page_title: Matchgirls' strike
section_title: Match making
hierarchical_section_title: Matchgirls' strike / Background / Match making
caption_attribution_description: English: Women working in a match factory in London in 1871.
context_page_description: The matchgirls' strike of 1888 was an industrial action by the women and teenage girls working at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, London.
context_section_description: In the late nineteenth century matches were made using sticks of poplar or Canadian pine wood, twice the length of the finished product. These were secured into frames holding approximately 4,000. Both ends of the sticks were dipped into sulphur and then into a composition of white phosphorus, potassium chlorate, antimony sulphide, powdered glass and colouring. The level of white phosphorus in the match varied; in 1899 a government report stated that in the UK it was between six and seven percent, while a Royal Economic Society report of 1902 put the figure at "usually about five; sometimes as much as ten per cent". Experienced workers could finish 1,400 frames in a ten-hour shift, which created ten million matches. Once the double-ended matches had been dried in ovens, they were placed in a machine to halve them into single matches. They were packed into boxes of a hundred and these then tied into bundles of twelve. Those involved in dipping the matches were usually male; females dominated the workforce involved in the remainder of the process.
  The inclusion of sulphur—nicknamed brimstone—was one of the reasons early matches were called lucifers; although they were also called congreves. Lucifer matches could be ignited on any surface where friction could be created with the strike. In the 1840s red phosphorus was discovered, which was more stable when exposed to the air. This meant matches could be made without any phosphorus, with a striking surface on the box that contained red phosphorus.
  In 1897 there were 4,152 people working in 25 match-making factories in Britain, 2,658 of whom were adults, 1,492 were aged between 14 and 18, and 2 under the age of 14. Of the factories that produced matches, 23 of them used white phosphorus. They employed 3,134 people; 245 men and 1,276 women were involved in processes that included phosphorus, with the remainder employed in non-phosphorus roles.
  An occupational disease that affected those who worked with white phosphorus was phosphorus necrosis of the jaw, also known as phossy jaw; the condition is not associated with red phosphorus. Phossy jaw developed by inhalation of phosphorus vapour—particularly when the ingredient was heated—which caused osteonecrosis of the jaw bone. This manifested itself in, initially, toothaches and flu-like symptoms, then tooth loss, abscesses, swelling of the gums, the formation of fistula and necrosis of the jaw. Mortality was reported in around 20 per cent of cases.
caption: Women working in a match factory, possibly that of Bryant & May
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "600", "Image YResolution": "600", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2011:01:02 18:26:45", "Image ExifOffset": "172", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "310", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "11285", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2070", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2012"}