Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T22:52:20.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gaskell, Peter, The Manufacturing Population of England (London, 1833; reprint, New York, 1972), p. 68Google Scholar.

2 Thomas Maudsley, quoted in the proceedings of the meeting at the Manchester Town Hall on 20 July 1872, reprinted in the Manchester Guardian (22 July 1872).

3 Dr.Oliver, Thomas, “Lead Poisoning and the Race,” British Medical Journal 1 (May 1911): 1096CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Baron, Ava, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Baron, Ava (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), p. 31Google Scholar.

5 For an excellent analysis of a contemporary case which bears a striking resemblance to the white lead episode in the 1890s, see Daniels, Cynthia R., “From Protecting the Women to Privileging the Fetus: The Case of Johnson Controls,” in At Women's Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 5795Google Scholar.

6 Scott, Joan, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), p. 2Google Scholar.

7 For examples of the deployment of gender in uneven and variable ways, see Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Critics of poststructuralist language analysis have rightly argued that the exclusive emphasis on discourse has produced ahistorical studies devoid of human agency. However, several historians have made significant points which serve as correctives to this problem and inform my approach. For an excellent overview of the impact and critique of this approach, see Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History”; and Canning, Kathleen, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994): 368404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 The movement for the ten-hour day has generated tremendous interest among historians, and they have interpreted it in several different ways. For an overview of the diverse interpretations, see Gray, Robert, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (New York, 1996), pp. 59Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., pp. 1–159.

11 See Alexander, Sally, “Women, Class, and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History,” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 125–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Valverde, Marianna, “‘Giving the Female a Domestic Turn’: The Social, Legal, and Moral Regulation of Women's Work in British Cotton Mills,” Journal of Social History 4 (Summer 1988): 619–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Humphries, Jane, “‘ … The Most Free Form of Objection …’: The Sexual Division of Labor and Women's Work in Nineteenth Century England,” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 4 (December 1987): 929–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Gaskell, , The Manufacturing Population, pp. 63–5Google Scholar.

14 The Trials of Feargus O'Connor and Fifty-Eight Others Charged with Sedition (Manchester, 1843), p. 253Google Scholar.

15 John Deegan, a Chartist, spoke at a public meeting in Leicester. The proceedings were reported in the Northern Star (1 June 1839).

16 Laqueur, Thomas, “Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution,” in The Industrial Revolution and British Society, ed. O'Brien, Patrick and Quinault, Roland (New York, 1993), p. 118Google Scholar.

17 See, e.g., Gallagher, Catherine, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Science in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gallagher, Catherine and Laqueur, Thomas (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 83106Google Scholar; Laqueur, “Sex and Desire”; and Valenze, Deborah, The First Industrial Woman (New York, 1995), pp. 128–80Google Scholar.

18 Malthus, Thomas, On the Principle of Population, in Sources of the Western World, ed. Perry, Marvin, Peden, Joseph R., and Von Laue, Theodore (Boston, 1995), 2:121Google Scholar.

19 Dr.Kay, James, The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (London, 1832; reprint, London, 1970), p. 62Google Scholar.

20 For an analysis of the anxiety of reformers Kay and Chadwick, see Poovey, Mary, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 55–72, 98131Google Scholar.

21 Alexander, , “Women, Class, and Sexual Difference,” p. 137Google Scholar.

22 Humphries, , “… The Most Free Form of Objection …,” pp. 930, 943–44Google Scholar. This was also evident in the rhetoric of the Chartist campaign. See Clark, Anna, “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s,” Journal of British Studies 31 (January 1991): 6288Google Scholar; and Robert Hall, “Unsexing the Male: Gender, Technology, the State, and Chartism in the Cotton District, 1830–1860” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Conference on British Studies, Orlando, Fla., November 1993).

23 Meeting of the powerloom weavers in Stockport, reprinted in the Northern Star (2 May 1840).

24 British Library, London, Francis Place Newspaper Collection, letter from Richard Carlile to Francis Place, 8 August 1822, vol. 68 (reel no. 50). For the place of Carlile's sexual ideology within plebeian culture, see Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), pp. 179–85Google Scholar.

25 See Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; and Tuana, Nancy, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (Bloomington, Ind., 1993)Google Scholar.

26 This important development has been analyzed in Cott, Nancy F., “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4, no. 3 (Winter 1978): 219–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, Catherine, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York, 1992), pp. 75107Google Scholar; Kent, Susan Kingsley, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 24–59, 80113Google Scholar; and Poovey, , Uneven Developments, pp. 123Google Scholar.

27 The complaints about women's work violating the natural order have been discussed in Valverde, , “Giving the Female a Domestic Turn,” pp. 627–28Google Scholar.

