usually ornamented and improved it. Woman " was
at first, and is now, the universal cook, preserving food
from decomposition and doubling the longevity of
man. Of the bones at last she fabricates her needles
and charms. . . . From the grasses around her cabin
she constructs the floor-mat, the mattress and the
screen, the wallet, the sail. She is the mother of all
spinners, weavers, upholsterers, sail-makers."
The evidence of anthropology thus hardly bears out
the assertion frequently made (recently, e.g., by Dr.
Lionel Tayler in The Nature of Woman) that woman
does not originate. A much more telling demonstra-
tion of the superiority of man in handicraft would be
to show that when he takes over a woman's idea he
usually brings it to greater technical perfection than
she has done. " Men, liberated more or less from the
tasks of hunting and fighting, gradually took up the
HISTORICAL SKETCH 3
occupations of women, specialised them and developed
them in an extraordinary degree. . . . Maternity
favours an undifferentiated condition of the various
avocations that are grouped around it ; it is possible
that habits of war produced a sense of the advantages
of specialised and subordinated work. In any case
the fact itself is undoubted and it has had immense
results on civilisation."
Man has infinitely surpassed woman in technical
skill, scientific adaptation, and fertility of invention ;
yet the rude beginnings of culture and civilisation,
of the crafts that have so largely made us what we are,
were probably due to the effort and initiative of primi-
tive woman, engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with
the rude and hostile forces of her environment, to
satisfy the needs of her offspring and herself.
I do not propose, however, to enter into a discussion
of the position of primitive woman, alluring as such a
task might be from some points of view. When we come
to times nearer our own and of which written record
survives, it is remarkable that the further back we go
the more completely women appear to be in possession
of textile industry. The materials are disappointing :
there is little that can serve to explain fully the in-
dustrial position of women or to make us realise the
conditions of their employment. But as to the fact
there can be no doubt. Nor can it be questioned that
women were largely employed in other industries also.
The women of the industrial classes have always
worked, and worked hard. It is only in quite modern
times, so far as I can discover, that the question, whether
some kinds of work were not too hard for women, has
been raised at all.
Servants in Husbandry. It is quite plain that
4 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
women have always done a large share of field work.
The Statute of Labourers, 23 Edw. III. 1349, imposed
upon women equally with men the obligation of giving
service when required, unless they were over sixty,
exercised a craft or trade, or were possessed of means
or land of their own, or already engaged in service, and
also of taking only such wages as had been given
previous to the Black Death and the resulting scarcity
of labour. In 1388, the statute 12 Richard II. c. 3, 4
and 5, forbids any servant, man or woman, to depart out
of the place in which he or she is employed, at the end of
the year's service, without a letter patent, and limits a
woman labourer's wages to six shillings per annum.
It also enacts that "he or she which use to labour at
the plough " shall continue at the same work and not
be put to a " mystery or handicraft." In 1444 the
statute 23 Henry VI. c. 13 fixes the wages of a woman
servant in husbandry at ten shillings per annum with
clothing worth four shillings and food. In harvest a
woman labourer was to have two pence a day and food,
" and such as be worthy of less shall take less."
Thorold Rogers says that in the thirteenth century
women were employed in outdoor work, and especially
as assistants to thatchers. He thinks that, " estimated
proportionately, their services were not badly paid,"
but that, allowing for the different value of money,
women got about as much for outdoor work as women
employed on farms get now. After the Plague,
however, the wages paid women as thatchers' helps
were doubled, and before the end of the fifteenth
century were increased by 125 per cent. A statute of
1495 fixed the wages of women labourers and other
labourers at the same amount, viz. 2|d a day, or 4^d.
if without board. At a later period, 1546-1582,
HISTORICAL SKETCH 5
according to Thorold Rogers, some accounts of harvest
work from Oxford show women paid the same as men.
In the sixteenth century the Statute of Apprentices,
5 Eliz. c. 4, gave power to justices to compel women
between twelve years old and forty to be retained and
serve by the year, week, or day, " for such wages and
in such reasonable sort and manner as they shall think
meet," and a woman who refused thus to serve might
be imprisoned.
