The machine in the nursery: incubator technology and the origins of newborn intensive care

women's movement as Victorian women's mission to women in the home became extended to more public settings, particularly in local rather than national contexts. And this leads to a third theme: women's welfare activities, especially, but not only, before they gained parliamentary suffrage, were to be found mainly at the local level, often embedded in specifically female networks. Chapters on Octavia Hill and Louisa Twining, by Caroline Morrell and Theresa Deane respectively, illustrate this and the significance of gender in the construction of welfare work. Perhaps the most unexpected contribution is Sheila Ryan Johannsson's detailed comparison of female mortality patterns in Japan and England in the late nineteenth century. Johannsson shows how women's life chances depended on state policies and societal valuation of their lives, and not just on access to wages. The impact of industrial employment was very different for young Japanese and young English women. Anne Digby reviews the roles of women as providers and managers (as mothers, volunteers and professionals) in the face of poverty in early twentieth-century Britain. Matemalism appears to have been an important lever for empowering and assisting women at local levels but, at national level, welfare benefits remained fmly tied to labour market participation, to women's disadvantage. Lesley Hoggart's chapter on campaigns for birth control in the Labour movement in the 1920s also contrasts strong local support for birth control as a boon for mothers with, until 1930, resistance to its adoption as national Labour Party policy. She attributes this resistance to electoral considerations, to the (female and male) leadership's judgements about what potential voters would find acceptable, rather than to male prejudice alone. Electoral considerations, especially appeal to the new women voters, are seen as one (but only one) reason for the Labour Party's strong rhetorical commitment to child welfare during the inter-war years in John Stewart's chapter. Pat Thane's review of policies for and affecting the elderly from the 1870s to the 1940s shows that enfranchising elderly women did not generate an equivalent rhetorical commitment to their welfare. Jane Lewis's concluding chapter provides an overview on women as clients as well as providers of welfare, drawing particularly on recent comparative literature on the development of welfare states. If it were not for the price, this chapter and the editors' introduction alone would justify the book's becoming recommended reading on many undergraduate welfare or women's history or social policy courses. Not all the individual contributions are of such a high standard, but overall this collection is a valuable addition to recent welfare history.