ABSTRACT
Central to the political struggles which ensued around women in the labour market, the effects on their health of working conditions and the rationales for legislative protection, was the ideology of women’s nature and place in society. It was the perception of women’s role in relation to the nurture, care and responsibility for men and children within the domestic domain which ensured that women’s work in the paid labour market would become a major ‘social problem’ of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The issue of occupational ill-health needs to be considered in this context because ‘domestic ideology’ both framed the discourse within which women’s health in this and other respects was considered and it impinged directly on women’s lives.
