Women’s Labor History Beatrice Webb on the Health of Female Industrial Workers 1917

Beatrice Webb

First Edition

Webb, Beatrice. Health of Working Girls: A Handbook for Welfare Supervisors and Others, 1917, a wartime study of the system developed to safeguard and supervise the health of women entering British industry in unprecedented numbers during the First World War. Webb, social investigator, Fabian reformer, and co-founder of the London School of Economics, prepared the work in connection with investigations for the War Committee on Women in Industry into the health and wages of female munitions workers. During the war, industrial welfare supervision expanded dramatically, with approximately one thousand women welfare supervisors employed to oversee conditions affecting female workers. The handbook documents that system through practical discussion of workplace hygiene and workers’ physical health, revealing how employers and welfare supervisors addressed sanitation, diet, fatigue, dental health, and other conditions believed to affect women’s industrial efficiency and well-being, and providing primary-source evidence for the study of women’s labor, occupational health, wartime industry, and the development of workplace welfare administration.

Webb, Beatrice. Health of Working Girls: A Handbook for Welfare Supervisors and Others. London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1917. First edition. 103 pages. Webb addresses the physical conditions confronting young female workers and the responsibilities assigned to welfare supervisors charged with monitoring their health. Wartime welfare supervision encompassed the cleanliness and ventilation of workrooms as well as cloakrooms, lavatories, washing facilities, and canteens, embedding personal health within the organization of the industrial workplace. Webb also discusses individual hygiene and medical problems, including “septic teeth,” which she warned could adversely affect the stomach and blood and contribute to anemia. The discussion illustrates both an emerging institutional concern for occupational health and the period’s tendency to place responsibility for bodily discipline upon women workers themselves. In this respect, the handbook shows the mechanisms by which industrial welfare operated in practice: supervisors observed workers, promoted hygiene, monitored workplace environments, and intervened in matters of health that increasingly became part of factory administration.

The book appeared during a major transformation in British women’s employment as wartime labor demands drew women into expanding industrial and munitions occupations and stimulated new forms of workplace oversight. Webb’s involvement was consistent with her broader career in social investigation and labor reform: she and Sidney Webb helped establish the London School of Economics in 1895, while her research encompassed trade unionism, employment, poverty, and welfare policy. The handbook is therefore significant both as a practical wartime manual and as part of the wider effort to bring empirical social investigation to questions of women’s employment and industrial regulation. No specific defects are supplied; overall very good. A focused primary source documenting how women’s health became an administrative concern within Britain’s wartime workplace and how welfare supervision developed alongside the rapid expansion of female industrial labor.

Item #16449

Price: $100.00