_Report of "Lancet" Sanitary Commission on Sanitation in the Shop_. 1892
Without entering upon the vexed question of women's rights, we may nevertheless urge it as an indisputable physiological fact that, when compelled to stand for long hours, women, especially young women, are exposed to greater injury and greater suffering than men.
_British Sessional Papers_. Vol. XII. 1886. Report from Select Committee on Shop Hours Regulation Bill
"Does their employment injuriously affect them, as child-bearing women in after years?"
"According to all scientific facts, it would do so."
"And you, as a medical man of a considerable number of years' experience, would not look to girls who have been worked so many hours in one position as the bearers of healthy, strong children?"
"Then it naturally follows, does it not, that this is a very serious matter in the interest of the nation as a whole, apart from the immediate injury to the person concerned?"
"Yes. As regards the physical condition of the future race."
_British Sessional Papers_. Vol. XII, 1895. Report from the Select Committee on Shops. Early Closing Bill
Witness, Dr. Percy Kidd, M.D., of the University of Oxford, Fellow of the College of Physicians and Member of the College of Surgeons, attached to London Hospital and Brompton, Hospital.
"Would this be a fair way of putting it: It is not the actual work of people in shops, but having to be there and standing about in bad air; it is the long hours which is the injurious part of it?"
_Official Information from the Reports of the [German] Factory Inspectors_. Berlin, Bruer, 1898
The inspector in Hesse regards a reduction of working hours to ten for women in textile mills as "absolutely imperative," as the continuous standing is very injurious to the female organism.
_Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography_. Berlin, September, 1907. Vol. II, Sec. IV. Fatigue Resulting from Occupation. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1908
"My experience and observations do not permit me to feel any uncertainty in believing that the injury to health inflicted upon even fully capable workers by the special demands of a periodically heightened rush of work is never compensated for. Under this head we may consider the demands of all seasonal work, ... as also the special rush season in shops before Christmas."