Jurgis never got up from bed: Masculinity, Injury, and Workmen's Compensation Law in the Early 20th Century United States

Work in the early 20th century United States was incredibly dangerous, with one employee permanently injured approximately every nine minutes. In 1910 the first U.S. states created their workmen’s compensation legislation. By 1920 forty states had these laws. In this paper I examine the ferment around employee injury that gave rise to compensation laws. I pay particular attention to how social reformers and policymakers framed the injury problem in gendered terms, as a matter of injured workmen. I frame this analysis through a close reading of passages in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, a reading I contextualize with material drawn from reports by state and federal Bureaus of Labor Statistics, state industrial accident commissions, and private and philanthropic investigation, all centered on the problem of employee injury. I argue that a political consensus built in the first decade of the 20th century treated injury as a problem of family breakdown. According to that consensus, physical injury and interrupted income combined to undermine working class men’s household authority. Those unmanned households, the idea went, could not raise children adequately, which in turn threatened the entire American social order. Compensation laws thus were intended as a fiscal surrogate for injured men. This arrangement simultaneously shored up masculine household authority and further rhetorically feminized injured men.