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Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practi

Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down." For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days. I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.

heymijo 7y ago
It seems like it was both. I have framed houses and I have shingled roofs. The former is physically demanding. The latter is back breaking. Some excerpts from Caro: > the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands > the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
jscholes 7y ago
> light house cleaning. I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...