Cleaning Casings
Meat
processing achieved economies of scale with the rise of the great factories on
Chicago’s Packingtown. Work was done in early versions of continuous flow
processing, each task being done on the flow of a multi-level building. At the
bottom, the remains of slaughtered animals were made into sausages. The worst,
filthiest and smelliest work was cleaning animal intestines to be used as
sausage casings. This was literally women’s work, as this picture from the
Armour plant shows.
Photo of Women Cleaning Casings at Swift Company Packing House, Chicago, IL
Library of Congress Digital Collection, http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html, Reproduction no. LC-USZ62-50217.
