Cotton textile manufacturing in America and Britain was one of the few trades where men and women could work alongside each other, performing the same tasks for the same rates of pay and experiencing the same workplace health hazards. The two cotton industries, centred in Lancashire and New England, grew rapidly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and subsequently declined, albeit at different rates. While studies of industrial strategy and production choices in cotton textile manufacturing regularly compare Britain and America and relate gender to costs and manual dexterity, industrial health has received limited comparative attention. Analysing workers’ understandings of and responses to an unhealthy working environment provides a multi-layered narrative involving official authorities, employers, medical advertising, and workers, in which the importance given to the role of gender depended on the context and discursive level. This article explores how working-class social realities influenced understandings of and responses to work-related health disorders, highlighting the similarity of the industrial experience across national and gender boundaries, thereby also broadening understandings of occupational health. Many causes of ill-health relate to both working and living conditions. Hence, workplace health encompasses ill-health experienced at work but not necessarily caused by it and overlaps with occupational health, or ill-health caused by specific work processes.
When men and women work alongside each other work-health relationships become entwined with broader histories of women’s health and work, and of occupational health and safety. British histories of women’s work-health relationship have followed broader histories of women’s health, which argue that these issues rose to government interest tangentially through the development of maternal and child welfare policies in the early years of the twentieth century.Footnote 1 Industrial work histories have emphasized the dangers that work supposedly posed to women and their unborn children, focusing on how the British government introduced legislation to support a broader social agenda.Footnote 2 The health of unmarried girls in the workplace – the future mothers of Britain – became a legislative priority.
In America, too, social policy and historical debates have emphasized both working-class women’s lack of agency and maternalist ideology.Footnote 3 In 1917, Alice Hamilton, physician, factory inspector, professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and creator of the field of industrial toxicology, shifted the existing legislative emphasis on purely protecting women’s health in factories to include hazards specific to reproductive health.Footnote 4 This marked a shift in workplace health policies reflecting gender and class norms that had previously sought to limit the hours that women could work, partly so that they had the time and energy to be a good mother. Indeed, assumptions about motherhood greatly influenced women’s employment regulations,Footnote 5 although both historiography and social policy debates have prioritized the policy implications of such assumptions over medical and scientific rationales for sex-specific laws.Footnote 6 This article reveals how social and environmental factors influenced Lancashire and New England workers’ conception of work-related disorders and did not necessarily correspond with the middle-class, gendered, social and political priorities.
In both countries, male experiences have dominated occupational health and safety discourses, with risk, cultures of masculinity, and the politics of compensation being the recurrent themes.Footnote 7 Broad labour issues, particularly legislation and compensation for occupational diseases, have overshadowed women’s experiences of occupational ill-health. Where historiography has addressed gender, it has emphasized women’s behaviour rather than their experiences at work. Women’s occupational health has been overlooked due to wartime necessities or the ill workers have been removed from the health debates.Footnote 8 Trade unions, legislation, medical politics, employers and their organizations, and sanitation have dominated debates about cotton textile manufacturing,Footnote 9 whereas women’s contributions to trade unions and, indeed, the broader labour movement have been marginalized.Footnote 10 Overall, British and American historiography about industrial illness and injury emphasizes how capitalist neglect, official indifference, and compensation took precedence over better health and safety standards – although the dynamics of each situation varied according to individual case studies.
This article examines the lesser known and often informal actions of individuals and groups of cotton operatives between the 1880s and 1940s, the period when cotton cloth manufacturing in Lancashire and New England shifted from industrial growth to terminal decline after World War I. Throughout, operatives in both regions daily calculated the health risks associated with work and sought to address such risks when the boundary of what they deemed “acceptable” working conditions was crossed. This boundary was fluid and only sometimes corresponded with trade union or political agendas. It was also entwined with the agendas of employers and official authorities and was furthermore influenced by medical advertising. In both Lancashire and New England, workers’ agency in responding to hazards depended on the relevant personal, industrial, and economic constraints, including the condition of the local labour market. When the need to earn a wage dominated priorities, operatives’ responses included coping strategies. Utilizing a combination of workers’ papers, oral history collections, government documents, and health reports, this article argues that the importance of gender in workplace health debates depended on the context and the dominant actors, but was never of central importance to workers. Instead, individuals and groups of workers daily determined the workplace health risks and responded accordingly. Risk was not determined by political and technical processes.Footnote 11 Rather, in both regions, the social and economic context dominated workers’ decision-making and was not overtly gendered.
