Women and the Industrial Revolution in Britain
Janet Glass
Eldorado High School
Albuquerque, NM
2008 NEH Seminar for School Teachers
Interpretations of the Industrial revolution in Britain
In studying the historical literature of the industrial revolution, it becomes
obvious that women are a group that receives varied attention, if mentioned as
separate group at all, by historians. Contemporary observers noticed women working
in the factories and mines but usually grouped them with children and the problems of
child labor. However, as other historians such as Louise Tilly, Joan Scott, and
Maxine Berg have observed, the industrial revolution affected women differently
because their social, economic, and cultural roles were different. In addition, the lives
of working class women differed from women of the middle and upper classes but
less is known of their lives as women or as workers. In the 1970s feminist historians
focused attention on how the industrial revolution affected women. By the 1990s
historical scholarship reversed the question: how did women affect the industrial
revolution?
Historians had long studied the development of the industrial revolution
on middle class women in terms of their changing domestic and economic position in
the family, but Tilly, Scott, and Berg focused more particularly on the group of
women who had always been involved in productive labor, working class women.
Visualize many young women standing for long hours in dusty, dirty, and loud
machines in perpetual motion. Contemporary writers of the 1700s and the 1800s were
so overwhelmed by mechanization and the environmental, social, economic, and
political changes that they chose to highlight aspects the industrial revolution that
shocked them the most, large numbers of women and children working in factories
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under dangerous conditions. The extreme poverty of the working classes horrified the
middle and upper class writers of the 1800s who in turn wrote various social novels
based on their observations and research. Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens,
Elizabeth Gaskell, and Benjamin Disraeli invoked shock and horror among their
privileged audience with their images of pregnant women standing for hours in
factories or women working half naked in coal mines. According to the Victorian cult
of domesticity, women should be separate from the dirt, noise, and corruption of the
workday world and devote their time and energies to creating the home as the
domestic refuge from the problems of the world. Unfortunately, this domestic ideal
was beyond the reach of a working class family, which needed as many working
members as possible.
In 1838 a member of British Parliament visited a textile mill and wrote his
observations:
Amongst other things I saw a cotton mill—a sight that froze my blood. The
place was full of women, young, all of them, some large with child, and
obliged to stand twelve hours each day. Their hours are from five in the
morning to seven in the evening, two hours of that being for rest, so that they
stand twelve clear hours. The heat was excessive in some of the rooms, the
stink pestiferous, and in all an atmosphere of cotton flue. I nearly fainted. The
young women were all pale, sallow, thin, yet generally fairly grown, with bare
feet-a strange sight to English eyes. (Tilly and Scott, 64)
Frances Trollope who visited cotton mills for her novel, Life and Adventures of
Michael Armstrong, depicted the factory as so oppressive that her middle class
heroine almost fainted. The children in the factory were
Taken and lodged amidst stench and stunning, terrifying tumult, driven to and
fro, till their little limbs bend under them- hour after hour, day after day- the
repose of a moment to be purchased only by yielding when tender bodies to
the fist, the heel, or the strap of the overlooker. (Hard Times, Appendix 406)
Trollope was describing the conditions for children but these conditions applied to the
women working in the mills also. Other social novels of the period depicted the girls
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as young, poor, yet virtuous. These Victorian writers were more concerned with the
possible sexual exploitation of these women than with their economic exploitation by
employers or by unsafe working conditions. A young, virtuous girl pitted against an
inhumane, factory system was a common image.
Politicians and journalists observed and criticized working conditions that they
thought promoted immoral behaviour. Coal mining was particularly dangerous and
definitely not feminine according to Victorian gender roles. It was common for entire
families to work in the coalmines. Women and men worked together in conditions
that middle class writers believed violated women’s delicate nature. Because of the
heat, men and women often worked without shirts and women wore pants. Miners of
both sexes worked in small spaces with basic tools and often chained their carts to
themselves as they pulled them out of the mine.
Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftsbury, investigated the conditions of mines for
women and children in 1842. The Report of the Commissioners objected to women
working in the mines:
…in the districts in which females are taken down into the coal mines, both
sexes are employed together imprecisely the same kind of labour, and work
for the same number of hours; that the girls and boys, and the young men and
women, and even married women and women with child, commonly work
almost naked, and the men, in many mines, quite naked; and that all classed of
witnesses bear testimony to the demoralizing influence of the employment of
females underground. (Selected Primary sources 39)
The display at the National Coal Mining museum showed a half naked woman
working the mine with her family and it does not take a Victorian mindset to be
shocked by it. Newspapers published stories about women miners with naked women
prominently featured in illustrations which were probably very effective in persuading
the public to support protective legislation banning women and children under 12
from working in the mines. Lord Ashley persuaded Parliament to pass the legislation
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in 1842. Victorian writers also emphasized the immorality of women working with
men in very physical situations. Peter Gaskell, a liberal physician who wrote about
industrialization in the 1830s, also portrayed the presence of girls in the factories as
immoral.
The bringing together numbers of the young of both sexes in factories has
been a prolific source of moral delinquency. The stimulus of a heated
atmosphere, the contact of opposite sexes, the example of license upon the
animal passions- all have conspired to produce a very early development of
sexual appetencies. Indeed, in this respect, the female population engaged in
mill labour, approximates very closely to that found in tropical climates;
puberty, or at least sexual propensities, being attained almost coeval with
womanhood. (Selected Primary sources 45)
These writers are just a sampling of the attitudes that middle class writers held
towards women in factory work. These dramatic contemporary accounts influenced
historians at a later date who like the 19th century writers, did not write about the
women who were working in other occupations such as trade, domestic service, and
other productive activities. Newspapers sensationalized the new factory jobs, not the
more mundane jobs that women chose as either single or married working class
women. The heavily mechanized textile industry employed many women because
women traditionally had been involved in textile production and because women were
a cheaper labor source. The working conditions were new because of powerful, new
technology but the presence of women in textiles was not. While it is understandable
that new jobs get all the attention, it is up to the historian to investigate more fully the
choices that working class women made regarding their occupations. It is also
necessary to distinguish between the interests of the middle class women and those of
the working class women. The 19th century ideals of womanhood known as the cult of
domesticity and separate spheres were related partly to the industrial revolution, but
did not immediately affect women of the lower classes. Middle class women, the
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wives of men who no longer lived near their businesses, were separated from the
work world, but working class women were not.
In Women, Work, and Family, Louise Tilly and Joan Scott analyze the
situation of the working class woman during the industrial revolution, which was very
different from the world of the middle class woman. Their research illustrates the
changing circumstances of working class women and provides a new perspective of
how the industrial revolution affected this group of women underrepresented in most
historical research.
Tilly and Scott divide workingwomen into two historical periods: preindustrial family called family economy and an industrial period where it became a
family wage economy. The family was one in which everyone contributed to the
economic survival of the group. Tilly and Scott carefully define working class women.
They are looking at women who lived in families of ‘’peasants, artisans, small
shopkeepers, skilled and unskilled urban and rural workers.’’ (Tilly and Scott 4) The
main goal was survival: make food, clothing, and to produce whatever they could to
earn money for the family. Family members often worked together in the same
domestic industry. In the domestic textile industry, young women and children were
the spinners while older women and men were the weavers. Young women in
particular could work at home or were often sent to work in domestic service. Their
duties were varied: ‘’dairymaid, harvester, laundress, charwoman, serving maid,
nursemaid’’ (Tilly and Scott 35) Other jobs included lace making, straw plaiting,
glove making, knitting, needlework, sewing, dressmaking, wig making. Urban women
often worked with their husbands in their trade. Widows would often get permission
to continue their husband’s trade after their husband’s death. Rural women could
work in the fields, sell eggs and butter from their few animals, or even make money
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from spinning wool or cotton. The key aspect of the pre-industrial family economy
was that married women could supervise their children and even train them to work
while also doing whatever domestic tasks that needed to be done. Single girls would
work at home or in other homes according what helped their families the most.
Families could control their daughters more closely, which helped them from being
exploited by outsiders or by employers. Girls in domestic service with family near
were less likely to become pregnant and abandoned by men. There is evidence that
orphan girls were more vulnerable and more likely to end up as: ’criminals, prostitutes,
and mothers of illegitimate children.’’ (Tilly and Scott 37)
Tilly and Scott propose that industrialization affected women’s labor in a less
dramatic fashion than contemporary critics and even historians have described. First,
women continued to work in a variety of occupations as single and as married women.
