Doctoral Dissertation Research: Risky Homes, Domestic Accidents, and Safety Work

Accidents account for 26 million nonfatal injuries each year and rank third among causes of death within the United States. Domestic accidents make up over half of these totals. Despite the centrality of physical hazards to domestic life, historians have generally left the subject of home accidents to researchers from sociology and public health.

Using the term “safety work” as shorthand, this project reveals how experts and laypeople tried to control mishaps and their consequences over time. It charts the history of domestic accidents and safety work from 1900 to 1980, analyzing how and why public health education, voluntary product standards, and markets for insurance and consumer appliances came to delineate American risk management.

This research describes how corporations and nonprofits established influential models for accident prevention research and policy and presents new insights into the changing realities and cultural meanings of risk and responsibility. Even as Americans have become more conscious of household risks, the burden of injury prevention continues to fall heavily on citizen-consumers.

Ordinary men and women shop for “safe” products; install and repair equipment; review the latest safety advice; and perform many other tasks to keep their homes running smoothly. This project considers the historical limitations of this individualized approach to accident management and illustrates the benefits of state-centered alternatives like strict presale product regulation and subsidies for childcare and home nursing.

Discussing this history with policymakers and public health practitioners has the potential to bolster existing consumer protection laws and to expand government aid programs.

Drawing on trade catalogues, advertisements, insurance policies, magazines, case histories, product safety tests, warning labels, and other sources, this research interprets domestic accidents as part of a longer sequence of events from risk prevention to long-term recovery or disability. This project analyzes shocks, burns, falls, and choking to make four related interventions.

First, its stress on safety work recenters the study of accidents on the home and the lives and labor of ordinary Americans. It represents mishaps less as results of fate or individual carelessness than as predictable byproducts of overwork and the complexity of domestic space. Second, this project clarifies how safety concerns became embedded within markets for insurance and consumer products, which left households to buy physical and mental security from for-profit corporations.

Third, work itself is redefined to include learning about common hazards and shopping for “safe” appliances, factoring self-education and consumption into the labor of risk management. Finally, it shows how experts papered over differences between communities with distinct racial, economic, and geographical profiles to make middle-class white suburbia the “one-size-fits-all” model solution for home accident prevention.

Overall, this project analyzes how Americans kept up with new safety practices and technologies and why they did or did not follow available social prescriptions for safe living. Accidents manifested not only as causes but also as effects of housework and compelled stakeholders to reconcile the ideal of the home-as-sanctuary with its risky and toilsome reality.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.