Firstly, this article provides the health context of the cotton textile manufacturing regions of Lancashire and New England, with the textile mills of the American South excluded from analysis due to differences in industrial structure, labour, and the timing of industrial change.Footnote 12 The focus is the chronic health risks associated with cotton manufacturing, rather than accidents or compensation campaigns against life-threatening diseases, such as mule-spinners’ cancer and byssinosis – the respiratory disease whereby lung capacity is increasingly restricted after prolonged exposure to cotton dust. Because many chronic health problems attributable to textile work had multiple contributing agents – for example, pneumonia, bronchitis, and hearing loss – these were not high on the political reform agenda. Moreover, as with many health problems, individual and collective responses to the perceived workplace hazards varied depending on context. Secondly, it analyses the changing knowledge and expectations about work-health relationships and responsibilities, revealing contrasting understandings of workplace health between politicians, medical professionals, employers, workers, and their representatives. Thirdly, it analyses the formal and informal strategies men and women cotton operatives utilized to address an unhealthy workplace, demonstrating the fluidity of the relationship between the working environment, health, and gender. It reveals how, through periods of industrial growth and subsequent decline, gender was more important to official authorities than it was to workers. The medical market, social reformers, and employers all utilized gender to suit their agendas. Unlike debates about industrial structure and strategy and union activism, workers’ understandings of and responses to the working environment in both countries reveals more convergence than divergence, where social and economic realities superseded national and industrial constraints as well as gender. These contextual relationships at any given point in time determine health priorities and responses – both formal and informal.
Textile Regions, Occupational Health and Responsibility
Historically, the cotton industry has been labelled one of the pillars of industrialization in both Britain and America. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the industry found its ideal location in Lancashire where the humid climate aided the fragile cotton fibres. Towns such as Blackburn, Burnley, Bolton, Preston, Oldham, and Nelson became synonymous with cotton textile manufacturing. Both men and women entered the mills, particularly in towns where cotton textile manufacturing dominated the local economy, including Blackburn and Burnley. Towns with more diverse economies, including Bolton and Preston, provided greater employment opportunities for males, while textiles remained a better paid choice for females. Cotton manufacturing expanded in a largely unregulated manner until the mid-nineteenth century, when concerns grew about the impact of mill work on operatives’ health and the high morbidity and mortality rates in many Lancashire towns.Footnote 13 That said, regulation was gradual and piecemeal and aimed more at restricting women’s labour than reforming working conditions.
In nineteenth-century America, entrepreneurs found the abundant rivers and available female labour in New England ideal for cotton textile manufacturing. While isolated rural mills survived, the Massachusetts towns of Lowell, Holyoke, Fall River, New Bedford, and Lawrence became thriving textile communities, employing men, women, and sometimes children. Increased immigration during the latter years of the nineteenth century provided a ready supply of labour for the mills. The low wages paid frequently required more than one family member to work in order to sustain the household, with over half the weavers of cotton goods in the United States being women and young people by 1905.Footnote 14 Factory regulation in America was state specific and, similar to British legislation, Massachusetts legislation was gradual and piecemeal, prioritizing restricting the working hours of women and children rather than industrial reform. Indeed, the concentration of cotton textile manufacturing in particular areas of the two countries created a regional component to occupational diseases and their regulation.Footnote 15 In both countries, health and safety laws and the evolution of factory inspection were strongly shaped by mill experiences.Footnote 16 Consequently, both mill operations and the labour force were under regular observation by social reformers and politicians, whose priorities were influenced by factors external to the mill, rather than internal ones.
The health risks specific to mill work are well recorded, with causation both occupational and environmental. Long hours and the gruelling pace of work caused fatigue and migraines. Cotton and size dust caused or exacerbated multiple respiratory problems, including bronchitis, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Long-term exposure could also cause byssinosis, which acquired its medical name between 1885 and 1890. Dust was a particular problem in raw cotton processing, while weavers were concerned about both dust inhalation and contagious diseases through the use of the suction shuttle, which required weavers to use their mouth to repeatedly draw thread through a tiny hole. Excessive heat and humidity contributed to high levels of respiratory illnesses, including pneumonia and bronchitis, and could cause rheumatism. Poor lighting strained operatives’ eyes, while excessive machine noise could eventually cause deafness. And, from 1922, the carcinogenic lubricating oils used on spinning mules were a recognized problem in Lancashire.Footnote 17 Indeed, the risks attributable to textile work were such that in 1914 the British government classified working in cotton factories a “dangerous” trade, despite the comparatively low rate of work injuries and fatalities compared with other industries.Footnote 18 By World War I, the government had regulated many workplace hazards, yet employers repeatedly breached the legislation. In 1903 alone there were 569 recorded breaches of the Cotton Cloth Factories Act, which regulated heat and humidity, in addition to those that went unrecorded.Footnote 19 Moreover, the factory inspectorate was grossly understaffed and many workers had never known an inspector visit their firm.Footnote 20
With similar timing to Britain, in 1915, the Massachusetts Industrial Accident Board labelled the cotton manufacturing industry the state’s second most dangerous, surpassed only by iron and steel.Footnote 21 Despite Massachusetts’ progressive labour legislation and despite the Bureau of Labor’s studies about the dusty trades from 1903, preventive legislation that would have protected workers’ health and safety was absent other than the 1911 ban of the suction shuttle from public health concerns over tuberculosis. While State and Federal officials readily noted the health risks attributable to textile work, Massachusetts legislation prioritized women’s and children’s working hours (1874), employer’s liability for accidents (1887), and Workers’ Compensation (1912). Similar to the situation in Lancashire, legislative enforcement was limited, with factory inspections few and the department understaffed and underfunded. While occupational legislation secured limited factory health reforms, responsibility for working conditions and for managing ill-health remained predominantly with employers and workers.
