Four interlinked problems beset late 19th-century industrial labour: employers worked their employees as hard and as cheaply as they could; this exploitation was at its most extreme in the ‘sweated’ trades, which were marked by long hours, poor wages and appalling conditions; sweating overlapped with home-work, where the production of goods and services for a pittance mingled uncomfortably with family life; and many of the manufacturing processes and constituents used in domestic and non-domestic workplaces actually poisoned or otherwise damaged workers’ bodies. This was mainly a class-based, not a gender-based, exploitation. But women and children were especially vulnerable. Women made up the bulk of workers in the sweated trades; they had fewer rights, in fact almost no rights at all, at a time when workers in general were only in the process of discovering the power that might be exercised through the trade union movement. This chapter ventures into the attempts women reformers made to relieve the dreadful conditions of industrial labour. Although some paid special attention to the work of women and children, much of their effort was directed towards improving the world of wage labour in general. In the process, some women reformers also inaugurated campaigns which we think of as entirely modern – for example, the idea of boycotting goods produced by exploited workers.

The work of the main women who feature in this chapter – Britain’s Clementina Black, Clara Collet, Margaret Bondfield and the early women factory inspectors, Sweden’s Kerstin Hesselgren, and Crystal Eastman and Alice Hamilton in the US – spans all the critical issues relating to the conditions of industrial labour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The trajectories of these women reiterate the theme of methodological inventiveness discussed in Chapter Three. In order to find out just how exploitative working conditions damaged workers, women researchers had to develop new tools of study and analysis. These were subsequently incorporated into economics, epidemiology and sociology as standard research techniques.

Thomas Oliver, a physician with a background in occupational diseases, edited a book called Dangerous trades: The historical, social and legal aspects of industrial occupations as affecting health, by a number of experts in 1902. Nine of its 60 chapters were written by women, eight of these by the first British women to be appointed as factory inspectors.