LADY INSPECTORS WORKING WOMENS RIGHTS ENGLAND 1893 1921

In Victorian Britain, unskilled women workers, in factories and workshops or at home, were at the mercy of their employers.  With neither time nor energy to organize, they had little other than the factory acts to protect them from unfair pay, endless overtime work, and dangerous working conditions.  To provide effective enforcement of these laws regulating hours of work, methods of payment, and conditions in the workplace, the government, after years of pressure from concerned women's groups, appointed two women as factory inspectors in 1893.  The experiment of sending middle-class women into factories, East End workshops, and courtrooms was viewed with alarm by many (including male factory inspectors).  But the lady inspectors tackled their assignment with courage and zeal in what one observer described as their "Arthurian period," when they set out to right wrongs.  Their encounters with factory managers, owners of dressmaking shops, Irish shopkeepers, country magistrates, and their  male colleagues, provide rich anecdotes.  Their efforts to talk and listen to the working-class women for whose welfare they were responsible make case study of class and gender relations.  Travelling alone in London slums, seedy provincial manufacturing towns, and remote rural areas; appearing in the role of prosecutor in the masculine world of the British courtroom; gathering and interpreting information to support new legislation; in all these activities, the lady inspectors were pioneers.  The participated in the transformation of Britain from a liberal state to one active in social welfare.  By 1914, they were experts ready to play an important part in the restructuring of essential industries as women workers took on a wide range of industrial jobs that only men had done before.  This is the story of the shaping of their occupation, of their adventures, struggles, successes and failures.

In good condition with dustwrapper.

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