Cotton manufacturers blamed workers for accidents and workplace ill-health. In 1920, the Textile World Journal neatly summarized the Massachusetts’ employers’ arguments that had been reiterated in testimony to state inquiries over the previous fifty years and which government officials largely seem to have accepted:
Textile workers are apt to be careless, ignorant of the dangers of infection and disease, not always cleanly, and many of the alien rather prefer to herd together in their habitations. They have borne the ill effects of accident and sickness with a stoicism handed down through several generations. They have accepted these ills as the customary lot of their class, without much thought that they could be alleviated, and without dreaming that in large measure they might be eliminated.Footnote 22
Blaming the victim and holding workers accountable for accidents and acute diseases under an assumption of risk, fit the broader ideology of the American legal system through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yet, consensus about responsibility was lacking. Some Progressive Era employers acknowledged the work-health connection, recognizing the production benefits from improved working conditions and linking responsibility with profits; others did not.
Lancashire employers also blamed workers for their own ill health, bemoaning in 1914 that: “How is it that the factory is always denounced as the only cause of sickness? Overcrowded housing, careless dietary, and habits that make for ill-health never seem to enter the calculations of the [trade union] officials”.Footnote 23 Responsibility for ill-health was placed on the workers, their lifestyles, dietary choices, and carelessness.
How much, for instance, have the conditions of the home got to do with sickness, especially the almost always closed bedroom windows. How much is a careless system of dietary responsible for illness? And how much carelessness in other matters that need not be specifically indicated?Footnote 24
To employers, health problems were the fault and prevention the responsibility of workers. Nevertheless, in both Lancashire and Massachusetts, without firm workplace legislation variations in working conditions between firms remained as employers sought to maximize production.
For their part, workers and their unions needed to balance the health risks attributable to work with those of not working – particularly the risk of no income. Yet, while documentary and some oral testimony supports Elizabeth Roberts idea of a “social calm” in Lancashire, whereby people accepted their lot, including poverty and poor conditions, and which is reflected in the absence of class protest,Footnote 25 this does not mean operatives were always deferential and submissive or that they left industrial health to their unions. Similarly, Mary Blewett has argued that, in Massachusetts, the female mill workers of Lowell accepted their lot as working-class children, with all that it entailed, from leaving school at a young age to many years in the mills.Footnote 26 Yet, while health did not always dominate workers’ priorities, this should not imply worker passivity. Rather, this article suggests that workers’ priorities were fluid and dependent on personal and industrial circumstances, particularly because many health issues related to both the working and living environment.
Biomedical Knowledge and Expectations about Health at Work
From the late nineteenth century, formal medical knowledge about the workplace causes of ill-health grew alongside developments in biomedicine, while health expectations in mill communities were tempered by living conditions. Levels of understanding about different workplace diseases varied, but in the latter decades of the nineteenth century the leading fear in both Lancashire and Massachusetts was tuberculosis. The medical community raised concerns about the spread of TB into the factory before medical knowledge differentiated byssinosis and tuberculosis. It was 1902 before the British physician Thomas Oliver recognized byssinosis as one of the four types of pneumoconiosis, or industrial lung diseases.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, distinguishing between industrial and contagious respiratory illnesses, particularly byssinosis and bronchitis, remained difficult well into the twentieth century. It was the mid-1950s before the British physician, Richard Shilling, made significant progress in separating the two and 1969 before the American medical community acknowledged that byssinosis was, indeed, a disease.Footnote 28
A different trajectory of understanding followed industrial deafness. In 1911, the Massachusetts’ legislature acknowledged that certain occupations associated with loud noises produced permanent injury to the ear, including weaving. Yet, deafness was not considered the serious handicap for weavers that it was for other occupations. Rather, weavers’ deafness was merely seen as an “inconvenience”.Footnote 29 It was the 1920s before audiometric techniques were developed and 1942 before a hearing impairment formula was developed and accepted by the American Medical Association.Footnote 30 Hence, until the 1940s, medical consensus was lacking about the boundary between hearing loss and deafness as well as about the causes.Footnote 31 With similar timing, in the 1930s, the British government’s Industrial Health Research Board conducted experiments about the effects of excessive noise on weavers’ efficiency, concluding in 1935 that:
it may be doubted whether complete immunity from the inimical effects of excessive noise can ever be acquired so long as normal hearing is retained, and that the development of partial deafness appears to be the only effective protection which the individual can acquire.Footnote 32
The following year, the British Medical Journal further deflected attention about hearing loss from the factory, arguing that it was “by no means easy to define precisely the working conditions which are in themselves calculated to produce partial or total deafness in a given time”.Footnote 33 Clearly, well into the twentieth century, both governments and medical communities in Britain and the United States were unable or unwilling to link specific health problems to work, making easier employers’ ability to ignore the working environment. Consequently, operatives lacked a formal, medical framework to which to attach any physical symptoms they believed were caused by occupation. Instead, workers’ expectations and knowledge about the working environment was based on a personal model of illness, not a medical model, where many health issues translated to both working and living conditions.