In 1851 English women worked in more than the textile industry. 45% of women
worked in manufacturing (22% in textiles factories and 17% in non-mechanized
garment trades), 40% of women were involved in domestic service, 8% in agriculture
and 7% in other. (Tilly and Scott 69) Other jobs included petty trading, hawkers,
street merchants, laundresses, and boarding-house keepers. (Tilly and Scott 76) Only
the women in textile manufacturing were generally working under the supervision of
managers in large-scale operations. Tilly and Scott argue that it was mostly single
girls, not married women who were in the factories. In 1850, 70% of French and
English women working in paid employment were single women while only 12% of
the women working were married with children under 5. (Tilly and Scott 127)
Domestic servants usually lived in their employer’s home and the other occupations
required the women to work outside the home but without supervision. Some of the
working class occupations of women did move outside the home but not necessarily
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into a factory. In what Tillie and Scott have called a family wage economy, family
members worked outside the home in jobs similar to ones they held before but for a
wage that they brought home and pooled for their mutual benefit. Furthermore, the
anecdotal evidence of Tilly indicates that young women took jobs according to the
needs of their families. (Tilly and Scott 107-116).
Three new aspects characterized the family wage economy. One was women
working for a wage and not just to produce items within their family which Tillie call
the “proletarianization” of women’s labor. (Tilly and Scott 77) Secondly, Single
women were still working for the benefit of the family but they might spend more
time as fulltime workers outside the home than they did before. Thirdly, married
women faced the difficult situation of trying to make money outside the home and
still bear and rear their children. Feeding and clothing a growing family was difficult
if the mother was at work all day. Tillie and Scott found that married women
participated less in factory work after they had children, but that they pursued other
options like laundry work, peddling food, keeping cafes, inns, boarding houses. (Tilly
and Scott 125) Industrialization influenced single and married women differently
according to the demands the jobs made upon a working class woman’s life. Single
women could work full time in factories for wages which were steady while married
women preferred jobs where they could control their hours and place, even if wages
were lower, as in piece work for the garment industry. Tilly and Scott make the
important point that women were involved in the urban market economy at a different
level as a “secondary labor force” in the service sector of an urban economy. (Tilly
and Scott 76)
Tilly and Scott emphasize that working class women had contributed to the
family economy before the industrial revolution and were expected to continue
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despite the changes in working lives of men and women. Furthermore, women
worked in jobs other than textile factories. Domestic service still employed a large
percentage of women. Tillie, Scott, and Berg make a second important point: that
while industrialization brought more women into mechanized fields, the work world
continued to be divided along gender lines. Women tended to do the least skilled jobs
in a field while men dominated the more skilled levels. There were many other
trades that women were excluded from by tradition such as stonemasonry, carpentry,
bricklaying, and from new ones in heavy industry. Although exclusion from male
occupations influenced working class women, Tilly and Scot argued that working
class women chose their occupations to align their personal and family needs and
adjusted to a changing economy as needed. Working class women were a large group
in the textile industry, but it was not the only field that they were in.
Interpretations of women’s role in the industrial revolution have been
influenced by historian’s own views. Tilly and Scott noted that historians who
favoured capitalism and those who were very critical of industrial capitalism formed
very different interpretations of women’s role in industrialization. (Tilly and Scott 5-6)
Historians who favoured capitalism tended to view wage earning and the entry of
women into industry as progress for women who could enter the public realm.
Historians like T.S. Ashton thought that women became more independent with
factory work. Wage earning helped women who ‘’gained self-respect and public
esteem.’’ (Ashton 95) Ashton did not note that women made barely half as much as
men for similar jobs in the textile industry and in general worked in occupations of
lower pay and status than men. His assumption that women did not have self-respect
of the public reveals his own belief that wage work as the only worthwhile work in a
capitalistic system. It is probable that Ashton was thinking of women becoming
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professionals and not working class factory workers. Writers who were critical of
industrial capitalism thought women were better off economically and socially in preindustrial domestic industry, trade, or agriculture because they were more central to
the family’s economic power, and perhaps enjoyed a more egalitarian role in the
family. (Tilly and Scott 5) Historians of the 1970s often promoted this view.
