Women Pioneers in Environmental Health, by Will Hatchett

Women Pioneers in Environmental Health

Lucy Deane and Rose Squire broke the mould of social convention to venture into the most dangerous corners of Victorian England.

The first two women to gain official public health positions in London were extraordinary individuals, whose long careers were highly accomplished. They were appointed by the vestry of Kensington – the forerunner to the Royal Borough of Kensington – in 1893 as sanitary inspectors. Their names were Lucy Deane and Rose Squire. They deserve to be remembered.

The Factory and Workshops Act of 1891 had recently extended responsibility for inspecting workshops from the national Factory Inspectorate, which had only 50 inspectors to cover the entire country, to local government. It was the age of the sweatshop and of poorly paid piecework. In London and all other large cities, many of those being exploited were women and children.

Kensington’s enlightened medical officer of health, Thomas Orme Dudfield, had received complaints about poor working condition in local dressmakers’ establishments. He took the bold step of appointing females to the new positions because he, confided, he did not have the resources to help a “numerous and somewhat helpless class” of young women. In addition, “some of the duties involved were of too special and delicate nature to be properly discharged by male inspectors.”

Victorian values were at their height in the 1890s. No form of official discourse was available to discuss sexual or reproductive rights – apart from the ludicrous misnomer of the ‘fallen woman’. And yet prostitution was everywhere. A similar myopia applied to poverty. Many people believed that poverty was caused by genetically transmitted ‘imbecility’ or ‘moral degeneracy’ and could be reduced by restraining the illiberal breeding of the poor. Of course, it would help if they didn’t drink so much. Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics, based on the concept of encouraging reproduction only for ‘higher’ races and classes, was reaching its apogee.

Even otherwise enlightened individuals attributed poverty to a failure of character, rather than a failure of society. John Simon, Britain’s first chief medical officer, wrote, in his his book of 1897, English Sanitary Institutions, of the able-bodied who ‘flagrantly’ claimed Poor Law relief: “Their idleness is so wilful an offence against the community as to deserve treatment of a penal nature.”

Two views of poverty

Two opposing views are encapsulated in the findings of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, which was delivered in 1909, after a four-year inquiry. The majority report, epitomised by the views of Helen Bosanquet and Octavia Hill of the Charity Organisation Society, focused on what it perceived as the moral causes of poverty, such as laziness, addiction to drink, or lack of ambition.

It was supportive of the existing poor law, including the deterrent effect of workhouses. It held that poor families should not be provided with state-subsidised services, like those, for example, of the newly formed London County Council which had begun in 1889. Services such as free school meals, as proposed by the LCC, it argued, would usurp family life, and make poor people dependent upon the state and unable to fend for themselves.

The minority report, representing more progressive views on the commission, including those of the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb, looked forwards rather than backwards. It stressed socio-economic causes rather than moral causes of poverty. It advocated welfare services free of judgement or stigma. The poor laws of 1832 should, it argued, be substantially reformed, or abolished. In practice, like most obsolete British institutions, the poor laws lingered, until the the National Health Service and national assistance legislation of the 1940s swept them away.

Female pioneers

In the Victorian era, organisations like the Charity Organisation Society and the National Health Society had developed as vehicles for women from the gentile classes – often the daughters of doctors, soldiers and clergymen – to help the poor. The rent collectors who worked for Octavia Hill from the 1870s, keeping careful track of tenants, were practising an early form of social work. Such women served a purpose for the state. It was felt that they could inculcate sober and thrifty values into the feminine sphere of the Victorian household.

It must have been extraordinary for a woman of this social class to enter what founder of the Salvation Army William Booth described in a best-selling book in 1890 as ‘darkest England’ – a depraved, drink-sodden sub-stratum, akin to the most ‘uncivilised’ parts of the British Empire.

Born in 1865 in Madras, India, Lucy Deane was daughter to a colonel who was killed in 1881 in the First Boer War and was the niece of a viscount. After the death of her mother, when she was 21, Deane obtained a nursing diploma from the National Health Society, a Victorian philanthropic charity, and worked at the Chelsea Infirmary.

In 1894, after serving as a sanitary inspector in Kensington, she passed stringent civil service exams and became one of the first females to be employed by the Factory Inspectorate. With her colleague, May Tennant, she was responsible for inspecting sweats shops in Soho. In 1898, her work observations led her to being one of the first people to postulate that dust particles, particularly asbestos, caused lung disease.

In 1901, Deane served as secretary to a “ladies’ commission” headed by Liberal supporter and suffragist, Dame Millicent Fawcett, to investigate reports of dreadful conditions in British-run camps in the Second Boer War. The commission’s findings were damning. Deane insisted that highly critical sections of the report were included in the final version. By the time the war ended in 1902, a quarter of the inmates had died.