While experiences of illness are individual, mill workers noted similarities of symptoms and the work-health connection. However, ill-educated workers focused on their immediate health and did not foresee any long-term health hazards from mill work. In the 1840s, Lowell operatives complained to family and friends how the dust and noise of the mills made them feel unwell.Footnote 34 By 1910, the majority of operative admissions to the Lowell Corporation Hospital, owned by the textile employers, were for respiratory problems.Footnote 35 In the 1920s and 1930s, mill workers still noted how inhaling textile dust made their breathing “uncomfortable”, but did not understand the physiological implications. Some workers stoically commented that “you get used to it [the dust]”,Footnote 36 while others identified a work-health connection. For example, Valentine Chartrand, who spent over twenty years working in the Lowell mills from World War I noted, “Because in the winter the windows are all closed, you know? And all you get is that lint flying around. And you breathe a lot of that. And I always had a feeling that wasn’t good for your lungs […]”.Footnote 37 Carder and dye house worker, Sydney Muskovitz, who entered the Merrimack Mills of Lowell in 1937, noted that “And before I got hired, I was told, keep your eyes open, ears open, and your mouth shut [because of the dust and dirt]. The superintendent says […] That [carding] is the most miserable, hottest, dangerous job I ever had”. Thirty years later, Muskovitz found that, “I couldn’t breathe, getting dizzy. Pains in the chest […] I believe it was the heat and the dust that irritated my heart”.Footnote 38 He had never heard of byssinosis, possibly because there were few cases of byssinosis in New England.Footnote 39 Despite lacking the medical language, both male and female operatives clearly recognized the work-health relationship between dust and respiratory problems, but not the longer-term health consequences until it had become too late.
In the mid-twentieth century, Lancashire mill workers’ knowledge about biomedical and legislative developments concerning dust inhalation, its regulation, and the term byssinosis remained limited. They did not realize the potential for cotton dust to permanently damage health. For example, Mona Morgan worked in the cardroom between the 1930s and 1970s and, at the time of her interview, suffered from byssinosis. She claimed that: “If anyone would have told me this would happen, I wouldn’t have gone in”.Footnote 40 Fellow byssinosis sufferer and ring room worker between the 1940s and 1980s, Ethel Fielding noted, “We were never told anything like that. You never dreamt of work hazards”.Footnote 41 Cardroom worker May Mitchell, employed in the 1930s and 1940s, confirmed that she had “Never heard the word [byssinosis], never heard the word till years after come out of t’ mill”.Footnote 42 Yet, from before World War I, trade union campaigns fought to secure compensation for male byssinosis sufferers, succeeding in 1941, suggesting that some men were aware of the health impact from long-term dust exposure. Indeed, the British discourse of byssinosis was predominantly male, comprising trade unions, medics, and government officials – not operatives.Footnote 43 While byssinosis compensation was extended to women from 1948, for years, ignorance of the disease and the law remained amongst women. Gendered understandings of the dust-disease relationship translated to unions and compensation, not reform or education.
Mill-workers could not avoid the deafening noise of machines. Yet, well into the twentieth century they remained unaware of the long term effects of exposure and did not consider industrial noise “dangerous”.Footnote 44 Massachusetts mill worker Rene Desjardins noted that: “At that time, nobody knew anything about that [industrial deafness]”,Footnote 45 while Mabel Mangan remembered that “The noise would drive you out of your mind […] but we didn’t know it could hurt you”.Footnote 46 Instead, the weavers compensated for hearing loss by either shouting directly into another’s ear or by communicating with their hands in a crude type of sign language.Footnote 47 Twentieth-century Lancashire mill workers also complained about the noise. George Wrigley remembered how “The noise was horrendous. But, like anything else when you’re young, you just take it. It’s your job. You’ve gone into it, get on with it”.Footnote 48 Weaver Marjory Shaw remembered that:
Oh, it was very noisy. But I knew that. Ahh, I knew it was noisy, but all the family had gone weaving, so I thought, well, it’s in the blood. Foolish, you know. Very foolish, but there it is. And, ah, it didn’t bother me, cause everybody was talking with yer lips, you know, lip reading, and you could have a conversation and nobody would know what you were talkin’, only you who were eye to eye.Footnote 49
Lancashire weavers were reputed for their lip-reading abilities, which enabled them to communicate. Yet, their denial of potential deafness was related to the gradual nature of the hearing loss. They could still communicate and friends and neighbours did not react to it. Throughout both regions, deafness was a socially accepted problem for men and women that could be overcome and one in which science, society, labour, and politics had little interest.
