Women's Work

by A. A. Brooke; Margaret Whitley

The Potteries.—So far we have been considering dust of vegetable origin; but this forms only one group, although it is with this group especially that women are concerned. In the pottery trade, however, the workers are exposed to mineral dust, and in this trade women are very largely engaged. Experts differ somewhat in their view of the relative injury caused by organic and inorganic dusts, though it seems to be agreed that where the material is chiefly of a gelatinous character the harm done is comparatively trivial. But we need not examine closely into these matters, for the statistics of death and disease furnished by the Pottery District are conclusive as to the injuries inflicted. To a lesser degree women are employed in the subsidiary branches of the Sheffield trades, but in this case it is the men who bear the full brunt of the injury. Men and women work in the pottery trade, and the dust given off is of such a fine character that it finds its way into every corner of the factory. Thus women who may not be immediately employed in the finishing processes which are attended to by men, may still receive their share of the fine white penetrating powder. But in certain parts of the work, and those the most dangerous, women only are employed. Such are the china-scourers and the towers. It is the towers’ business to put a smooth surface on the dry ware, which is set in rapid rotation whilst sand paper or some other medium of the kind is applied. The result is that in the course of the day the workers get powdered all over with the dust that is given off, besides inhaling a considerable quantity. Where no fans are at work to draw off this dust the consequences are terribly destructive, and the tower, unless she happens to be a person of exceptionally fine constitution, succumbs in the course of a few years, sometimes of a few months, to the accumulation of fine particles in the pulmonary passages. Even where a fan is at work the presence of the white powder may be detected on the person of the worker, and as the dust is constantly blown by her from the ware, some portion of it is inevitably inhaled by the act of inspiration. Dr. Greenhow, who was sent by Sir John Simon, the medical officer of health for the Privy Council in 1861, to report on the potters’ diseases, wrote as follows about the china scourers, and the conditions to-day are precisely the same as they were then:

“China scourers remove loose flint powder from the baked china, and in doing so, partly by brushing, partly by rubbing with sand paper, they send much flint dust into the atmosphere about them—a dust which is lighter and floats more obstinately in the air in proportion as the earthenware is fine. This dust inhaled into the lungs of the workpeople is a terrible irritant to the bronchial surface which it invades. The women (for the occupation is a female one) soon get habitual shortness of breath, with cough and expectoration; very often they have bleeding from the lungs, sometimes also from the nose, and their chronic disease is from time to time accelerated by more acute catarrhal attacks to which they are particularly subject. Comparatively few china scourers continue long at the employment; those who continue at it become sooner or later asthmatical, those who relinquish it in time are said occasionally to regain perfect health, but for the greater number the mischief is reported to be irretrievable. Against the danger of this occupation scarcely any provision has been made. A scourer who had worked eight years, and was suffering from chronic bronchitis, said that four other scourers who were employed in the same room had died from the effect of the occupation since she had commenced it, and that a fifth was then at the point of death. In a third pottery, a woman who had worked ten years at the occupation asserted that about twelve other scourers in the same shop had died since she entered it. Out of thirteen china scourers belonging to six or seven different potteries, whose evidence was taken, only four were in good health; nine were suffering in consequence of their occupation.”

The evils caused by the dust are aggravated by the very close and stuffy atmosphere in which much of the work is carried on.

White Lead.—We come now to consider some of the effects caused by working poisonous materials. Foremost among these come the trades into which lead enters. By some strange and perverse fate the manufacture of this deadly commodity is, so far as this country is concerned, undertaken largely by women. This is due in a great part to the fact that their labour can be procured more cheaply than that of men, and that the operations in which they are engaged require but little skill or training. In the white lead works of Newcastle, Sheffield, and East London the women are employed in carrying heavy weights on their heads, climbing ladders while loaded in the same way, and in fact in performing those operations which are usually done by means of trucks and hoists and other mechanical appliances. Anyone who has watched the white-lead women passing backwards and forwards in their long, weary trampings under their heavy loads, clambering up and down the ladders, or passing the lead from hand to hand up a staging beside the stoves where it has to be heated, must realise how thoroughly retrograde in its tendency, as well as mischievous in its physical and moral effects, is the existence of a class of cheap and unresisting labour which the manufacturer can bend into any shape, or turn to any purpose that he chooses. The most ardent advocates of perfect freedom for women in matters industrial will scarcely defend the system of transport, and transport of a highly poisonous material, which depends upon the cheap supply of women’s heads, or the system of elevators which is kept up in the same fashion.

