Additionally, another justification was put forth by male workers and employers; women were performing less skilled jobs than men were and so deserved less pay - this was because they had been placed there by the employers themselves, due to fears that they would threaten the jobs of the male workers. For example, in the nineteenth century, home knitters in Leicester entered hosiery factories to perform unskilled jobs (and gain the lowly status and wages that came with them), not jobs that would have drawn on their experience in the production of garments. This sexual division of labour was evident in other industries; in the iron industry, men were given jobs in the factories rolling and puddling, whilst women were left to make chains and nails in workshops. This ‘separate spheres’ ideology served to reduce the power and authority that women may have had in the years preceding the industrial revolution. Some historians, such as P. Lindherst and J.G. Williamson, are of the belief that on the whole women’s work decreased during industrialisation, owing to the fact that they weighed up the benefits of working and staying at home, and decided to remain in the home as they felt they would be more worthwhile than to participate in employment in the capitalist market. To illustrate this, (although outside the time period studied for this essay) the 1871 Census found that 63% of women in Liverpool were not occupied in any employment other than their domestic duties performed the home. Whilst this cannot represent the country as a whole it nonetheless proves that a significant amount of women in an industrial city were not employed in work considered to be industrial. But employment did vary in different regions, for instance women in living in Durham or Northumberland did not work in the coalfields, but they did in Lancashire. Similarly, brick making was an exclusively female trade in the Black Country but in Lancashire this was a man’s job.
As was to be expected, factory work was very tiring and tedious. Typically, cotton workers worked around ten hours per day, “great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly, with raised chests and spinal flexures.”4 There was a
widespread concern that factory work was detrimental to the femininity of a woman - they were ungraceful, with an “unwomanly voice”5 and often promiscuous. They were seen as fragile creatures, in need of protection. Therefore, their working hours were limited. A piece of legislation passed in 1844 limited their hours to 12 hours a day, and further legislation passed in 1847 limited them to 63 hours per week. Whilst this may have been borne out of a genuine concern for women, the perceived threat to male employment may have had a hand in this. On the one hand it may be a good thing that there was a concern for the welfare of women and that the government’s laissez-faire attitude was not in evidence here, but if one is pessimistic, then this may be interpreted as patriarchal dominance over women and exclusion from paid work.
During the last half of the eighteenth century, other forms of employment continued alongside industrial work, and factories were competing with them for cheap female labour but once they had dried up due to centralisation and other effects of industrialisation, factories became a valuable source of relatively well-paid and steady work to women. Thus, they were more affable than men and prepared to accept lower wages and as a rule were not involved in unions or negotiations with employers. Men, however, actively took part in such activities, and on occasion campaigned for better pay and working conditions. Thus, they maintained a position of influence and power, and possessed a common male voice, whereas women were hidden away and could not represent themselves, therefore those who believed that women were inferior anyway left them open to interpretation.
A significant amount of women decided to work in the mines, as often the pay in factories was not enough. However, working conditions were dreadful, and in the Royal Commission Reports of 1842, a number of women said that they only mined because otherwise they could find no other employment. Typically, a woman worked
a twelve hour shift, day or night, often alternating between the two from week to week. Lunch consisted of an hour’s break and dry bread and no water. The job of
many women was to ‘hurry’, or haul tubs of coal from the face to the wagons, by
fastening a belt around their waist that was connected to chains running between their legs, and pulling the coal behind them on hands and feet, in passageways some three
feet high. Due to the heat underground, many women worked in a state of indecency,
alongside men who worked totally naked. Accidents were frequent - loss of a limb and damage to joints were among the most common injuries. Pregnant women often
4 - Gaskell, P. The Manufacturing Population of England. (taken from
5 - Valenze, D. The First Industrial Woman. p.99.
worked right up until the day their child was born and returned to work a few days after. Not surprisingly, a high proportion of children were stillborn. Pay was around 7s. a week, which did not stretch very far.