While operatives in both regions recognized that certain aspects of millwork made them feel unwell, the social context of the living environment tempered their understandings and expectations of health. Overcrowding, poverty, and poor sanitation featured in the textile towns of both Lancashire and New England. While direct comparisons are difficult, it is probable that the damp, stone houses of Lancashire were unhealthier than the wooden homes of New England. That said, the public health initiatives and agendas of different Lancashire town councils and their Medical Officers of Health suggest considerable variations in the living and working conditions between communities.Footnote 50 In Massachusetts, too, living and working conditions varied within and between communities, with Fall River living conditions reputedly some of the worst; rivalling those in parts of Lancashire.Footnote 51 Hence, within each region and, indeed, each town, the importance of both the living and working environment to the public health agenda fluctuated, making difficult any unified campaigns for workplace health reform.
Social factors meant that Lancashire women’s health was frequently weaker than men’s, more so than their New England counterparts and excluding the universal impact of pregnancy. American wages were higher than those in Lancashire. Nevertheless, diet and the quantity and quality of food varied between towns. Archaeological digs in Lowell revealed that skilled workers on higher pay, unsurprisingly, were more likely to have better quality food than unskilled workers. Yet, the unskilled workers residing in Lowell boarding houses had sufficient food and did not note gender differences in diet, quantity or quality. During the textile recession of the 1920s and 1930s, families strove to ensure “three squares a day” for all members.Footnote 52
In contrast, late nineteenth-century Fall River workers had poor diets in both quality and quantity, but the vital contribution of multiple family members to the household budget required all to have a fair share of the available food.Footnote 53 While family circumstance determined whether American women needed to enter the paid labour force on a short-term, intermittent, or long-term basis, society acknowledged women as essential contributors to the economy. In contrast, Lancashire diets were generally more meagre than those in New England, with cheap, filling foods rather than nutrition being the priority.Footnote 54 When times were hard, women and young girls often had the smallest portion at family mealtimes, lowering their resistance to diseaseFootnote 55 and making the long days in the mills more difficult. Through the mid-twentieth century, social reformers ignored economic realities and prioritized morality, a male-breadwinner and women’s primary role being that of mother and homemaker. These factors, combined with the longer manufacturing decline than in New England, suggest that Lancashire women textile workers may have been consistently physically weaker than both their American counterparts and their male colleagues in their ability to cope with an unhealthy workplace. Variations aside, urban living conditions in both countries were bleak, with high mortality and morbidity rates. Being unused to a healthy living environment makes it unsurprising that textile operatives’ tolerated some discomfort in the working environment.
Textile workers’ expectations about health and the working environment were continuously entwined with social realities. In a life of low wages and substandard housing, with a need to earn money and limited employment opportunities, both Lancashire and Massachusetts textile workers accepted certain health risks attributable to the workplace, including dust, accidents, and noise. Yet, both men and women operatives did not expect these risks to have long-term health consequences extending outside the factory walls. Such dissonance between means and ends, responsibilities and understandings of workplace hazards, left mill workers to daily address what they understood to be the immediate health risks attributable to work, rather than seeking prevention of long-term health conditions.
Operatives’ Responses to Workplace Health Hazards
Cotton operatives’ responses to what they perceived to be the health risks of work were entwined with relationships with their trade unions, employers, and governments and influenced by local factors, including available medicines. Moreover, workers’ attitudes and reactions to an unhealthy working environment cannot be pigeonholed. Rather, they reveal the multiple attitudes and methods workers adopted to address the workplace health risks, which only grew during the interwar recession as production was speeded up on outdated machines, increasing levels of noise and fatigue.Footnote 56 Throughout, coping strategies could include collective action, such as spontaneous protests and strikes, both with and without trade union support. At the same time, operatives supported union reform campaigns. What emerges is a universal picture of cotton operatives who were consistently concerned about the impact poor working conditions had on their immediate health, alongside a gendered commonality of experience and response. The exception is women who retained their traditional familial role as healthcare provider. Individually and collectively, workers dealt with whatever life threw at them, rather than merely accepting it, as Hallet et al. have argued.Footnote 57
The working environment was firm specific which prevented sustained, widespread action for reform. Individual firms earned reputations for their working conditions, making some firms more desirable places to work than others. In the 1880s, the Granite Mills in Fall River began improving their factory environment by tackling the high heat and humidity levels. The firm continued investing in new technologies into the 1920s. Not only did some new machines meet legislative requirements, they also earned the firm a good reputation.Footnote 58 Similarly, the Merrimack, Hamilton and Bunting Mills in Lowell also invested in more modern technologies. By the end of the nineteenth century, these employers recognized the production benefits that translated from reforming the mill environment to improving the health of their workforce, while operatives found these firms more desirable places to work.Footnote 59 In contrast, in 1932, the fire insurance company identified the Boott Mills of Lowell as the dirtiest and dustiest firm in the American textile industry. The Boott also ignored legislation about humidity, child labour, and sanitation. Consequently, when possible, Boott operatives sought employment elsewhere.Footnote 60 In Lancashire, too, mill workers regularly switched employers when dissatisfied with conditions.Footnote 61 Oldham operatives remembered how the working environment in the Bee and Maple Mills was better than at the Borough or Monarch Mills, being cleaner and having newer technology that minimized atmospheric dust.Footnote 62 These employers recognized the production benefits of technological investment, while workers reaped the health benefits.