The assumption that the family was a refuge from the harsh cold world, part of
the cult of domesticity ideology of the 19th century, influenced the many critics of
industrialization like J.L. and Barbara Hammond. Child labor was the Hammonds
main concern but their comments on working women’s problems reflect the
Hammond’s middle class upbringing. The problem with factory work was that
working class families did not have a home according to middle class ideals:
‘’Too often the dwelling of the factory family is no home; it sometimes is a
cellar, which includes no cookery, no washing, no making, no mending, no
decencies of life, no invitations to the fireside.’’ (Hammond 24)
The Hammonds, as empathetic as they were to the problems of the working class, did
not totally understand the concerns of working class families. They considered it a
problem that the women did not have the habits of “Domestic economy” and the
working class men did not “have wives that can dress a joint of meat.” (Hammond 24)
Working class women and families were more concerned with survival than with the
niceties of preparing a roast.
Examining the life story of Esther Price, a factory operative at the Quarry
Bank Mill, shows how Esther’s life both follows these historical interpretations and
yet challenges the pattern described by Tillie and Scott. Esther Price was a young girl
who was apprenticed to the Quarry Bank Mill when she was around 12 years old in
1833. She lived in the Apprentice House on the site and worked in the Mill. She was
not an orphan but had two parents and at least four siblings in Liverpool. Esther
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shows up in the records for misbehaviour in 1835. Apparently she and another girl
assaulted another apprentice and ended up before the magistrates. In 1836 Esther and
another apprentice ran away. Apparently she left to see her father in Liverpool and
ran away when her request to leave was denied. (Robinson 6) Esther returned after
ten days and was sent into solitary confinement. Because of the death of the woman
who ran the Apprentice house with her husband, Esther was let out two days early. It
is interesting to note that Esther was a very independent young girl. She went so far
as to use her baptismal certificate to prove her age so that she could leave the
Apprentice house at age 18. Esther claimed to be a year older than the factory had
thought when her apprentice papers had been drawn in 1833.
Although Esther wanted to leave the Apprentice house, she did not leave the
employ of the Quarry Bank Mill. Furthermore, she went to have an illegitimate child
in 1839 and continued to live in the cottages. Esther’s decision to live nearby in Styal
implies that she was still connected to the Mill in some way. The pay ledgers are not
complete so it is hard to say with certainty if Esther was working in the Mill or
perhaps working for a Mill family. The father of her child was known and she
eventually married him twelve years after the birth of her first child. Esther appears
sporadically in the pay ledgers which could be the result of incomplete records or also
her decision to work and leave according to her needs. She was listed as a worker
from 1840, the year after her son died, and appears in the records as an employee on
and off until 1856. Her name’s absence from the wage’s books often coincided with
the birth of her children; after a second son was born in 1842 and for two years after
the birth of her third son in 1852. After the birth of her fourth son, Esther’s name
appears in the wages book but not continuously. There is a twenty-month gap that was
perhaps due to missing records. It is also possible that Esther was doing what Tillie
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and Scott suggested: that married women had a hard time working full time in a
factory after they had children. It could be that married women would go in and out
of the cotton textile factories as they needed because the jobs were unskilled enough
so that job turnover over was not a problem. Despite Esther’s disagreements with the
Mill’s management, she stayed in the area and worked in the Mill until she died.
Esther worked in a variety of jobs from the reeling room, to the spinning room, and
finally to the weaving room. Even her second son worked at the mill beginning when
he was ten years old. Esther, as a married woman, moved in and out of wage
employment in a factory according to the needs of her family. Interestingly, the
Quarry Bank Mill rehired her despite her youthful rebellion and breaks in
employment.
Esther Price exemplifies the historical research of Tilly, Scott, and Maxine
Berg. Tilly and Scott write mostly about young women with parents and families
who influenced their decisions, but Esther is an example of a young woman who
made decisions for herself outside of her family. Esther’s life suggests that she had
found a place for herself in the community of workers that lived near Quarry Bank
Mill, which was not in Liverpool where her parents lived. From age 18 to 41, Esther
worked as a textile worker as a single mother and later as a married woman. Having
children influenced her factory work but did not end it. Maxine Berg, author of The
Age of Manufactures, has argued that young women may have made their decisions
differently than married women. She proposes that workingwomen created networks
that should be examined in addition to family influences. (Berg 165) Esther Price
was in touch with her family but she lived near the Quarry Mill from age 12 to her
death at age 41. The records are not complete but they suggest that she chose to
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continue in textile industry and to live near friends who very likely helped her when
she was a single mother.
