Thursday, 1 Feb. 2024, 1-2pm (GMT)
Speaker: Dr Carly Collier (UCD)
Title: A Lady Sanitary Sub-Officer if active could do great good’: Dublin Corporation and the first women sanitary inspectors in Ireland
Abstract:
This paper explores the introduction of women Sanitary Sub-Officers (hereafter SSOs) to Dublin’s public health infrastructure at the turn of the twentieth century.
The figure of Charles Cameron, who presided as Dublin’s Medical Officer of Health for almost 50 years (1874-1921), looms large in the history of the city’s public health policies during a period when Dublin was widely viewed as being plagued by poverty and disease. Cameron, however, marshalled a considerable workforce who supported his efforts to improve the hygiene, health and welfare of the city’s inhabitants, particularly the poor and working class, and it was during his tenure that the first women were appointed as ‘Lady’ SSOs.
Although Dublin Corporation was the first Irish local authority to introduce women on its sanitary staff in such roles, and Cameron publicly advocated for the employment of women in this arena, the role that these women SSOs played in improving the public health of Dublin has not yet been explored. This paper will outline both the trajectory of and the tensions around the introduction of women to what has been argued to be the most interventionist – and sensitive – role in the public health service of the period. It will explore the socio-economic, marital and religious backgrounds of the first group of women sanitary sub-officers; the way in which their roles were defined; and the interplay between their duties and status and those of their male colleagues as a means of understanding the institutional response of the Corporation to the introduction of women into a new professional sphere, as well as the ambitions, and limitations of, its public health strategy.
Biography: Carly Collier is a postdoctoral research fellow on the major IRC/AHRC-funded digital humanities project ‘Typhoid, Cockles and Terrorism’, hosted by the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, UCD. In addition to researching the entry of women into Dublin’s public health labour force at the end of the nineteenth century, she is also exploring the history of typhoid control in Dublin more generally and curating both physical and digital exhibitions on different aspects of that subject in partnership with the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland Heritage Centre and Dublin City Library and Archives.
Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMuf-urqzopE9F6QgBcXwsNIkaxWoR6oLBr
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