28 Rose, Sonya O., Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley, Calif., 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Hutchinson, Barbara and Harrison, Amy, A History of Factory Legislation (London, 1911)Google Scholar.

29 This point has previously been made by Rose; see Rose, Sonya O., “‘From behind the Women's Petticoats’: The Movement for a Legislated Nine Hour Day and State Protection of Working Women in Britain, 1870–1878,” Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (March 1991): 3251CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gender Antagonism and Class Conflict: Strategies of Male Trade Unionists in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Social History 13, no. 2 (1988): 191208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Rose, , Limited Livelihoods, p. 59Google Scholar.

31 Bridges, J. H. M.D., and M.D.Holmes, T., “Report to the Local Government Board on Proposed Changes in Hours and Ages of Employment in Textile Factories,” C. 754, Parliamentary Papers, 1873, 60:840Google Scholar.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., pp. 841–42.

34 Ibid., p. 863.

35 See Rose, , Limited Livelihoods, pp. 6667Google Scholar.

36 Thomas Maudsley, letter and paper sent to the Home Office, Public Record Office (PRO), London, HO45/9308/12500, item no. 5.

37 Manchester Guardian (11 June 1873).

38 The aims of the SPEW were outlined in Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 19 (September 1859): 5459Google Scholar.

39 For more on the LNA activities regarding the Contagious Diseases Campaign, see Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Vigilance Association for the Defense of Personal Rights and the Amendment of the Law, Constitution and Rules (Manchester, 1871), p. 1Google Scholar.

41 Letter to the editor of the Manchester Examiner from the Vigilance Association (20 June 1874).

42 Cooke-Taylor, Richard Whately, “What Influence Has the Employment of Mothers in Manufacturing on Infant Mortality; and Ought Any, and What, Restrictions to Be Placed on Such Employment?” in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, ed. Ryllis, Charles Wagner (London, 1875), p. 574Google Scholar.

43 See, e.g., Boucherett, Jessie, “Legislative Restriction on Women's Labour,” Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 16 (October 1873): 252–58Google Scholar.

44 See Boucherett, Jessie, Englishwoman's Review 4, no. 15 (July 1873): 209–11Google Scholar; and Butler, Josephine, letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian (5 May 1874)Google Scholar.

45 Public concern was manifested, for example, in the formation of pressure groups such as Dr. J. B. Curgeven's Infant Life Protection Society and the government's appointment of a Select Committee on the Best Means of Protecting Infants Put Out to Nurse in 1871. The following year the first Infant Life Protection Act was passed requiring the registration of births and deaths of infants in baby-farming institutions.

46 Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for the Year Ending 1862,” C. 179, Parliamentary Papers, 1862, 22:655Google Scholar.

47 Margaret Hewitt has presented a full listing of papers written on infant mortality in Lancashire in her study Victorian Wives and Mothers (London, 1958)Google Scholar. She has argued that the desire to remove women from the mills led observers to present a conflated picture of the problem.

48 Letter to the Registrar-General on the Causes of Death in England in 1871, by William Farr, Esq., M.D., F.R.S., Appendix to the Thirty Fourth Annual Report of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England,” C. 806, Parliamentary Papers, 1873, 20:225–27Google Scholar.

49 This point, widely accepted by historians of gender and medicine, has been disputed in Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (New York, 1994), pp. 195205CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He argues that this remark is without parallel in the medical literature and inconsistent with Acton's views of female sexuality in other works.

50 Dr.Acton, William, “The Perfect Ideal of an English Wife,” in Strong Minded-Women, ed. Murray, Janet Horowitz (New York, 1982), pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

51 For this important development, see Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; and Wohl, Anthony, The Eternal Slum (Montreal, 1977)Google Scholar.

52 For more on sweating, see Schmiechen, James, Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914 (Urbana, Ill., 1984)Google Scholar; and Morris, Jenny, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades: The Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation (Aldershot, 1986)Google Scholar.

53 Since the 1870s, male nail and chainmakers had regarded competition from women working in domestic workshops as the cause of their low wages and frequently proposed the prohibition or restriction of women's work in the trade as the answer to their low wages. For these developments, see Blackburn, Sheila, “Working Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-sweating Legislation, 1880–1931,” International Review of Social History 33, no. 1 (1988): 4269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System,” C. 169, Parliamentary Papers, 1890 17:286Google Scholar.

55 Ibid., p. 287.

56 Ibid.

57 The so-called dangerous trades clauses were included in the Factory and Workshop Act, 1891, 54 Vict. IV, c. 159, and the Factory and Workshop Act, 1895, 58 Vict. III, c. 133. Their creation has been analyzed in Malone, Carolyn, “Sex in Industry: Protective Labor Legislation in England, 1891–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1991), pp. 41112Google Scholar.