Another negative effect of the industrial revolution was the fact that although opportunities for women were created with the burgeoning of the textile - wool, cotton, linen - industries, many of those women (and the ones still spinning at home) were displaced with the advent of new technology. In the 1760s, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which initially had sixteen spindles, rather than just one. Eventually this number grew to 80, and by 1800 spinning jennies carried 100-120 spindles, making it an extremely efficient machine - what had taken a women 612 hours with the aid of a child, now took 38 hours. It was said that 50 women working machines as 500 without could do the same amount of work. If this was true, then certainly the demand for spinsters would decrease dramatically. Furthermore, at around the same time, Richard Arkwright, who was a wig-maker, decided to invent his own spinning machine. With the help of others, he developed the spinning frame, which involved the use of three pairs of rollers that revolved at different speeds which produced the yarn at the desired thickness whilst a set of spindles twisted the strands together to produce a very strong thread - stronger than the spinning jenny was able to produce. Too large to be worked by hand, it required the power generated by a water wheel and became known as the water frame. By 1771 he had installed it in his factory in Derbyshire, and by 1788 140 water-frame mills were dispersed around the country. By 1837 all cotton spinning was done in factories. Also, Arkwright wished to maintain control of all of his machines and limited the amount produced so they couldn’t be made on a domestic scale. Whilst this may have spelt greater efficiency and therefore more profit for factory owners, this would have dispensed with the need for so many workers, and cut the demand for the produce of home spinsters.
Aside from work in the factories, the emergence of the middle class, partially as a result of the industrial revolution, played a part in women’s lives. It was believed that middle-class women should not go to work, as it was degrading for them, and depicted men as unable to look after their wives properly. The ideal of the ‘angel in the house’ was promoted very strongly throughout this period; that of the lady of the house dealing with the stresses of life serenely, receiving callers, organising the family’s social calendar, and by doing so helping to promote business connections and networks, for the benefit of their husbands. There were two effects of this; firstly, “while middle-class women clearly benefited from the increasing wealth of their families, they were no more given new rights and freedoms by this process than by the French Revolution.”6 The status of middle-class women seemingly did not improve even though they contributed to the well-being of both the family and of the image of their family that was projected to others, although admittedly this is not a direct result of the industrial revolution, but a general social trend.
The second implication of the emergence of the middle class was the increased amount of domestic servants. With the capitalist industries making more and more middle class businessmen richer, more people were living in larger houses,
and attending social occasions, and therefore, more help was needed. Servants were especially drawn from regions where was heavy industry, like shipbuilding, railways,
iron and steel, which were closed to women. Domestic service far outstripped the
6 - Caine, B. English Feminism. p.14.
cotton industry in terms of numbers - by 1851, 900,000 females were employed as servants whilst only 250,000 worked in the cotton sector. The work of a domestic servant was arduous and tiring, and fairly low paid. A general servant could expect to earn £19 10s a year on average, £28 8s for a parlour maid. Typically, they worked from 6am until 10pm; discounting breaks this meant that they laboured for twelve hours - two hours longer than the average factory girl, plus they had to work on a Sunday whereas a factory girl had the day off. Before electricity and gas were commonplace in households, chores such as cooking and laundry were extremely taxing. In addition to this, servants often lived-in with their employers (usually in a damp, cold attic room) which afforded them little or no privacy or personal freedom, for example the choice of what to wear, as they were required to don a uniform at all times, and the fact that their sleep and meals were frequently interrupted. Also, the average middle class family had a material base of around £300 a year which afforded them one or two household servants. The life of a young female servant must have been very lonely with little chance to interact with others of her own age and status, plus there was no opportunity to organise a union, nor were there the regulatory bodies that were involved with factory work.
It is evident that there were a lot of negative changes to women’s lives - the destruction of the domestic family economy prompting women to seek work outside the home; work that was tedious, difficult, in very poor conditions with low pay and inferior status to men. This was true across all sectors; factory work, mining and domestic service. They were seen as dispensable, and given the jobs that men refused to do - a contrast to the harmonious pre-industrial family economic unit.
Having dwelt on the negative changes to the lives and status on women, I will now look at the positive effects of the industrial revolution, and discover whether R.M. Hartwell’s statement - “it was during the Industrial Revolution, and largely because of the economic opportunities it afforded to working-class women, that there was the beginning of that most important and most beneficial of all social revolutions of the last two centuries, the emancipation of women.”7 Although some statements may appear to be contradictory to what been discussed in the first section of this essay, it is important to remember that there were many variations and differences from place to place and it is impossible to generalise.
