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Social History of Medicine 1996 9(2):235-251; doi:10.1093/shm/9.2.235
© 1996 by Society for the Social History of Medicine
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Invisible Labours: Mill Work and Motherhood in the American South

PATRICIA EVRIDGE HILL*

*Department of Social Science, San Jose State University One Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192-0121, USA.

SUMMARY With an almost total lack of access to contraceptive information before the mid 1930s, a high percentage of married women working in the textile mills of the American South were or rapidly became mothers. Without the financial resources to provide their families with wholesome food, medical care, and adult supervision, these women, who bore many children and shouldered most domestic duties in addition to their mill jobs, presumably had particular health care needs. This essay initially questions the usefulness of traditional categories that label physical ailments and accidents as either job-related or lifestyle-related.

A group of female physicians in Greenville and Spartanburg Counties in South Carolina, all of them southern natives, worked during the 1930s to address some of the most immediate medical needs of the region's working women. These physicians had no appreciable effect, however, on workplace conditions and did not question the social and economic relationships that led so many working mothers to depend on their services. This essay also provides a partial analysis of public health services available to working mothers in Carolina mill villages during the Depression decade and explores reasons why the region's female medical professionals failed to challenge a form of social organization that left working mothers' particular health care needs unaddressed.

Keywords: occupational health; physicians; women in medicine; maternal welfare; public health; infant welfare; South Carolina; textile mills; 1930s; southern medicine


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