Mark Aldrich, Safety First: Technology, Labor and Business in the Building of American Work Safety 1870–1939, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, £41.50, xx+415 pp.

Regina H. Kenen with Jenny McLeish and Daphne May, Pregnancy at Work: Health and Safety for the Working Woman, London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998, paper £12.99, xiii+271 pp.

Karen Messing, One-Eyed Science: Occupational Health and Women Workers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998, $59.95, paper $22.95, xx+244 pp.

Much of the new scholarship on the body at work tends to ignore writing on occupational health and safety which has always been concerned with the body, albeit within problematic frameworks. These three books take various positions in relation to that literature. I would argue that Karen Messing's book is one of the most important books on occupational health and safety in the latter half of the twentieth century. Messing poses questions that are essential to re-orient the area of occupational health and safety, not only if it is to include women and their work, but also if it is going to be equal to the task of addressing work characterised by the service relationship unfolding before us. Dealing comprehensively with aspects of occupational health and safety from toxins to traumatic injuries, the book also takes seriously service occupations such as waitressing. For example there is a chapter called ‘Emotional stressors in women's occupations’.