Managing danger in the home environment, 1900-1940

Insurance companies also contributed to the improvement of the home accident statistical record. Before state and public health officials began to identify distinct home accidents, insurance companies had marked the home as a perilous place. By the late nineteenth century, insurance underwriting focused on three distinct areas: life contracts, fire contracts, and liability contracts. Generally, life insurance companies offered policies which insured individuals; fire underwriters insured property from fire losses (perhaps the most common of all accidents and among the most severe); and liability contracts developed in the late nineteenth century for use in industries, to protect employers and property owners from suits brought by injured workers and people injured on their premises.(58)

Beginning about 1890, the Aetna Insurance Company began to undertake the underwriting of accident insurance. First it concentrated on industrial accidents, but in 1913 the Company began offering a policy that diverged dramatically from the traditional accident policies offered by life insurance companies. Rather than targeting individuals who might have an accident, this broad-based liability policy - "combined residence insurance" - protected policy holders from calamities of all sorts related to the home, be it water damage, explosion, glass breakage, or burglary.(59) The new policy reflected the company's belief that home accidents represented a growth area. As the company's in-house publication, the Aetna Agency Edition, noted in 1913, "We only wish [the business man] were as safe as he feels [at home]. Not a day passes but we have it most unpleasantly brought to our attention that the home is no sure isle of safety."(60) In 1921, following Aetna's lead, New York's Metropolitan Life began offering an accident policy.

Insurance company campaigns in the 1920s clearly identified the home as a hazardous place, but aimed at middle-class men, especially businessmen and professionals, as likely sales targets for policies to protect themselves from risk. Often they specifically identified merchants, manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, and doctors as those most susceptible to "loss of income" from accidents and therefore in need of insurance. Metropolitan Life even discouraged agents from offering such policies to women or to members of the working class.(61)

Class and Ethnic Dimensions

Comments in the home safety literature suggest that many of those involved in the safety movement believed, as Zurrer had observed in 1930, that there was a class and ethnic basis to home accidents. That is, while accidents did occur in middle- and upper-class homes, their frequency was greater in working-class and immigrant homes. In explaining this phenomenon, home safety specialists sometimes maintained that it was more difficult to advance their message among immigrants and the working class. They often argued that the schools should be used to spread their safety message, giving students instruction in proper attitudes to bring home to inculcate their recalcitrant parents. In addition, students were often equipped with safety check lists, a ubiquitous feature of home safety campaigns. The NSC considered school safety instruction an important activity.(62)