Emploi

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Vigilance Association for the Defense of Personal Rights; Women's Labor & EmploymentABAA

Women's Employment Legislative Restrictions on Women's Labour and Opposition to Protective Factory Legislation 1874

1874réf. 165761874. Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights. Legislative Restrictions on Women's Labour 1874 opposes proposed factory legislation that would prevent women from returning to industrial employment for six months after childbirth. The Association argues that a measure presented as protection would fall most heavily on women whose families depended upon their wages asking "Who in thousands of cases where there is no helper will assure them and their children bread" Its objections connect employment restrictions to married women's precarious legal and economic position particularly women deserted or unsupported by husbands and left without an enforceable claim upon their husbands' earnings. Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights. Legislative Restrictions on Women's Labour. Extract reprinted by kind permission from the Manchester Examiner and Times of Saturday June 20th 1874. London: Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights 1874. First edition extract. 4 pages. Original paper wrappers. 8 1/2 x 5 inches. The pamphlet challenges legislation directed specifically at working women while leaving wealthier women free from comparable interference. Addressing married workers it notes that there are ".many married women deserted or uncared for by their husbands" and argues that "no marriage law secures to the wife a share in the earnings of the father of her children." The text consequently treats freedom to work not as an abstract principle but as an immediate question of food wages and support for women and children and calls upon women themselves to oppose the proposed restriction. The pamphlet belongs to the Vigilance Association's campaign against statutory limitations imposed specifically upon adult women's labor during the parliamentary debates surrounding the Factory Acts in 1874. Its argument exposes a central conflict in nineteenth-century labor reform: legislation intended to protect women workers could also restrict their access to wages without providing an alternative means of family support. At the time this description was prepared no copies were located in American institutions through the OCLC search consulted; institutional records are subject to revision and should be reconfirmed. Condition information was not supplied. The four-page tract records an organized women's-rights response to factory regulation that linked employment freedom directly to marriage law household income and women's economic dependence. unknown books