In both countries, women workers were more likely than men to switch jobs or firms because they were denied access to more highly skilled, better paid jobs like loom fixing. Equally, a poor working environment hastened some operatives’ exit from the textile labour market.Footnote 63 In New England, cotton manufacturing left the region more rapidly than in Lancashire and where, in some towns, employment options in other industries grew during the twentieth century. From the 1940s, light industry and electronics firms moved into Lowell, providing jobs with better pay and conditions than the mills, especially for women. Nevertheless, in both regions the regular switching of firms and jobs provided women with a sense of empowerment in an otherwise powerless environment because the mills offered little opportunity for either advancement or consistent employment. Switching employers demonstrated individual worker agency, although the way in which this agency was expressed remained locally determined.
Workers in both Lancashire and New England developed coping strategies when switching employers was not possible, when the risk of not working was greater than the health risks of working, or when the health risks associated with work were within the boundaries of “acceptable” risk. Although varied, there were similarities in the strategies workers used to cope with the factory health risks. For example, dust inhalation caused workers to cough and sometimes vomit. To try and remove the dust from their mouth and lungs, workers spat.Footnote 64 When this did not work, well into the twentieth century, both men and women chewed tobacco to induce coughing to try and clear the airways.Footnote 65 To workers, spitting served an immediate, practical, preventive health function. Such actions had no direct effect on employers’ technological choices, but elicited both social and political responses. Social reformers considered “spitting” a disgusting habit, particularly by women; while early twentieth century public health officials argued that spitting spread disease.Footnote 66 The emphasis on morality and contagion prevented social or professional support for workers needing causational reforms from employers.
The public moral priority, combined with legislative indifference, led operatives in both countries to turn to kinship and friendship networks and “wise women” for advice on managing the ill effects of work, while utilizing patent medicines to alleviate discomfort.Footnote 67 Indeed, the multiple health problems, made cotton regions a ready market for patent medicines, especially when whole families were employed. It is unsurprising that two of the leading patent medicines, Beechams in Britain and Father John’s Medicine in America, were developed in the textile regions. By the 1920s, these firms had clearly identified women as the core purchasers of medicine and targeted them in advertising family remedies.Footnote 68 As both victims of occupational maladies and in charge of the household health, women provided a dual market for patent medicines.
Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Beecham’s adverts claimed that their pills cured consumption, fatigue, and women’s problems. In 1918, Beecham’s advertised in the operatives’ newspaper, the Cotton Factory Times, that Beecham’s Pills were designed for “Weary Women Workers”. They could prevent or cure fatigue.Footnote 69 While initially advertised as a cure-all, Beecham’s pills also had a positive effect on the digestive system,Footnote 70 which may well have appealed to operatives working in dusty environments. Despite the growing authority of biomedicine in the twentieth century, Lancashire workers continued utilizing traditional and patent medicines, herbal remedies, and consulting wise women.Footnote 71 Women learned about such remedies in the mills from listening to conversations of older women or directly seeking their advice in health matters.Footnote 72
Figure 1 Immigrants from many countries entered the Lowell mills, working alongside each other and experiencing the same work-related health problems. Boott Mills Employees (no date). Image courtesy of Lowell Museum.
New England mill workers similarly used kinship, friendship, and workplace networks for health advice, with women central to such care networks. Yet, the multi-ethnic composition of the New England textile workforce meant makers of patent medicines adopted different marketing strategies than in Lancashire, although women remained the target customer. New immigrants reconstructed their ethnic support networks and traditions from their home country,Footnote 73 with many coming from Catholic traditions, including French Canadians, Irish, and Southern Europeans (see Figure 1). Perhaps the most famous patent medicine, Father John’s Medicine, was named after the Lowell priest, Father John O’Brien in 1855. It targeted Catholic families with Father John’s personal, product endorsement. Father John’s Medicine was widely available and claimed to cure: “consumption, grip, croup, whooping cough, and other diseases of the throat”. It was a “A fine tonic: Good for the whole family”.Footnote 74 Unlike another well-known New England patent medicine, Lydia Pinkham’s vegetable compound, which in 1906 was found to contain fifteen per cent alcohol, Father John’s medicine contained no alcohol. Initially, comprising cod liver oil, with liquorice flavouring, after fifty years, the ingredients remained virtually the same. Hence, the makers of patent medicines in the British and American textile regions recognized a burgeoning market with mill workers, but marketed their product within the local gender context.
Another component of the operatives’ mixed economy of healthcare was that offered by employers. Some employers increasingly recognized the production benefits from onsite welfare, in part because it could prevent workers from going home. The 1916 British Factory Act mandated a sick room where workers could rest and return to work when well. By the 1950s, Lancashire workers regularly utilized certain company health initiatives. Welfare Officers, who were occupational nurses or first aiders, provided workers with aspirins or a chance to rest in the sick room. They also supported operatives with cases to go home sick. Yet, if a firm did not have a Welfare Officer, or if operatives chose to ignore her advice, sick operatives continued to go home – much to the employers’ chagrin.Footnote 75 The Welfare Officers retained their autonomy and resisted management aims for them to serve the employers, rather than the workers. Although employed to support all workers, Welfare Officers particularly catered to women. They allowed tired women to rest, particularly if they had their periods, or listened to domestic troubles, providing a cup of tea and sympathy rather than rushing operatives back to work.Footnote 76 For minor illnesses and fatigue, Welfare Officers bridged the gap between self-help and employer control. Hence, Lancashire operatives expanded their healthcare networks to take advantage of the free healthcare provided, including that offered by employers, while retaining the autonomy of individual choice.
