This study examines the disjuncture between Bay State workingmen's right of person and assaults on their bodies in the industrial workplace from 1820 to 1911. The thesis focuses, therefore, on the cultural costs for workers of industrial violence and imaginings of imperiled laborers advanced by labor, employers, lawmakers, medical authorities, reformers, and the print media. At question is how these reciprocal and conflicting readings delimited public awareness and political recognition of workers' endangerment.

The argument recognizes that workers contract out their bodies when they sell their labor to employers. Historians' inattention to this fact has obscured the centrality of workers' bodies for the allocation of rights and authority in the wage relation, the social production of workers' susceptibility to employer neglect, and the consequences for working Americans of labor's failure to enshrine the right of bodily integrity alongside the liberties of subsistence, association, and collective bargaining. Consistent with these concerns, the thesis poses four questions. First, how were male workers' views on citizenship linked to personal physical autonomy and defense of the body? Second, how did the ideologies of race, gender, and status condition their understanding of assaults on their bodies at work? Third, how did popular, medical, and legal readings of the body sustain and undercut workingmen's social criticisms and political claims? Fourth, how did non-workers' discourses constitute and reconstitute the male wage earner as a social type and legal person, and with what effects on their standing in the polity?

The thesis concludes that workingmen understood the body and volition as integral to individual autonomy. They invoked this widespread idea in three related assertions. First, human volition differentiated the free and unfree. Second, exertion of the will through (and over) the body was a hallmark of individual independence. Third, wage-earning men averred that the right of person—or "Life," as the Declaration of Independence had it—secured human agency by safeguarding the body, carrier of the will. Thus persuaded, the Commonwealth's workingmen maintained that their susceptibility to "industrial violence" undermined their claims to independence and contravened political ideals of embodied liberty.