Moring’s Women in the factory, 1880–1930: class and gender provides rich evidence of the working lives of women in relation to securing basic workers’ protections: childcare, maternity leave, unionization, workplace injury and disability, limits to the workday and nightwork, and fair compensation. The most significant contribution of the volume is its broad scope, encompassing 30 nations with in-depth accounts of women in factories across Scandinavia, Britain, France and Germany, as well as substantial consideration of Russia, the Iberian nations, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. This cross-cultural comparison allows the reader to trace parallels, intersections and gaps in experience between women at work across these territories. As the culmination of two decades of study of women and the economy, Moring provides an invaluable perspective on the impediments to and the agents of change in women’s industrial labour, especially regarding the introduction of female factory inspectors, positioning this within wider socio-political movements across different geographies and political systems.
Women between 1880 and 1930 faced challenges that remain familiar in the twenty-first century: single-income households, returning to work after childbirth, and re-entering the workforce once children had grown. Moring demonstrates that proposed solutions – often led by male-dominated industries, unions and political parties – rarely put women’s interests at the centre. Instead, protective legislation frequently created new barriers, pushing women into unregulated work and reinforcing gendered labour divisions. Socialist movements, Moring reminds the reader, largely prioritized male workers, assuming that improving their conditions would uplift families as a whole. In reality, working men, particularly skilled labourers, often sought to exclude women from industrial work rather than campaigning collectively for better conditions. Yet, as Moring notes, when unions did organize intersectional strikes, they were measurably more successful.
The opening chapters provide an overview of the status and conditions of factory workers in this period, establishing how emancipation and working-class agitation were deeply interlinked. While Chapter 1 treads familiar but necessary ground, Moring’s expansive comparative framework offers fresh insights into the obstacles to industrial reform and political enfranchisement. Chapter 2 challenges the stereotype of the ‘factory girl’, instead emphasizing that factory work encompassed both younger and mature women, many of whom were married and had children. Chapter 3 expands on why women opted for factory work over other forms of employment, particularly domestic service, demonstrating how industrial labour, despite its hardships, offered more autonomy – especially in creating a household – and was thus particularly attractive to women with children.
Chapter 4 serves as a fulcrum for the book, detailing the dangers of factory work – injuries, disabilities and fatalities – and the evolving legislative responses. This sets the stage for subsequent chapters on the development of female factory inspectors. Moring provides a detailed account of how this role emerged in response to moral panics over supposed female vulnerability, shaping both policy and enforcement. Chapter 5 traces middle-class women’s entry into teaching, medicine, administration and civil service roles, alongside shifting attitudes towards female education across industrializing nations. Here, Moring’s analysis could have been expanded: brief but interesting observations, such as American seminaries requiring female students to undertake domestic work, in contrast to British institutions like Girton College where domestic servants were employed, could have been explored further for their differing socio-political implications, particularly regarding the attitudes and approaches of educated women entering the civil service and the inspectorate.
Chapter 6 examines the expansion of female factory inspectors across multiple nations, offering the richest primary source analysis in the book. Case studies of individual inspectors highlight their contributions to documenting working conditions, exposing child labour and advocating for policy changes. Chapter 7 further explores the activities of female inspectors, demonstrating how they enacted change – whether through formal prosecutions, reports that escalated into legislative reforms, or small but tangible workplace improvements such as sanitation access. Finally, Chapter 8 underscores how these inspectors facilitated policy shifts that improved factory conditions, from clothing regulations to housing standards for the female support staff of remote mines. Moring contrasts their pragmatic and worker-focused approach with male-led unions, which often sidelined women’s issues or supported exclusionary ‘protections’ that ultimately limited female employment opportunities.
The two most significant contributions to knowledge in this volume lie in its focus on women’s work and lives in and beyond the factory. First, Moring provides rich evidence of how female-headed households were often better fed, more secure and less burdened by financial strain than those led by men, particularly when unemployment and alcohol consumption came into play. ‘Strategies for survival’ – such as food cooperatives and shared wage management – highlight working women’s ingenuity and economic agency. Second, the book’s examination of female factory inspectors recasts women from objects of inspection to agents of change, revealing the tensions between gender and class as middle-class women gained oversight of working-class labour conditions.
The book prioritizes voices from below alongside tables of data, recovering forgotten or marginalized perspectives by using personal accounts, letters, interviews and other sources to capture how women understood and navigated the world of the factory. For example, it portrays Chicagoan inspector Florence Kelley’s frustrations about the conditions of child workers. As the book prioritizes giving a prismatic picture of women’s experiences in these inspection roles in different countries, direct quotations are largely supplementary to the broader data analysis. Nonetheless, Moring’s archival work ensures that previously ‘invisible women’ – both factory workers and inspectors – are recovered, particularly those obscured in census data or erased through marriage and name changes.
One limitation of the book’s methodological approach, to which Moring readily confesses in the introduction, is the burden of its expansiveness. As a result, it can be harder to track a single nation, industry or group of women in a linear fashion. Certain themes, such as women’s attempts to balance factory work with family life, are revisited across multiple chapters rather than being consolidated. While this prism-like structure offers a fruitful comparative perspective, it is more difficult to trace specific arguments, such as developments within particular industries like textiles, the industry which receives the most attention owing to the predominance of women working in it. However, the inclusion of comparative tables, substantial appendices and a thorough index helps to mitigate this fragmentation.
Arriving at a critical moment in economic history, this volume offers a stark reminder of what is at stake when labour rights and gender protections are undermined or overturned. Moring dismantles persistent myths: that factory women were transient workers, involved only until marriage or war’s end; that they were passive in shaping industrial change; or that male-led unions and governments acted in women’s best interests when it came to safe, equitable employment. Instead, this study highlights the strategies women employed to navigate and transform industrial labour, as they negotiated precarious work, fluctuating finances and exclusionary legislation. With striking timeliness, Moring underscores how long and hard-won these struggles were – and how fragile these achievements remainded.