58 Anderson, Adelaide, Women in the Factory: An Administrative Adventure, 1893–1921 (London, 1922), p. 303Google Scholar. The various regulations were outlined in app. I, “Dangerous and Unhealthy Industries.”

59 Mort, Frank, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England since 1830 (New York, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 The various facets of this development have been considered in Weiner, Joel H., ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalistic Press in Britain, 1850s–1914 (London, 1988)Google Scholar.

61 See Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Death in the Workshops: How Women Are Poisoned,” Daily Chronicle (15 December 1892)Google Scholar, found in PRO, HO45/9848/B12393A, item no. 4.

63 Ibid.

64 Daily Chronicle (21 December 1892).

65 Dr.Oliver, Thomas, “Lead and Its Compounds,” in Dangerous Trades: The Historical, Social, and Legal Aspects of Industrial Occupations as Affecting Health, by a Number of Experts, ed. Dr.Oliver, Thomas (London, 1902), p. 296Google Scholar.

66 For these and other developments, see Malone, Carolyn, “The Gendering of Dangerous Trades: Government Regulation of Women's Work in the White Lead Trade in England, 1891–1914,” Journal of Women's History 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 1535CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Dangerous Industries,” British Medical Journal 1 (January 1893): 7Google Scholar.

68 Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Conditions of Labour in the Various Lead Industries, into the Dangers to the Workpeople Employed Therein, and to Propose Remedies,” C. 7239, Parliamentary Papers, 1893–94, 17:25Google Scholar.

69 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 27 (16 July 1894), col. 1022Google Scholar.

70 Government statistics showed that from 1 December 1897 to May 1898, nineteen males and sixty-six females were reported ill, while from 1 June 1898 to 30 November 1898, when males first displaced females according to government regulations, the figures were eighty-two and twelve respectively. Statistics of inpatients at the Newcastle Infirmary showed an increase in male cases of lead poisoning from seven in 1897 to twenty-two in 1898, nineteen in 1899 and fourteen in 1900, while the number of females treated decreased from twelve for both 1897 and 1898 to one in 1899 and none in 1900. (These statistics are reprinted in Oliver, , ed., Dangerous Trades, pp. 297–98Google Scholar.)

71 Ibid., p. 298.

72 Dr.Legge, Thomas, “Industrial Lead Poisoning,” Journal of Industrial Hygiene 1 (1901): 103Google ScholarPubMed.

73 Home Secretary Matthew Ridley sent instructions in a letter dated 28 April 1898, found in PRO, HO45/1017/B12393P, item no. 1. He instructed them to ascertain whether the danger from lead could be diminished or removed through the use of a less soluble compound of lead or a leadless glaze, the feasibility of manufacturers using substitute ingredients, and the adoption of other preventive measures.

74 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Conditions of Labour in the Potteries, the Injurious Effects upon the Health of the Workpeople, and Proposed Remedies,” C. 7240, Parliamentary Papers, 1893–94, 17:48Google Scholar.

75 Ibid., p. 60.

76 Drs. Oliver and Thorpe, report to the Home Office, February 1899, PRO, HO45/10117/B12393P, item no. 16, p. 11.

77 Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for 1897,” C. 8965, Parliamentary Papers, 1898, 16:53Google Scholar.

78 The Daily Chronicle published a series of articles under the heading of “Lead in the Home.” It included, e.g., “Another Death from Lead Poisoning: Mother and Daughter Killed by the Lead” (8 June 1898) and “Whole Families Desolated: A Story of Mothers and Children” (18 June 1898).

79 Daily Chronicle (27 June 1898).

80 Daily Chronicle (30 June 1898).

81 This rule was unveiled at a deputation on 19 May 1898. The transcript is item no. 10 in PRO, HO45/9933/B22610.

82 The Home Office personnel recorded their opinions in files in PRO, HO45/9851/B12393E.

83 McFeeley, Mary Drake, Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Better Workplace, 1893–1921 (New York, 1988), p. 66Google Scholar.

84 Petition from the Operative Potters' Association, 16 January 1893, PRO, HO45/9851/B12393E, item no. 12.

85 Arbitration began in 1901 when working men objected to the proposal that they undergo medical inspection.

86 From the transcript of arbitration, November 1901, PRO, HO45/10120/B12393P, pp. 142–43.

87 For more on the male breadwinner ideal, see Seecombe, Wally, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 2, no. 1 (January 1986): 5376CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Progressive medical men were writing about the generally dangerous nature of the pottery trade. For more on this subject, see Dr.Greenhow, Edward, Papers Relating to the Sanitary State of the People of England (London, 1858)Google Scholar; or Dr. John T. Arlidge's testimony before the Children's Employment Commission (1863) when he testified to the general physical degeneracy of pottery workers—male and female. Also see Wohl, Anthony, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian London (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Lee, W. R., “Emergence of Occupational Illness in Victorian Times,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 30 (April 1973): 118–24Google Scholar. Arlidge's testimony is quoted in Posner, E., “John T. Arlidge (1822–1899) and the Potteries,” British Journal of Industrial Medicine 30 (April 1973): 246–70Google Scholar, esp. 266.