Economic changes wrought by industrialisation expanded opportunities for women in commercial manufacture - as well as factory work, there was thriving employment in workshops and proto-industrial trades, where they carried out a single process in a chain of production. Often, more women than men were employed - in Scotland, in 1833, roughly 34 per cent of women made up the workforce in the cotton industry, compared with 22 per cent of men, and 17 per cent of girls compared to 8 per cent of boys. It is possible that women were valued more because of their experience in cotton spinning and similar tasks in the home. Anyhow, this type of outside work emancipated women from the household and allowed them to earn their own money and actively contribute to the family income. Comparatively good wages were to be gained in rapidly growing industries in the Midlands and the north - textiles, potteries and metal wares, and also in the south where silk-spinning, straw-
plaiting and lace-making were expanding. Despite the fact that women’s wages were nearly always lower than men’s, some women’s level of pay grew to equal those of
7 - Roberts, E. Women's Work, 1840-1940. p.20
male agricultural labourers, such as in the case of the Birmingham metal industries. In the calico industry in Lancashire, and in the potteries in Staffordshire, women could earn twice as much as male local agricultural labourers. Weavers were often paid more than women workers performing other tasks, as they were paid by the piece and rates were the same for both sexes; this meant that they were more equal with men. Another point worthy of raising is the fact that women, by the age of sixteen or eighteen, were reaching their top wage level, so were gaining maximum spending power at a young age, and often with no husband and children to care for as yet, had a little spending money after paying for their board. This meant that they could buy their clothes rather than make them, and other adornments such as ribbons.
In some cases, women worked alongside their husbands or fathers in factories as assistants, which may have served to strengthen family ties.
Some spinsters, though displaced by the advent of the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle and other new machinery, were able to install smaller versions in a large room or the upstairs area of their cottage and were thus able to produce greater amounts of thread in a much shorter time; indeed, a woman at the jenny might have earned as much or more than her husband working the loom. When thread was in scarce supply, spinsters could demand more money for their produce - signifying a certain amount of bargaining power within the commercial market.
So we can see the burgeoning opportunities for women in industry, rather than a uniform decline of activity. Even those who were displaced from their occupations were reabsorbed into new trades, for instance flax spinning, silk throwing and jenny spinning, although admittedly these did not absorb all of the surplus labour and were restricted to certain regions like Essex, Scotland and Lancashire. In addition, although iron works generally excluded women, they were taken on by other metalworking industries. Other industries were ‘exclusively female’, especially lacemaking and stocking knitting - there were 140,000 lacemakers in Buckinghamshire, Northampton and Bedfordshire. Hand-knitting took place in rural areas all over the nation, and in Scotland and the dales of West Yorkshire it continued long after knitting frames such as the silk stocking frame and cotton hose frame came into use; “Thus when we talk of industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we are talking of a largely female workforce”8 The dressmaking trade, formerly a male trade, to cope with the increased number of middle-class women with increased spending power, was forced to take on women in a bid to keep costs down, although they did small tasks like buttonholing and oversewing seams. However, this still represented an extension of female employment opportunities.
Having explored the changes in women’s lives, we must not forget that there was a certain amount of continuity. We have already seen certain examples - such as the hand-knitters continuing to do so after machinery was brought in. Also, some cotton handloom weavers were working until the 1850s, as centralisation and mechanisation was not fully complete by this time. Furthermore, in 1861, only 30 per cent of the whole labour force was employed in new industries that came with the industrial revolution, which meant that 70 per cent of the labour force were involved
in some other kind of work such as agriculture and the fish industry.
8 - Sharpe, P. (ed) Women’s Work. The English Experience. p.156.
One must not assume that the industrial revolution merely drew people from the fields into factories - even before industrialisation occurred, more families were not occupied in subsistence but commercial agriculture, and also manufacturing products and providing services for the market. Therefore the general switch to commercial production did not come as a huge shock to women’s lives; rather the way in which this was carried out, and the implications of this.
To conclude; women’s lives and status were changed - the former rather more than the latter, and there was more change than continuity. The entry into factories, mines, workshops and middle-class households were naturally a far cry from the domestic scenes of the early eighteenth century, and we see the many negative effects of this, although there were a number of positive changes too. However, as we see the general level of women’s wages fail to surpass those of men’s, and the inferior, unskilled jobs assigned to them, there does not appear to be much change from pre-industrial times, when women were considered to be subordinate to men. The only change in this context is that fact that whilst women’s work in the family economy earlier on was considered vital, thereby giving them at least some importance, in the industrial period - with the rise of the male breadwinner - they were considered to be expendable.