In 1904, she moved to Westerham in Kent. A keen supporter of votes for women, Deane organised a Westerham branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, attending marches and rallies in London. During the First World War, she served on the executive committee of the Women’s Land Army and on an arbitration tribunal for the wages of women munition workers.

She was invited to attend the Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague in 1915, but the government prevented most British delegates from attending by suspending ferry services between England and Holland. Deane was one the first women magistrates, in Kent. As founder of the Westerham branch of the Women’s Institute, she produced and acted in Shakespeare plays. She also helped to set up a home in Chelsea for unmarried mothers and their babies.

Fearless investigator

Rose Squire, her co-appointee in Kensington, the daughter of William Squire, a Harley Street doctor had been educated by a governess and presented at court to Queen Victoria. One of her father’s patients was Lord Cardigan, from whom she heard stories about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Like Deane, Squire enjoyed a remarkable career. In 1904, she was appointed to investigate “the relation of industrial and sanitary conditions to pauperism”, for the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws.

She and her colleague Arthur Steel-Maitland, who was later to become a Conservative MP and a baron, were supported by two secretaries. They travelled to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, St Helens, the five pottery towns and Cornwall. They visited factories, docks and mines and took evidence from thousands of paupers. Women were discouraged from entering male places of work and, in many cases, forbidden.

That did not stop her. In her vivid memoir, Thirty Years in the Public Service (which is worthy of a Netflix series) she describes plunging down a terrifying, 3,000-foot shaft in a coffin-shaped capsule and walking down tunnels with a candle stuck in a ball of clay attached to her hat: “When our party emerged once more into the light of day we were scarcely recognisable and, to me at least, until I had bathed and donned dry garments, life seemed not worth living!”

In 1904, there was no compensation for industrial diseases, no national health insurance, no old age pension, widow’s pension or employment exchanges. They would all evolve over the next two decades. Services catering for tuberculosis (the most common cause of destitution) and for infant and maternal welfare were in their infancy. Drink, she admitted, was often resorted to, inevitably, when other forms of hope and relief were absent.

Her work made her angry. She wrote, “Honest, hard-working, steady men were reduced to destitution by the conditions under which they were employed. I cannot recall without hot indignation and shame the cold fact of excessive hours, miserably inadequate wages, exposure to wet, to heat, to dust, to poisonous materials in the heavy iron and steel trades, in chemical works, in white lead, paint and pottery works, to say nothing of the inhuman system (or lack of a system) of casual labour at the docks.”

Women make inroads

A few persistent and single-minded women followed in the wake of Dean and Squire. By 1898, there were a handful of female sanitary inspectors in London, working in Kensington, St Pancras, Islington, Hackney, Southwark and Battersea. There were also female inspectors in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and St Helens.

But many male sanitary inspectors did not welcome female incursion into their work realm and opposed their membership of their professional body, the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association, which was an all-male organisation until 1901. They frequently argued that some parts of their job, such as lifting manhole covers to peer intro drains or going into abattoirs were too physically demanding or gruesome for women. A short-lived Women’s Sanitary Inspectors’ Association came into being in 1896, with seven members, based in London.

Legislative changes, such as mandatory health visiting, following the Notification of Birth Act of 1907, and school medical inspections under the Children’s Act of 1908, were changing the nature of the role. Female inspectors had become relatively numerous by 1913 – there were 23 in Liverpool and 17 in Sheffield. In all authorities, their duties were focused on mothers, infectious disease and workplaces employing women, including laundries. This was an era, long before vaccines, in which diseases like measles, German measles, mumps and whooping cough frequently killed babies and children.

Some women fulfilled dual posts as sanitary inspectors and health visitors. In 1914, fearing that “women would take men’s jobs”, the Sanitary Journal warned condescendingly that a “frantic rush of well-meaning wealthy ladies”, without proper training, could “wreak havoc” on public health. More women were employed as inspectors, often with reduced salaries and powers compared to their male equivalents, but the return of millions of men from the First World War, in 1918, led to their retrenchment into the ‘female’ occupations of nursing, school nursing, health visiting and midwifery, which were less well-paid than equivalent male roles,

In 1915, reflecting its evolving membership, the WSIA had restyled itself as the Women’s Sanitary Inspectors’ and Health Visitors’ Association. In the 1920s, health visitors gained national standards and training courses, and in 1997, their professional body was retitled the Community Practitioners and Health Visitors’ Association (CPHVA). To this day, the CPHVA, which is a trade union (part of Unite) retains mauve and green, which were chosen by the Suffragette movement, as its colours.

This blog was greatly assisted by Jennifer R. Haynes’ PhD, dissertation, Sanitary Ladies and Friendly Visitors: Women public health officers in London 1890–1930 and Ava Greenwell’s chapter in The Stuff of Life, CIEH, 2012, The Women Inspectors.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10019281/2/430969_Redacted.pdf

?