American textile employers also increasingly sought to manage workers’ ill health, particularly after a 1929 U.S. Department of Labor investigation into mill workers’ absences revealed high absentee rates due to illness and accidents, home duties, and personal reasons, especially by women who were both workers and the primary care-givers.Footnote 77 The Lowell employers were unique because they operated a hospital between 1840 and 1930 to attend workers’ injuries and illnesses, albeit with limited success. Workers preferred to manage their own health and avoided the employers’ hospital when possible.Footnote 78 Starting in the interwar years, some employers introduced company nurses to provide minor health services and to determine whether individuals were sick enough to leave. Previously, this had been the managers’ decision.Footnote 79 While little is known about company nurses, Lawrence operatives remembered them as being kind and resourceful. They dressed wounds, treated burns, and advised on pregnancy.Footnote 80 While company nurses were associated with the employer and consulted with caution, generally, mill hands responded favourably to them and the free, professional health advice they provided.Footnote 81 Nevertheless, similar to their Lancashire counterparts, Massachusetts working-class mill operatives retained autonomy by seeking health advice from whomever they wished.
Figure 2 Lancashire operatives were aware of both the economic and health issues related to the use of steam in weaving sheds. Cartoons in the workers’ newspaper, The Cotton Factory Times, provided poignant comment on both issues. “Give Us Steam”, Cotton Factory Times, 12 May 1912. Image courtesy of https://lancashirecottoncartoons.com.
Being ill was costly because time off work was unpaid. Hence, cooperative networks played an important role in mill workers management of ill-health. In fact, cooperation was essential for managing the heat, dust, humidity and pace of work. Lancashire and New England operatives watched co-workers’ machines to enable breaks. They helped struggling colleagues, for example, to lift something heavy, while neighbouring workers might help an individual keep up when sick or pregnant. Twentieth-century mill worker Jean Rouses remembered how in Lowell: “We took care of one another. Sometimes you’d say, Would you watch my frame? And you’d take off. They’d watch it. It was pretty good”.Footnote 82 Similarly, Lancashire mill worker Elsie Hansford remembered how “We always used to help one another”.Footnote 83 Such informal networks secure little written documentation; yet, collectively and individually, for short periods, they allowed ill workers to keep earning when unable to afford time off. Mill managers seemingly accepted such arrangements because workers retained their jobs, possibly because production was not impeded.
Nevertheless, if working conditions became unbearable, operatives were not averse to collective action. Accounts of collective action happening outside those recognised by trade unions paralleled individual responses. New England newspapers record mills voluntarily closing for a few days in the summer due to the heat as well as operatives walking out and effectively shutting the mills when they considered the weather too hot for work, to take advantage of the berry picking season, or to go fishing.Footnote 84 In 1873, women operatives walked out of the Lawrence Mills in Lowell because of poor ventilation.Footnote 85 Unable to assert their authority and prevent walkouts, or because of a local labour shortage, employers seem to have accepted these informal disruptions because the newspapers do not mention workers being dismissed. More formally, in 1903 and again in 1912, Lowell mill workers struck for higher wages and “better, cleaner and healthier conditions in the city of Lowell”.Footnote 86 While strikes and walkouts were mostly mill specific and returned only limited success, they reveal how working-class cooperation prioritized dignity, autonomy, conditions, and wages. In collective forms of protest outside the factory, as on the shop floor, women worked alongside men organizing and participating in strikes. In fact, of the recorded, spontaneous walkouts mentioned in New England newspapers, most were started and led by women, including the 1912 strike, which started in Lawrence.Footnote 87 While this does not imply that men were less interested than women in working conditions, it highlights the importance of working conditions to women. Women played a leading role in coping with or protesting bad working conditions and ensuring that factory conditions remained on the reform agenda. Despite the lack of a strong trade union tradition in New England, working-class collaboration on the shop floor strove for better factory conditions.