From the 1700s to the 1800s, industrialization was moving working class
women’s work outside of the home and separating women’s domestic and
reproductive responsibilities from their income producing responsibilities. (Tilly and
Scott 145) Tilly and Scott conclude that the industrial revolution separated work from
the home but not women from work. It is important in discussing how the Industrial
Revolution affected women and their families, to recognize Tilly and Scott’s
contribution on its affect on working class women. Industrialization changed where
and how workingwomen worked but continuities remained. Women continued to
work in a variety of occupations and at the same time, men and women worked in
different occupations. Women were dominant in traditionally feminine jobs
considered like garment work and textile industry. Tillie and Scott make a persuasive
case that while all working class women worked for wages, family obligations
influenced their choice of occupation. Married women preferred jobs like charwomen
or small trade, or sweated labor (piece work) that were flexible and could be done
from the home or in their own time.
Maxine Berg presents convincing research that show that working class
women were directed to the least skilled part of any occupation. In agriculture, they
were the weeders, stone gatherers, and spreaders of manure. (Berg 137) while men
operated the machines and new equipment. (Berg 155) In factory work, women made
up a larger portion of the lower skilled jobs in factories and were excluded from
skilled trades like metallurgy and the building trades. Maxine Berg argues that
women were a cheap source of labor that business could not ignore. In some cases,
women resisted mechanization less while others, who had fewer options, resented the
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machines that took away their jobs. Over all, Berg and other historians have noted,
women were restricted to certain areas by tradition. It is possible that married women
chose less skilled jobs because they were more flexible and easier to resume after
taking breaks for childbirth and childrearing. Berg argues that men kept the skilled
occupations to themselves and reserved less skilled jobs for women. This assumes
that men wanted the jobs that paid more. Berg then argues that women’s jobs were
considered less important because women themselves had lower status. (Berg 156)
This would make sense in a time when occupations were gender specific by tradition
but would change as the 19th century progressed. Under the name of separate spheres,
women were told to work in areas that used their special talents as mothers and moral
beings, like teaching and nursing. Unfortunately the jobs themselves would acquire
lower status because women dominated the field. Jobs for working class women’s
jobs were defined by tradition and to a certain extent by their preference. The working
class women would move into newly created jobs only as better education prepared
them, but more importantly, as men left jobs like office work for new ones in a
growing urban economy.
The different economic and social circumstances of middle class and working
class women would be important issues in the suffrage movement in England and the
United States and in the labor movement. Women shared many of the same concerns
as a group but it is a mistake to ignore socio-economic differences, which have
influenced women’s occupational and political choices. Temperance groups,
suffrage groups, and women labor organizers shared a desire to change society, but
their members often had very different concerns, which were in part due to their very
different economic roles in their families. Working class women were obliged to
contribute to their family economically and the industrial revolution did not reduce
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this need. Working class women might choose to focus more on labor organizing
and favour protective legislation while suffragettes favoured complete equality in
professional and political realms, including the right to vote. A middle class woman
thought in terms of the right to vote, the right to education, and a profession whereas a
working class woman very often did not want to compete directly with unionized men
for jobs. Many working class women were often torn between the union movement,
which had promoted the well being of their families through better wages for men and
feminists who promoted the rights of women in particular.
However, working and living independently of the family did affect
workingwomen’s expectations for their lives and as Maxine Berg suggests, it would
be a mistake to underestimate how wage work in any field could change women’s
relationship with their families and society. (Berg 165) The life of Esther Price
suggests that women, single and married, developed relationships outside their
original family. These new relationships helped them to get jobs and support
themselves throughout their lives. Maxine Berg suggests that workingwomen were
forming networks that were as important as their families. After 1850, women’s lives
in all classes, especially middle and working class would change as new opportunities
in education and work became available and they would form new networks of
support as well.
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Work Cited
Ashton, T.S. The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures 1700-1820. New York: Routledge, 1994.
2nd edition.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times for These Times. ed. Graham Law. Toronto:
Broadview Press, 2003.
Hammond, J.L. and Barbara. The Town Labourer: The New Civilization 1760-1832,
New York: Harper & Row, 1970. First published by Longmans, Green and
Company, London, 1917.
Koot, Gerard. Selected Primary Sources: Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution
In Britain. Class Photocopy. March 2008.
Robinson, Keith. Esther Price: The life story of an apprentice at Quarry Bank Mill.
Publication of Quarry Bank Mill Museum.
Tilly, Louise and Joan Scott. Women, Work, and Family. New York: Routledge, 1989.