The Hidden Cost of Progress: Health Hazards Faced by Working-Class Women

The Industrial Revolution was a turning point in European history, reshaping economies and restructuring laborers. But for the majority of working-class women, factory life meant enormous physical risks that risked their health and well-being. Rather than realizing autonomy or mobility, the majority of women found themselves in situations that shattered their bodies and kept them from even gaining a minimum of health precautions. These risks were not incidental but structural consequences of capitalist growth and masculine relations to labor.

The witness of the day provides a harrowing report of women's everyday misery. Elizabeth Bentley, who began life in the factories at the age of six, recalled working from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. with short intermissions. When asked about eating, she testified she often did not want to eat because it was so hot and dusty, and that "the overlooker took it, and gave it to the pigs."^[1] Her evidence is indicative of a pathetic lack of regard for food and dignity in the workplace, where hunger and exhaustion were the norm. In the same way, recorded official factory visits revealed extensive respiratory illness in women workers who worked with textile dust and poor ventilation. Dr. James Mitchell, who was conducting inquiries into Manchester mills in 1833, noticed that young girls were "more affected than boys owing to their slender frame," and coughed up phlegm due to inhaling fibers day in and day out.^[2] These facts are corroborated by scholarly studies. Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley have analyzed wage records, height statistics, and nutritional measures in trying to assert that industrialisation didn't bring about evident gains for women's wellbeing. Infect, actually, they found. Factory girls ate less than their male counterparts and grew stunted and chronically undernourished.^[3] They show through evidence that women's health wasn't necessarily caused by poverty but was worsened by exploitative working conditions where cheap submissive women workers substituted bodily well-being and health.

This sexed neglect had lasting consequences. Malnutrition and overwork in early adulthood came to yield birth defects on the factory floor, back and joint disease, and vulnerability to epidemics. These women literally were the backbone of industrial expansion—but at a price of silence. Inadequate defense of women's labor was part of a broader pattern of gendered disadvantage in industrial society. And all this suffering was not in vain. It precipitated the increasing social consciousness and ultimately the legislation, like the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which began limiting the working hours of children and women. Crises in women's health during industrialization therefore not only outlined their own history but set the stage for humanitarían values and public policy reform throughout the entire modern Europe.

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