ABSTRACT
Sweated labour. This evocative term signalling extremely long hours of work in unsanitary conditions and for a fraction of subsistence wages, was, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at the centre one of the most provocative aspects of the labour question in Britain: women's employment. The conjunction of discourses of sweating and femininity in representational practices as diverse as Academic painting, graphic illus tration, and trade union demonstrations, is well recogized.2 Its visual cues, first developed in the 1840s, had always been highly emotive: haggard women in ragged clothes were depicted hunched over light manufacturing tasks in dwellings characterized by dilapidated furniture, broken crockery and leaking roofs (Figure 1.1). In 1906, however, the emotive currency of this imagery was rapidly inflated, as the visual representation of sweating took a new, performative, twist.