89 Ogle-Moore, Helen and Hare, Edith, “The Work of Women in the White Lead Trade,” in The Conditions of Women and the Factory Acts, ed. Boucherett, Jessie and Blackburn, Helen (London, 1896), pp. 7784Google Scholar.

90 For the proceedings of the June 1894 deputation, see the transcript of deputation, PRO, HO45/9881/B16265. The proceedings of the 1895 deputation were reported in Women's Labour in the Potteries,” Staffordshire Sentinel (17 May 1895)Google Scholar.

91 Transcript of the deputation from the Women's Industrial Defence Committee to the Home Office, 22 June 1894, PRO, HO/45/9881/B16265, item no. 5, pp. 25–26.

92 Spencer, Herbert made this point in The Study of Sociology (New York, 1906)Google Scholar. This work was based on a series of articles Spencer published in Popular Science Monthly (1872–73). For more on the subject, see Mosedale, Susan Sleeth, “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider ‘The Woman Question,’Journal of the History of Biology 11, no. 1 (1978): 156Google Scholar.

93 Geddes, Patrick and Thompson, J. Arthur, The Evolution of Sex (London, 1889)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the quote is in Easlea, Brian, Science and Sexual Oppression (London, 1981), p. 147Google Scholar.

94 Dr.Oliver, Thomas, “Presidential Address to the Conference on Industrial Hygiene,” Journal of the Sanitary Institute 24 (1904): 181Google Scholar.

95 Ibid., p. 182.

96 The gendered and repressive nature of science has been analyzed in Fee, Elizabeth, “Science and the Woman Problem in Historical Perspective,” in Sex Differences: Social and Biological Perspectives, ed. Teitelbaum, M. S. (Garden City, N.Y., 1976)Google Scholar; Conway, Jill, “Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution,” in Suffer and Be Still, ed. Vicinus, Martha (Bloomington, Ind., 1973)Google Scholar; Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hemel Hempstead, 1989)Google Scholar; Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; and Tuana, The Less Noble Sex.

97 See Davin, Anna, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 666CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Lewis, Jane, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare Schemes in England, 1900–1939 (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Working-Class Wife and Mother and State Intervention 1870–1918,” in Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940, ed. Lewis, Jane (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar. Also see Dwork, Deborah, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; and Michel, Sonya and Koven, Seth, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Journal 95 (October 1990): 10761108Google Scholar.

98 See Ross, Ellen, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1914 (New York, 1993), pp. 3–10, 195221Google Scholar. She does carefully note that there had previously been organizations and activities in London concerned with the conditions of motherhood among the poor, but she clearly differentiates between them and developments during the early twentieth century. She argues that the difference is most clearly seen in the exclusive focus on mothers and child care, the sheer size and intensity of organizations, and, very importantly, the coercive laws which accompanied this activity.

99 See Dyhouse, Carol, “Working-Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England, 1895–1914,” Journal of Social History 12 (1978): 7398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Anderson, , Women in the Factory, p. 114Google Scholar.

101 Oliver, , “Lead Poisoning and the Race,” p. 1096Google Scholar.

102 Death in the Workshops: How Women Are Poisoned,” Daily Chronicle (15 December 1892)Google Scholar, found in PRO, HO45/9848/B12393A, item no. 4.

103 Stead, William T., “Government by Journalism,” Contemporary Review 49 (1886): 653–74Google Scholar.

104 For more on the following campaigns, see Malone, , “Sex in Industry,” pp. 198217Google Scholar. The long-standing controversy over women's pit brow work has been discussed in John, Angela V., By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

105 Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, p. 4849Google Scholar.

106 Canning, Kathleen, “Social Policy, Body Politics: Recasting the Social Question in Germany, 1875–1900,” in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Frader, Laura L. and Rose, Sonya O. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), p. 233Google Scholar.

107 The tremendous anxiety about the declining birth rate in France has been amply illustrated in Offen, Karen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

108 Stone, Judith F., “Republican Ideology, Gender, and Class: France, 1860s–1914,” in Frader, and Rose, , eds., Gender and Class, p. 249Google Scholar.

109 For an extensive analysis of the creation of French protective labor legislation, see Stewart, Mary Lynn, Women, Work, and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879–1919 (London, 1989)Google Scholar.