Managing danger in the home environment, 1900-1940

According to Arwen Mohun, the National Safety Council "was out to effect a cultural shift; to teach not only workers and employers but also the American public new ways of thinking about danger, risk, and safety."(11) The NSC recognized home safety as an issue of concern at its first National Congress, as did its biweekly magazine, National Safety News (NSN). Home safety, however, held a much lower priority within the organization than did industrial safety. In fact, the initial focus of the NSC and its publications, as well as of the journal Safety Engineering (an insurance industry publication first issued in 1913), was for mothers to train their children to preach "accident prevention in the business and industrial world ... [when they became] the workmen and the executives of the future."(12) By emphasizing the special responsibility of women to develop a safety consciousness in the family's males as preparation for encountering workplace risk, the NSC and Safety Engineering minimized the extent to which risk was also present in the home, especially for women and children.(13)

The safety movement redefined the perception of home safety and of women's role as it matured. The movement's directors were ambivalent concerning the place of women in a field primarily oriented toward male-dominated industry, but they gradually accepted the idea that the home was also a place of risk in which women had special responsibilities.(14) In 1917, for instance, Safety Engineering ran two editorials entitled, "Housewives and Home Hazards." Focusing on the danger of fires, the writers bemoaned the fact that fire fighting was seen as a man's job and noted that the "housewife's responsibility should be considered ... [since] housewives are the ones to prevent fires in the homes." In 1918 the NSC organized a "Women's Session" at its annual Safety Congress dealing with women's industrial and home safety experiences alike. One male speaker noted the contradiction between the common view of the home as a "haven of safety" and its high accident rate. He emphasized women's special responsibility to remove hazards and to prevent family members from taking risks. Even though "Women in War Industries" was a major session theme, NSC male spokesmen carefully emphasized that "safety in the home and safety instruction" were women's special province.(15) Women may have played a valuable wartime role, but their peacetime place was in the home.

In an attempt to expand women's role in the safety movement, in 1919 Tracy Copp, chairperson of the NSC "Women in Industry Section," led a move to have eighteen national women's organizations join with the NSC in organizing public safety in the nation's communities and schools. Copp noted,

Now that women have finished the war work in which they displayed such constant courage and skill, they are seeking some social task which is worthy of their ability and which will grip their interest as the war work did. We believe accident prevention offers this field of activity, and the toll of deaths among children alone should arouse every public spirited woman to action.(16)