What eight million women want by Rheta Childe Dorr
page 83 of 206 (40%)
page 83 of 206 (40%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical books; from reports of boards of health. REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth. Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha, and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or afterwards, was included. The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long |
|