Textiles. Wool and Linen. No trace remains in
history of the inventor of the loom, but no historical
record remains of a time without some means of pro-
ducing a texture by means of intertwining a loose
thread across a fixed warp. Any such device, how-
ever rude, must involve a degree of culture much above
mere savagery, and probably resulted from a long pro-
cess of groping effort and invention. From this dim
background hand-spinning and weaving emerge in
tradition and history as the customary work of women,
the type of their activity, and the norm of their duty
and morals. The old Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and
German words for loom are certainly very ancient, and
Pictet derives the word wife from the occupation of
weaving. In the Northern Mythology the three stars in
the Belt of Orion were called Frigga Rock, or Frigga's
Distaff, which in the days of Christianity was changed
to Maria Rock, rock being an old word for distaff.
Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and embroidering were
special features of Anglo-Saxon industry, and were
entirely confined to women. King Alfred in his will
distinguished between the spear-half and spindle-half
of his family ; and in an old illustration of the Scripture,
Adam is shown receiving the spade and Eve the distaff,
after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This
6 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
traditional distinction between the duties of the sexes
was continued even to the grave, a spear or a spindle,
according to sex, being often found buried with the
dead in Anglo-Saxon tombs.
In the Church of East Meon, Hants, there is a curious
old font with a sculptured representation of the same
incident : Eve, it has been observed, stalks away with
head erect, plying her spindle and distaff, while Adam,
receiving a spade from the Angel, looks submissive and
abased.
In an old play entitled Corpus Christi, formerly
performed before the Grey or Franciscan Friars, Adam
is made to say to Eve :
And wyff, to spinne now must thou fynde
Our naked bodyes in cloth to wynde.
The distaff or rock could on occasion serve the
purpose of a weapon of offence or defence. In the
Digby Mysteries a woman brandishes her distaff,
exclaiming :
What 1 shall a woman with a Rocke drive thee away !
In the Winter's Tale Hermione exclaims :
We'll thwack him thence with distaffs (Act I., Sc. ii.).
Spinning and weaving were in old times regarded
as specially virtuous occupations. Deloney quotes
an old song which brings out this idea with much
naivete :
Had Helen then sat carding wool,
Whose beauteous face did breed such strife,
She had not been Sir Paris' trull
Nor cause so many lose their life.
Or had King Priam's wanton son
Been making quills with sweet content
HISTORICAL SKETCH 7
He had not then his friends undone
When he to Greece a-gadding went.
The cedar trees endure more storms
Than little shrubs that sprout on hie,
The weaver lives more void of harm
Than princes of great dignity.
There is also a little French poem quoted and trans-
lated by Wright, which runs thus :
Much ought woman to be held dear,
By her is everybody clothed.
Well know I that woman spins and manufactures
The cloths with which we dress and cover ourselves,
And gold tissues, and cloth of silk :
And therefore say I, wherever I may be,
To all who shall hear this story,
That they say no ill of womankind.
Spinning and weaving, as ordinarily carried on in
the mediaeval home, were, Mr. Andrews thinks, back-
ward, wasteful, and comparatively unskilled in tech-
nique. It is uncertain exactly at what period the
spinning-wheel came into existence certainly before
the sixteenth century, and it may be a good deal
earlier ; but doubtless the use of the distaff lingered on
in country places and among older-fashioned people
long after the wheel was in use in the centres of the
trades. Thus Aubrey speaks of nuns using wheels, and
adds, " In the old time they used to spin with rocks ;
in Somersetshire they use them still." Yet weaving
among the Anglo-Saxons had been carried to a con-
siderable degree of excellence in the cities and monas-
teries. Mr. Warden says that even before the end of
the seventh century the art of weaving had attained
remarkable perfection in England, and he quotes from
a book by Bishop Aldhelm, written about 680, describ-
ing " webs woven with shuttles, filled with threads of
8 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
purple and many other colours, flying from side to side,
and forming a variety of figures and images in different
compartments with admirable art." These beautiful
handiworks were executed by ladies of high rank and
great piety, and were designed for ornaments to the
churches or for vestments to the clergy. St. Theodore
of Canterbury thought it necessary to forbid women
to work on Sunday either in weaving or cleaning the
vestments or sewing them, or in carding wool, or
beating flax, or in washing garments, or in shearing
the sheep, or in any such occupations.
