"Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is an impressive achievement. Blending the languages of gender and class, Bender movingly captures the meaning of the sweatshop for the home lives of immigrant workers, and demonstrates its power to shape their imaginations and their organizing strategies."--Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

Daniel E. Bender is an assistant professor of history at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, and co-editor of Sweatshop U.S.A.: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective.