Female factory inspectors and leadership in early twentieth-century Australia

In her memoirs published in 1921, the British factory inspector Adelaide Anderson recalled what drew her to the ‘calling’ of inspection. The ‘idealizing powers of youth … embarking on a calling that involved conduct of legal proceedings and much other technical knowledge of an entirely novel kind for women of that day, counted for much’, she recalled. There were also the ‘authority and powers to enquire into and enforce remedies for wrong conditions, or to persuade sympathetic employers to provide amenities that the law could not enforce’, which were other appealing aspects of the role