Tapestry, cloth of gold, and other woven fabrics of
great beauty and fineness, besides embroidery, were
produced in convents, which in the Middle Ages were
the chief centres of culture for women. So much was
this the case indeed, that the spiritual advisers of the
nuns at times became uneasy, and exhorted them to
give more time to devotion and less to weaving and
knitting " vainglorious garments of many colours."
In that curious book of advice to nuns, the Ancren
Riwle, composed in the twelfth century, the writer
showed the same spirit, and opposed the making of
purses and other articles of silk with ornamental work.
He also dissuaded women from trafficking with the
products of the conventual estates. These injunctions
seem to indicate that women were showing some degree
of mental and artistic activity and initiative. Royal
ladies worked at spinning and weaving, and Piers
Plowman tells the lovely ladies who asked him for
work, to spin wool and flax, make cloth for the poor
and naked, and teach their daughters to do the same.
It is evident from old accounts that a good deal of
weaving was done outside by the piece for these great
households, and of course spinning and weaving were
HISTORICAL SKETCH 9
largely carried on in cottages as a bye-industry in
conjunction with agriculture. Biicher gives a very
interesting account of spinning as an opportunity for
social intercourse among primitive peoples. In Thibet,
he says, there is a spinning-room in each village ; the
young people, men and girls, meet and spin and smoke
together. Spinning in groups or parties is known
to have obtained also in Germany in olden times,
and girls who now meet to make lace together in the
same sociable way still say that they " go spinning."
Spinning-rooms exist in Russia. In Yorkshire spinning
seems to have been done socially in the open air, in fine
weather, down to the eve of the industrial revolution.
Spinning was one of the first works in which young
girls were instructed, and thus spinster has become the
legal designation of an unmarried woman, not that she
always gave up spinning at marriage, but because it
was looked upon as the young unmarried woman's
chief occupation. Old manuscripts also show women
weaving at the loom, illustrations of which can be
found in the interesting works of Thomas Wright.
In 1372 a Yorkshire woman spinner was summoned
for taking " too much wages, contrary to the Statute
of Artificers." In 1437 John Notyngham, a rich grocer
of Bury St. Edmunds, bequeathed to one of his
daughters a spinning-wheel and a pair of cards (cards
or carpayanum, an implement which is stated in the
Promptorum Parvulomm to be especially a woman's
instrument). In 1418 Agnes Stebbard in the same
town bequeathed to two of her maids a pair of wool-
combs each, one combing-stick, one wheel, and one
pair of cards. An illuminated MS. of the well-known
French Boccace des Nobles Femmes has a most interest-
ing illustration showing a queen and two maidens ;
io WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
one maiden is spinning with a distaff, another combing
wool, the queen sits at the loom weaving. Women
often appear in old records as combers, carders, and
spinners. Chaucer says rather cynically :
Deceit, weeping, spinning God hath given
To women kindly, whiles that they may liven.
And of the wife of Bath :
Of clothmaking she had such an haunt
She passed them of Ipres and of Gaunt.
The distaff lingered on for spinning flax. As late
as 1757 an English poet writes :
And many yet adhere
To the ancient distaff at the bosom fixed,
Casting the whirling spindle as they walk ;
At home or in the sheep fold or the mart,
Alike the work proceeds.
Walter of Henley says : "In March is time to sow
flax and hemp, for I have heard old housewives say
that better is March hards than April flax, the reason
appeareth, but how it should be sown, weeded, pulled,
repealed, watered, washen, dried, beaten, braked,
tawed, heckled, spun, wound, wrapped and woven,
it needeth not for me to show, for they be wise enough,
and thereof may they make sheets, bordclothes (sic),
towels, shirts, smocks, and such other necessaries, and
therefore let thy distaff; be always ready for a pastime,
that thou be not idle. And undoubted a woman
cannot get her living honestly with spinning on the
distaff, but it stoppeth a gap and must needs be had."
Further on, in reference to wool (probably spun by
wheel ?), he draws the opposite conclusion : " It is
convenient for a husband to have sheep of his own,
HISTORICAL SKETCH n
for many causes, and then may his wife have part of
the wool, to make her husband and herself some
clothes. . . . And if she have no wool of her own she
may take wool to spin of cloth-makers, and by that
means she may have a convenient living, an many
times to do other works."