But the physically exacting and degrading conditions of the work, though unmatched in this and probably any other European country, are as nothing compared with the action of the lead poison upon the health of the women. No woman working in the dangerous processes of a white lead mill can escape attack, for the subtle poison permeates the system, resulting in the slighter cases in faintness, sickness, and weakness; in the graver instances in lead colic, epilepsy, paralysis, blindness, madness, or death. After all the precautions that have been adopted so far under the Factory Act, it has been demonstrated too clearly that the lead poison retains the upper hand and finds its way into the system in the form of dust, which is either swallowed, absorbed through the pores of the skin, or works in under the finger and toe nails in defiance of baths and nail brushes and the swallowing of sulphuric acid drinks. In spite of the establishment of a sort of hygienic police, which is maintained in the best works with a view to enforcing regularity in the matter of baths, lead poisoning remains to-day a common feature in white lead works. During five years 145 cases have been treated in the Newcastle Infirmary, in addition to many others at the Newcastle Union and Gateshead Union, and whilst in Poplar Workhouse 30 cases were treated in 1882, there were 28 cases in 1892. From Newcastle comes the report that the greatest human wrecks which pass under the notice of the medical charities are workers from the lead mills, and when we examine the following biographies of lead workers we shall hardly marvel at Dr. Oliver’s emphatic view as to the pernicious character of this trade for women.

Injurious Effects of White Lead.—Barbara R——, a married woman, aged thirty-three years, was admitted to the infirmary on December 4th, 1890, and died the following day from lead poisoning. She had never worked in the lead more than a few days at a time. Eliza H——, aged twenty-five, after five months working in the “stacks” was seized with colic and was ill for seven weeks. On recovery she worked for two years in the stoves, and then had another attack of colic. On getting better she was seized with a fit on her way to work at six o’clock in the morning, and was unconscious for fifteen minutes. Her comrades then helped her into the factory, where she worked all day, feeling very shaky. During the two months that followed she was better, but at the end of that time was seized with convulsions while at work. She became unconscious, and was taken to the workhouse hospital, where she had a succession of fits, followed by total blindness, and death was narrowly escaped.

Effect on Offspring.—Although the law prescribes eighteen years as the minimum age at which women may follow this occupation, two cases have occurred recently in which girls have died from lead poisoning who were under the age. Nor does the suffering cease with the men and women who work in the lead mills; they bequeath an awful legacy of sickness to their children—an amount of suffering which is almost disproportionate to their own. I came not long ago in contact with a woman who had worked for the fifteen years of her married life on the “pans” in a lead mill, a process which is considered to be non-dangerous; during her employment she had suffered little, yet this woman had never borne a living child. I give another dismal chronicle in support of my remarks.[17] “C. E., twenty-seven years of age. There was first a living child, then one miscarriage. She left the lead works and went into the country, where a second child was born. She then returned to the lead works and had two miscarriages. M. W., aged thirty-nine, a lead worker for eighteen years, has had twelve children, of whom four are now living. The remaining eight died at ages varying from five days to four, six, and fourteen months, in convulsions. She has had in addition five miscarriages, three in succession. In the case of Mary A——, aged forty years, whose mother too had been a lead worker, we have a history of eight children, all of whom died in convulsions.” In one form or another paralysis too is common among the workers. It is sometimes acute and sometimes chronic, and its commonest manifestation is in “wrist-drop,”—loss of power in the wrist. The victim of “wrist-drop” is incapacitated from lifting or moving anything or in any way using the hands, and this crippled condition sometimes lasts for life.

[17] See Dr. Oliver, Lead Poisoning.

Greater Susceptibility of Women.—The greatest authorities on the subject of lead-poisoning, notably Dr. Oliver, lay stress on the greater liability to lead-poisoning which women show over men. Not only do we find that women are more susceptible, but they are susceptible earlier in life. Girls from 18 to 23 years of age are at the most susceptible age, while with men the dangers of lead-poisoning are greatest between 41 and 48. The fashion in which men and women suffer differs also, for we note that, while young women suffer very readily from “saturnian poison”—fall quickly victims to colic, and recover to be again and more severely attacked—men may work for long terms of years, suffering slightly and seldom, till they fall victims, at the end of long service, to paralysis. It must be borne in mind, however, that those women who have been the subject of Dr. Oliver’s investigation have been brought more directly and constantly into contact with the peculiarly dangerous processes of lead manufacture than the men.