Abstract
The significance of Beatrice Moring's book on factory women emerges only gradually as the reader moves through the chapters. The title and introductory chapter are quite general, but it soon becomes clear that the women to whom the title refers encompass both women factory workers, and, more innovatively, women factory inspectors as well. The temporal focus on the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century is well-chosen, since the situation of women in factories—factory workers and inspectors both—evolved rapidly and in relation to each other during these decades. The title specifies this chronological focus, but it does not signal the book's geographic range, which, while not global, is most impressive. From the start, the author bases her analysis on a variety of forms of historical evidence from many European countries and also from the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. She thus not only lays the ground for cross-national comparison but also brings into the realm of Anglophone scholarship regions of Europe (especially Scandinavia) often overlooked in the field of women's history.
In the introduction, Moring begins by making some very general claims about the history and historiography of women's factory work. While it is useful to begin with a general framework, at times Moring's general claims are puzzling, such as her statement early in the introductory chapter that: “The aim of this study is by focusing on working women to elevate them from obscurity and give them their rightful place as actors in history” (3). Here she seems to be overlooking the huge historiography on this topic, although it soon becomes clear that she is aware of and draws upon the decades of prior scholarship by historians of women's work. Soon after this opening, Moring begins to demonstrate how she builds upon this scholarship and then takes it in an interesting new direction by raising questions about the complex cross-class and cross-gender dynamics involved in the history of women's factory work.
She notes that the opening of positions for female factory inspectors brought about “the creation of a niche for middle-class, educated women to gain recognized positions within the administration …” (6). And even while noting the class bias of the first-wave feminist movement that helped to bring about this female entry into the profession of factory inspectors, Moring points to a more surprising development that the book investigates. She sets us up to follow a process through which “organizations like the Women's Protective and Provident League experienced a transformation in the 1880s … [from] an organization … dominated by ladies hostile to the unions and state regulation … into one promoting union work and state regulation of the workplace…” (7). The introduction thus flags the book's concern with and documentation of gendered and cross-class conversations that occurred on the factory floor and elsewhere. But before the reader gets to that discussion, there are framing chapters on the more familiar topics of debates over women's status and women's work in the context of first-wave feminism; women's work across industrial sectors, life course stages, and marital status; and the particular place of the factory as a site of female employment.
Chapter 1, “Gender and Class—Male Unions, Political Movements and the Female Vote,” addresses the existing historiography about the role of gender in debates of women's rights more broadly, and the gender politics of the male-dominated union. The focus here is on summarizing the scholarship on the reiterated concern with “protecting” women workers, a concern articulated by both organized male unionists under the rationale of advocating a “male breadwinner wage,” and more conservative opponents of women's participation in the paid labor force. While these general developments are familiar, there is nevertheless a valuable contribution here in terms of the range of national historiographies the discussion incorporates. This allows the reader to be aware of not only the more general history but also the exceptions, especially the Finnish case history marked by a welcoming of early efforts to build trade unions for women workers. Moring notes that there were specialized female unions in Finland already in the 1890s, in contrast to other Scandinavian countries as well as the rest of Europe. There is much to be learned from the presentation of many national cases, even if this comes at the cost of more detailed comparative analysis of the variations. This methodological tension—which comes with the terrain of any ambitious comparative history such as this one—is apparent throughout the book.
Chapter 2, “Women in Industry: Work, Sectors, Age and Marital Status,” also takes on familiar themes, summarizing general trends related to female employment in paid labor in agriculture and industry across and beyond Europe in the decades round 1900. The summary is based largely on census records, which means it is at times challenging to follow given the variation in the definition of categories deployed in the sources across time and place. Still, given that the data gathering is impressively wide-ranging, it yields many provocative findings. For example, we learn that the proportion of women in the economically “active population” in 1910 ranged from a low of 20% in USA to a high of 38% in Finland. While there are too many such data points to effectively analyze in a brief summary, the evidence presented here and throughout the book will no doubt encourage further comparative study.
Chapter 3, “Women, Earnings and the Household—Why the Factory?” looks at work options from women's perspectives and looks critically across different types of relevant sources. The family and household context plays a role in all of these early chapters, but here it is emphasized in the analytic frame: women were more constrained than men by their family roles—as daughter, wife, mother, or widow—in terms of both the need for them to earn and the job options that were possible for them. Moring has notably scoured the archives and historical literature for sources that allow her to get at women worker's perspectives and in this chapter the census data is enriched by sources such as surveys conducted among women workers. Her discussion of such surveys emphasizes the reiterated insistence on the necessity of paid labor for women, either as a supplement to inadequate male wages or as the primary source of income for the household.
These early chapters review familiar trends concerning the situations of female factory workers and their households, while adding many more national cases to the knowledge pool. But the most innovative contribution of the book begins to emerge in Chapter 4, “Accidents, Compensation, Laws and Inspection,” when Moring introduces her finding about the situations of women in the factory not only as women workers but also as women inspectors. Moring launches this topic not with a framing argument, but with the presentation and discussion of tables summarizing evidence about industrial accidents in several countries, reports that were necessitated by laws regulating factory conditions and requiring insurance of and compensation for workers. These types of laws in turn brought the need for new types of bureaucracies to deal with industrial injuries but also to delve into the conditions in workplaces that caused them. An increasing demand for factory inspectors followed since they were necessary for the enforcement of the new laws.