Irish women were noted for their skill in dressing
hemp and flax and making linen and woollen cloth.
Sir William Temple said, in 1681, that no women were
apter to spin flax well than the Irish, who, " labouring
little in any kind with their hands have their fingers
more supple and soft than other women of poorer
condition among us."
In the old Shuttleworth Accounts, reprinted by the
Chetham Society, there are minute directions to the
housewife on the management and manipulation of
her wool. "It is the office of a husbandman at the
shearing of the sheep to bestow upon the housewife
such a competent proportion of wool as shall be con-
venient for the clothing of his family ; which wool, as
soon as she hath received it, she shall open, and with
a pair of shears cut away all the coarse locks, pitch,
brands, tarred locks, and other feltrings, and lay them
by themselves for coarse coverlets and the like. The
rest she is to break in pieces and tease, lock by lock,
with her hands open, and so divide the wool as not any
part may be feltered or close together, but all open and
loose. Then such of the wool as she intends to spin
white she shall put by itself and the rest she shall weigh
up and divide into several quantities, according to the
proportion of the web she intends to make, and put
every one of them into particular lays of netting, with
tallies of wool fixed into them with privy marks
thereon, for the weight, colour, and knowledge of the
12 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
wool, when the first colour is altered. Then she shall
if she please send them to the dyer to be dyed after her
own fancy/' or dye them herself (recipes for which are
given).
" After your wool is mixed, oiled and trimmed
(carded), you shall then spin it upon great wool wheels,
according to the order of good housewifery ; the
action whereof must be got by practice, and not by
relation ; only this you shall be carefull, to draw your
thread according to nature and goodness of your wool,
not according to your particular desire ; for if you draw
a fine thread from wool which is of a coarse staple,
it will want substance ... so, if you draw a coaise
thread from fine wool, it will then be much overthick
... to the disgrace of good housewifery and loss of
much cloth."
Weaving and Spinning as a Woman's Trade.
The employments carried on by women in the house-
hold may have yielded money occasionally, as we have
seen from some of the foregoing quotations, but the
work appears in these excerpts to have been carried
on rather as a bye-industry, as a means of utilising
surplus produce, than as a recognised trade for gain
or profit. Did women carry on the manufacture of
woollen goods definitely as a craft or trade ? The
evidence on this head is not very clear. A statute of
Edward III. 1 expressly exempts women from the
ordinance, then in force, that men should not follow
more than one craft. "It is ordained that Artificers
Handicraft people hold them every one to one Mystery,
which he will choose between this and the said feast
of Candlemas ; and Two of every craft shall be chosen
1 37 Edw. III. c. 6, quoted in Cunningham's Growth of Industry
and Commerce, I. 353 n. (5th ed.).
HISTORICAL SKETCH 13
to survey, that none use other craft than the same
which he hath chosen. . . . But the intent of the King
and of his Council is, that Women, that is to say,
Brewers, Bakers, Carders and Spinners, and Workers
as well of Wool as of Linen Cloth and of Silk, Braw-
desters and Breakers of Wool and all other that do use
and work all Handy Works may freely use and work
as they have done before this time, without any im-
peachment or being restrained by this Ordinance/'
The meaning of this ordinance is rather obscure, but
the greater liberty conferred on women would seem to
imply that they were not carrying on the trades
mentioned as organised workers competing with men,
but that they performed the various useful works
mentioned at odd times, incidentally to the work of
the household. Miss Abram says women were some-
times cloth-makers (see 4 Edw. IV. c. i), and often
women cloth-makers, combers, carders, and spinners
are mentioned in the Parliamentary Rolls. There were
women amongst the tailors of Salisbury, and amongst
the yeoman tailors of London, also among the dyers
of Bristol and the drapers of London. Women might
join the Merchant Gild of Totnes, and some belonged
to the Gild Merchant of Lyons.
There appear to have been women members of the
Weavers' Company of London in Henry VIII. 's time.
Again at Bristol, in documents dating from the four-
teenth century, we find mention of the " brethren and
sistern " of the Weavers' Gild.
