ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the ways in which social and economic conditions influenced standards of health. The domestic environment and women's work in that environment was central to health and well-being. Mothers' meetings first organised by middle-class women in the nineteenth century to bring women of all classes together, increasingly turned their attention to health-related matters. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, of the WCG, argued that women should be able to influence protective legislation, working conditions, child labour, temperance, education, health and divorce laws. After the First World War the men's and women's branches of the Inspectorate were amalgamated and women's health no longer received the Inspectors' special attention. In practice it is hard to judge how closely local authorities followed the letter of the law, for war soon intervened, and in 1915 the Board of Control complained that feeble-minded women were not being transferred from workhouses to mental defective institutions.