Embodying Industrialization: Inequality, Structural Violence, Disease, and Stress in Working-Class and Poor British Women

Abstract

Industrialization in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United Kingdom (UK) created a demand for an able-bodied workforce, with the result of an increased mobilization of state-controlled improvements in hygiene and health-care access, especially for working-class (e.g., “laboring class”) women. However, public health and hygiene legislation was characterized by contradictory discourses regarding the extent of the state’s responsibility in caring for the body politic and social anxieties over the regulation of working-class women’s bodies. Historical records indicate that inequality and structural violence played a critical role in the marginalization and institutionalization of working-class women’s bodies, creating health disparities between the socioeconomic strata, especially in rates of morbidity and mortality. However, our understanding of the direct biological outcomes for working-class women’s bodies from the interplay of embodied inequality and structural violence, manifesting as increased allostatic load, and public health policies and practices remains limited. Taking a life-course approach, we examine relationships between disease conditions and oral stress markers in adult females from seven skeletal collections across the UK who derived from low to middle socioeconomic status communities. Results of this study suggest a negative synergy between early life health indicators and diseases among all populations but that working-class women outside London experienced a higher risk for increased allostatic load over their life course related to noninfectious conditions, specifically rickets and scurvy, than did those within London.