After beginning with a discussion of the emergence of the factory inspector as a profession, Moring then delves into the politics of recruitment, defining the scope of their mission, and especially the gender-inflected debates about the conditions of women workers. A tacit coalition of unlikely allies—male trade unionists and social conservatives—committed in many countries to the agenda of “protecting” female workers by restricting their hours of employment and their workplace conditions such that employers would find it less desirable to employ them. If the aim was that these restrictions would get women out of the factory all together, it failed, and, ironically, ended up creating a new demand—for female factory inspectors deemed more appropriate for enforcing laws in female workplaces.
There were debates everywhere over protection versus banning the employment of women, married women in particular, in the decades around 1900. But in these same years, the reality of female employment fed into the related demand for proper inspection of workplaces. Gender ideology about the proper places for women ironically supported the call for female inspectors who were seen to be more appropriate for close interactions with women workers. Moring goes into detail about selected national histories that in some cases took interesting turns from the more general pattern. In Austria, for example, the grassroots organization of women workers pushed back against the male unionists: “the grassroots Social Democratic women pushed for better regulation of the workplace, particularly through engaging of female factory inspectors” (113). By 1898, the whole party endorsed this idea. In Finland, where women could be elected to parliament by 1907, and one member of Parliament was a female inspector, regulations of women's work were less restrictive than elsewhere.
As the growing feminist movement intersected with debates about women factory workers, feminist activists demanded access to education for women, including some forms of professional education. This is the focus of Chapter 5 “Middle Class Girls, Education and Entry into the Civil Service.” The first demands were for access to professional training seen to fall within “women's spheres,” such as teaching and the supervision of charitable work, but others followed. The demand for professional training for women eventually converged with the demand for female factory inspectors. The emphasis on women's special competence in realms relating to women and children led to arguments for women professionals in both schools and in factories. Moreover, some budget-conscious male state administrators argued that women inspectors and clerks would be cheaper not only because they expected lower salaries, but also because they could be expected to leave their positions to marry before they pay grade got too high. Moring offers salary data that supports this claim. This points to another ironic development: “In many countries, the price woman had to pay for being a professional was enforced celibacy” (135).
Chapter 6, “The Female Factory Inspectors—How, Why and Who,” looks closely at the experiences of the early cohorts of female factory inspectors. The analysis of this chapter rests more heavily on stories rather than the statistics on which previous chapter relied. Contextualized within the general history of second-wave feminism, the stories show how the careers of the earliest inspectors were shaped not just by professional qualifications but also by their contacts and networks—through family connections to commissions or positions in charitable organizations, and even, eventually, with unions. The collected brief biographies analyzed and included here tell us a lot about both the difficulties encountered by early female inspectors and the varied routes to professional success but also—most interestingly—about their innovations in terms of cross-class communications and local and international alliance building that they were often able to achieve despite the obstacles first encountered.
Some of Moring's most interesting claims of the book are to be found here, where she directly introduces findings about what happened on the factory floor and in adjacent spaces co-occupied by factory workers and inspectors, as an underexamined site of gendered cross-class communication and alliance building. Her evidence again comes from varied sites, here ranging from Chicago to Finland. The inspectors had to innovate as they went along, by experimenting with dress, for example, to maintain respectability without being too posh, or by carrying on conversation while walking to and from work with women who felt uncomfortable with factory-floor conversations. They even managed to conduct surveys with women workers to add better information on topics too often neglected by official company or government reports. Despite often challenging beginnings of the profession and despite persistent class division, Moring concludes that, by the early twentieth century, “there was one thing that working-class women and middle-class women could agree on: the need for female inspectors to inspect the working conditions of women” (162). The chapter concludes with nine short biographies of female factory inspectors from six different countries, most of whom were born in the 1850s or 1860s and began their careers in the late nineteenth century inspectorate boom period.
Chapter 7, “Female Inspection Activity,” tracks the work and accomplishments of the inspectors. Here Moring presents evidence of the women inspectors’ substantial accomplishments, and offers a range of interesting examples across place, though here again as in other chapters, we learn a lot about interesting variations across nations but without much of a comparative analytic framework that might begin to account for the variation. The accomplishments emphasized here are multiple. Female inspectors were creative in developing relations of trust with workers, including finding spaces where the women workers would feel more comfortable talking about workplace issues. They found new ways to record their observations (such as surveys of worker's experiences) to yield new forms of data to share with policymakers. Their investigations and data collection ranged widely from hygiene and sanitation to problems associated with home/sweated work to the health of younger workers. Here too we get suggestions about the processes whereby ideas for reforms traveled across national boundaries, helping to explain the notable simultaneity of developments across the globe.
The last chapter on “Class, Gender and Communication” delves directly into the innovative approach by female factory workers that increasingly relied on building trust and alliances between inspectors and workers. Here Moring goes into detail about the strategies that inspectors developed to gain workers’ trust. As she points out, even though women workers and unions had in many places advocated for female inspectors, the relationship was not always easy once they arrived at the factories. Of course there were always cross-class suspicions to deal with, and some disagreements about appropriate limits of female work. Evidence of trust building is provided by the rising number of complaints that inspectors filed on behalf of workers. Female inspectors seem to have been caught between sometimes having to negotiate as advocates for protection and sometimes as advocates for women's equality, reproducing on an individual scale the debates documented in the historiography of first-wave feminism, between “maternalist” and “equal rights” feminists more broadly. In the case of the female factory inspectors, we see on-the-ground and innovative ways of negotiating these tensions.
The book thus leaves the reader with new connections between the history of feminism and middle-class women's professional history, on the one hand, and the history of female factory workers and their work roles, family roles, and agency as political actors on the other. In these chapters and the many appendix tables, we are also introduced to a lot of data from multiple sites that may well allow future scholars to do more comparative analysis and to more fully analyze the cross-national similarities and variations that Moring has uncovered.