Women's Bodies and Dangerous Trades in England examines the debates over women's labor in trades deemed “dangerous” by Parliament. Carolyn Malone argues that in the period between 1880 and 1914 increased attention was paid to the impact of women's work on their reproductive capacities. This resulted in legislation and practices, she argues, that prioritized the health of unborn babies but that paid scant attention to the needs of working women.

The first half of the book investigates the creation of dangerous trades legislation for women. Focusing on the nail and chain, white lead, and pottery trades, Malone shows how parliamentary officials and working men argued successfully for the government to introduce legislation that restricted, and in some cases prohibited, women's work in trades that were believed to imperil women's reproductive abilities. Under this new legislation enormous power was invested in the home secretary to declare a trade “dangerous” and thus to introduce special measures to limit women's employment in these often high-paying industries.

Malone argues that while protective labor legislation had been in place since the 1830s, it was not until the end of the century that debates over women's work focused specifically on their reproductive, rather than sexualized, bodies. While certainly indicative of a widespread trend, this is perhaps too neat an argument. Marjorie Levine-Clark's book Beyond the Reproductive Body (Columbus, OH, 2004) reveals that concern over the relationship between women's paid work and their maternal capacities was evident as early as the 1830s. Conversely, the sexual dangers associated with women in the workplace did not disappear in the 1870s, as Malone's own discussion of barmaids makes clear. Indeed by arguing that the sensational stories of women's labor that circulated in the press were a version of what Judith Walkowitz calls “narratives of sexual danger” (City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London [Chicago, 1992]) Malone draws attention to the persistence of discourses that positioned women's work as a moral and a sexual problem. By simplifying the chronology of anxieties over women's labor in the opening chapter, Malone in many ways undermines her own argument, which is important and interesting.

The second half of the book foregrounds the key voices in debates over women's bodies and the dangerous trades. Here Malone provides a close reading of journalistic, medical, and feminist approaches to the problem. Malone ties press coverage of women's work to the emergence of the “New Journalism,” which focused heavily on crime, sex, and other sensational stories. Journalists and newspaper editors constructed working women as victims in need of protection from the dangers of the industrial workplace and in the process promoted themselves as key to exposing the exploitation of women workers. Newspapers, however, also provided a forum for public discussion and allowed the voices of working men and women, as well as employers, to be heard. Letters to the editor and counternarratives that appeared in trade journals often challenged the representation of women's work as inherently dangerous and exploitative.

Key to the passage of dangerous trades legislation was the opinion of medical “experts.” In an important chapter on medical men and sexual science, Malone reveals the ways in which doctors constructed women as unfit for labor in general and cast the dangerous trades as especially hazardous because of the ways in which they impinged on women's reproductive abilities. Doctors’ concern, she argues, was with fetal protection, rather than with women's overall ability to raise healthy children, which would have necessitated consideration of women's wages. In fact, medical men argued that women were more susceptible to occupational illness, that their bodies were more adversely affected by lead and other contaminants. Even when statistical evidence pointed away from this conclusion, doctors continued to champion this position and buttressed it through claims about infant mortality. Medical experts thus helped to shift the debate over women's work from a concern with women's health and safety to a privileging of fetal rights. As Malone suggests, this was to have a major impact on future feminist issues.

Malone's chapter on feminist debates over the dangerous trades successfully illustrates the heterogeneity of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. She reveals the ways in which this type of protective labor legislation divided equal-rights feminists, who claimed that women were free agents who could negotiate the terms of their own labor, and social feminists, who argued that state intervention protected women who were more vulnerable than men in the marketplace. While politically excluded from the formulation of this legislation, feminists of all varieties spoke out about the realities of women's labor both inside and outside the home, the necessity of women's wages to family survival, and the nature of good mothering. Although deeply divided over government intervention and who could speak for the working mother, feminists worked together to depathologize the working woman's body and to champion women's rights at a moment when women's bodies were becoming less critical to the state than those of their unborn children.

Malone's epilogue places dangerous trades legislation for women workers within the larger context of debates over national efficiency and the health of the nation. She argues that protective labor legislation was bound up in larger turn-of-the-century anxieties over the future of the race. Building on the work of Anna Davin and Deborah Dwork, Malone argues that protecting working mothers was part of a post–Boer War concern with population and degeneration. But this critical context for understanding this legislation comes too late in the book to help to structure our reading and understanding of the periodization of public and parliamentary concern with the impact of dangerous trades on women's reproductive bodies. The epilogue would perhaps be more effective as an introduction that situated the dangerous trades legislation within these wider, and as Malone illustrates, pan-European, concerns with the health and strength of the nation.

This is a clearly written and accessible book that complements both Barbara Harrison's work on the dangerous trades and women's health and Sonya Rose's work on protective labor legislation for women Barbara Harrison, Not Only the “Dangerous Trades”: Women's Work and Health in Britain, 1880–1914, Gender and Society [London, 1996]); Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England, Studies on the History of Society and Culture no. 13 [Berkeley, 1991]). It is an important reminder that labor history must also be actively engaged with women's and gender history.