In Lancashire, male trade union activity and government priorities have overshadowed spontaneous and non-union collective action about the working environment.Footnote 88 White’s study of Lancashire textile workers’ strikes between 1910 and 1914 found that of 130 weavers’ strikes, twenty-four (eighteen per cent), related to undefined working conditions.Footnote 89 Yet, additional, unofficial action throughout the first half of the twentieth century went unrecorded in White’s union and government sources. Male and female operatives walked out when managers used bad language, including at Marsden in 1900 and Blackburn in 1925,Footnote 90 or when the moisture was excessive, including in 1895 in Burnley and Padiham and in 1913, in both Blackburn and Burnley.Footnote 91 While a local labour shortage minimized the long-term risks of such action, the state of the local labour market was not always relevant. When the humidity became too oppressive(see Figure 2), workers sometimes left anyway, including at Burnley in 1900 and Preston in the 1930s.Footnote 92 Impromptu strikes were also staged at mills that were too cold or if temperatures were below that required by the Factory Acts, such as in Nelson, Oldham and Burnley in 1918.Footnote 93 Indeed, working conditions were important to male and female workers and their representatives. In 1910, the Blackburn and District Power-Loom Weavers’, Winders’ & Warpers’ Association argued that weavers:
[…] are even willing, to receive less wages if they can bring about the abolition of artificial humidity. That to our minds gives us the possibility of arriving at only one conclusion, namely, that the system is considered and believed to be so injurious to their health that the weavers are prepared to face other difficulties rather than carry on their vocation under its operation.Footnote 94
While Lancashire mill workers accepted that working conditions were not always ideal, such non-gendered collective action to improve working conditions helps counter the argument that the Lancashire working-class stoically accepted their lotFootnote 95 and highlights workers’ proactive efforts to improve working conditions, with and without union support. Nevertheless, the localized nature of such protests secured little national political attention.
During the interwar years, when the textile industries began their long decline, British government investigations into the effect of mill conditions on operatives’ health increased. In 1925, an Industrial Fatigue Research Board investigation revealed no significant difference in the morbidity rates of weavers who worked in sheds that used steam and those that did not. The report, published in 1927, and the 1928 Home Office Report effectively “confirmed” that humidity did not pose a risk to workers’ health.Footnote 96 With similar timing, the workers’ newspaper, the Cotton Factory Times, placed greater responsibility on operatives for their own health, hinting at the unions shifting priorities to wages and jobs.Footnote 97 Indeed, both government and the unions prioritized industrial survival over workers’ health. When a 1935 Industrial Health Research Board investigation revealed that the noise in weaving sheds seriously impaired hearing and impeded production, the government accepted the employers’ argument that industrial reforms were prohibitively expensive.Footnote 98 The government demonstrated a similar disinterest in complaints about eyestrain and fatigue and formally ignored workplace health by not including an occupational health service in the original mandate for the National Health Service (NHS).Footnote 99
Despite industrial decline and political disinterest, Lancashire workers continued their sporadic collective action against unhealthy conditions. For example, in August 1932, 150 weavers at Clover Mill in Nelson struck, claiming that the excessive use of steam caused numerous cases of rheumatism. The Nelson Weavers’ Association provided little support other than claiming “that the people who work in that atmosphere are the best judges”.Footnote 100 Instead, the Association prioritized an ongoing wage-battle with employers, the outcome of which held wider implications for all Lancashire weavers.Footnote 101 The growing government and trade union apathy towards the working environment helps explain the decline in recorded collective action and the preference for individual strategies and cooperative networks for managing the ill-effects of work. Mill workers continued to switch employers or walk out. They still spat and self-medicated. After the 1948 introduction of the NHS, operatives incorporated state healthcare into their network, including Welfare Officers and NHS doctors. While outside the scope of this article, such initiatives began replacing rather than paralleling collective action to improve factory conditions. Nevertheless, a constant through the years of industrial growth and decline in both Lancashire and New England was the commonality of working-class experiences of workplace ill health and responses to it. Addressing the consequences of industrialization was a class issue, not a gendered one, with operatives left to address the working environment themselves. The human costs of industry were universal; so too were the methods of managing them.
Conclusion
Both social policy and historical arguments suggest that many Western nations were headed towards a paternalistic welfare state in the twentieth century, seeking to aid industrial workers and their dependents, with America heading towards a pioneering maternalist welfare state.Footnote 102 The patriarchal discourse of gender comprised campaigns to either “protect” women or to remove them from the workplace.Footnote 103 This paper provides a parallel, multi-layered narrative about working-class experiences of health at work and the associated role of gender. It reveals how the social, political, and economic contexts affected both the conception of work-related ill-health and responses to them. Gender only entered the working-class experience because women were responsible for the household health, which explains why medical advertising targeted women. Ultimately, however, workers were left to address working conditions as they saw fit. As McIvor and Johnston found with British coal miners facing dusty conditions, mill workers in both countries were pragmatic and realistic.Footnote 104 How operatives responded to conditions depended on understandings of the causes of ill-health and on local and individual circumstances. This article has shown how British and American operatives’ daily management of unhealthy working conditions suggests a commonality of textile workers’ experience of workplace health that incorporates working and living conditions. Here, occupational health overlapped with workplace health. These understandings were framed by the broader social and economic conditions.
This multi-layered synthesis of medical, business, and labour history highlights the commonality of the industrial experience and how this overshadowed social and political perceptions of gender. While it supports Dembe’s argument that medical knowledge is a contested terrain and occupational diseases are socially constructed, it also reveals how occupational health is entwined with broader workplace health and living conditions.Footnote 105 If we are to fully understand the intricate and changing relationship between health, work, and gender, further studies are needed about the complex relationship between health in the living and working environment and working-class experiences of ill-health.
