, secretary of the Committee Promoting the Nine Hours Movement, 1872)From a purely physical point of view the nation's strength is measured by its reproductive power and the high percentage of the fitness of its children …. Women's work becomes the cause of physical degeneracy and of inability on the part of women to rise to the dignity of the completed act of motherhood. (Dr. Thomas Oliver, lecture before the Eugenics Education Society, 1911)Each of these statements was made as part of the public debate about enacting protective labor legislation in England. They were diverse manifestations of a single idea—the idea that women's work outside the home was dangerous to society and required state intervention. Between 1830 and 1914, a discourse of danger dominated the public discussion of female labor. Yet, as the opening quotations suggest, different types of danger were emphasized at various times.