In the next century, in the first year of Edward IV.,
complaint was, however, made that many able-bodied
weavers were out of work, in consequence of the
employment of women at the weaver's craft, both at
Jiome and hired out. It was ordered that hence-
14 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
forward any one setting, putting, or hiring his wife,
daughter, or maid " to such occupation of weaving in
the loom with himself or with any other person of the
said craft, within the said town of Bristol " should upon
proof be fined 6s. 8d., half to go to the Chamber of
Bristol and half to the Craft. This regulation was not,
however, to apply to any weaver's wife so employed at
the time it was made, but the said woman might con-
tinue to work at the loom as before.
Professor Unwin quotes a rule of the Clothworkers
of London, in the second year of Edward VI., imposing
a fine of 20 pence on any member employing even his
own wife and daughter in his shop. At Hull, in 1490,
women were forbidden working at the weaver's trade.
But in 1564 the proviso was introduced that a widow
might work at her husband's trade so long as she
continued a widow and observed the orders of the
company. The London Weavers clearly recognised
women members, for they enacted that "no man or
woman of the said craft shall entice any man's servant
from him." But another rule prohibited taking a
woman as apprentice. The statutes of the Weavers of
Edinburgh in the sixteenth century provided that no
woman be allowed to have looms of her own, unless
she be a freeman's wife. Probably it was felt in practice
to be impossible to prevent a woman helping her
husband, or carrying on his trade after his death,
although there was evidently a desire to keep women
out of the craft as much as possible. By the seven-
teenth century Gervase Markham writes as if women
did no weaving at all. " Now after your cloth is thus
warped and delivered up into the hands of the Weaver,
the Housewife hath finished her labour, for in the
weaving, walking, and dressing thereof she can challenge
HISTORICAL SKETCH 15
no property more than to entreat them severally to
discharge their duties with a good conscience." At
Norwich, in 1511, the Ordinance of Weavers forbade
women to weave worsted, " for that they be not of
sufficient power to work the same worsteds as they
ought to be wrought/'
Records of rates of pay to journeymen weavers,
tuckers, fullers, etc., 1651, * ignore women as textile
workers altogether ; the only women mentioned in this
assessment are agricultural workers and domestic
servants. Nevertheless, old accounts of the seven-
teenth century do show payments to women, not only
for spinning, but for weaving and " walking " woollen
cloth, and we can only conclude that while the progress
of technical improvements had made weaving largely
a men's trade, it was yet also carried on by women to
a considerable extent.
Apprenticeship. It seems appropriate here to give
some little space to the subject of apprenticeship.
Miss Dunlop points out, in her recent valuable work
on that subject, that the opposition of some of the
gilds to women's work was not hostility to women as
women, so much as distrust of the untrained, un-
qualified worker. " At Salisbury the barber-surgeons
agitated against unskilled women who medelled in the
trade." " In the Girdlers' Company the officers forbade
their members to employ foreigners and maids, not out
of any animosity to the women, but because unscrupu-
lous workmen had been underselling their fellows by
employing cheap labour." At Hull, as we have seen,
the employment of women was forbidden, but so was
the employment of aliens. According to Miss Dunlop,
1 See a volume of tracts at the British Museum numbered 1851,
c. 10.
16 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
the great difficulty in the way of women was the
onerousness of domestic work, which prevented girls
undertaking apprenticeship to a skilled craft. It
appears that women and girls were largely employed
as assistants to the husband or father, and that the
requirement of apprenticeship by the Elizabethan
Statute did not check the practice, as it was so wide-
spread and so convenient that the law was difficult to
enforce. It is exceptional, Miss Dunlop remarks, to
find a gild forbidding the practice, and in point of
fact, the services of his wife and daughter were usually
the only cheap casual labour a man could get. Ap-
prentice labour was cheap, but could not be obtained
for short periods at a sudden pressure. " Girl labour,
therefore, had a peculiar value, and we may suppose
that more girls worked at crafts and manufactures than
would have been the case if they had been obliged to
serve an apprenticeship." There was no systematic
training and technical teaching of girls as there was of
boys, though in some cases they were apprenticed and
served their time, and in others, though unapprenticed,
they may have been as carefully taught. " But
apprenticeship played no part in the life of girls as a
whole : they missed the general education which it
afforded, and their training tended to be casual and
irregular " : on the other hand, their lives gained