something in variety from the change of passing from
household to industrial work and vice versa. The
system must, however, have tended to keep women in
an inferior and subordinate position. " For although
they worked hard and the total amount of their labour
has contributed largely to our industrial development,
it was only exceptionally that they attained to the
standing of employers and industrial leaders." The
HISTORICAL SKETCH 17
exceptions are rather interesting ; it is evident that
London was broad-minded in its delimitation of the
woman's sphere of activity and there were many in-
stances of girls being apprenticed.
There were also women who, though unappr enticed,
had the right of working on their own account, and
this, though never very common, was not so unusual
as to arouse comment or surprise. These were mostly
widows who carried on the work of their deceased
husbands ; others were the daughters of freemen who
claimed as such to be admitted to the gild or com-
pany, basing their claims on rights of patrimony.
This taking up of independent work by no means implied
that the women had themselves served apprenticeship
in youth ; it seems merely to have meant the in-
heritance of the goodwill and privileges along with the
craftsman's shop. In the Carpenters' Company Mary
Wiltshire and Ann Callcutt took up their freedom by
right of patrimony, and there are other instances.
The Development of Capitalistic Industry. The
growth and development of a capitalistic system of
industry can be traced from the fifteenth century, and
forms one of the most interesting and dramatic episodes
in economic history. It is, however, not very easy to
determine in what way the change influenced women's
employment. The more prosperous among the weavers
gradually developed into clothiers, employing many
hands, but the majority tended to become mere wage-
eafners. A petition of weavers in 1539 stated that
the clothiers had their own looms and weavers and
fullers in their own houses, so that the master weavers
were rendered destitute. " For the rich men the
clothiers be concluded and agreed among themselves
to hold and pay one price for weaving, which price is
c
i8 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
too little to sustain households upon, working night
and day, holy-day and work-day, and many weavers
are therefore reduced to the position of servants."
The Petition of Suffolk Clothiers, 1575, says that the
custom of their country is "to carry our wool out
. . . and put it to sundry spinners who have in their
houses divers and sundry children and servants that
do card and spin the same wool." In the north
of England also large clothiers employing many hands
were to be found as early as 1520. The subsequent
development of the industry, Professor Unwin tells us,
took place in a very marked degree in those districts
which were exempt from the operation of the statutes
forbidding clothiers to set up outside market-towns. In
other parts of the country the struggle was acute. " The
protection of industry from all competition was the
first and last word of the crafts. To employers and
dealers the monopoly of trade chiefly meant their own
monopoly of production and sale, while the wage-
earner's predominant anxiety was to keep surplus
labour out of the craft, lest the regular worker might
be deprived of his comfortable certainty of subsistence."
There was, however, a great expansion of trade
and industry going on, and labour was needed. The
master who had accumulated a little capital perhaps
moved out to the valleys of Yorkshire or Gloucester-
shire in search of water-power for his fulling mills or
finer wool for his weavers, or forsook the manufactur-
ing town for some rural district where labour was
plentiful and he could escape the heavy municipal
dues^which his business could ill afford to pay. The
ordinances of Worcester, for instance, contain regula-
tions intended to prevent the masters giving out wool
to the weavers in other parts so long as there were
HISTORICAL SKETCH 19
people enough in the city to do the work, " in the
hindering of the poor commonalty of the same."
The struggle between these two forms of industry,
the craft carried on in the towns and the dispersed
industry under a more definitely capitalistic organisa-
tion in the country, went on for centuries. From the
earliest years of the reign of Henry VIII. to the accession
of Elizabeth, a constantly increasing amount of legisla-
tion was devoted to the protection of the town manu-
facture against the competition of the country. This
legislation was interpreted by Froude as a genuine
endeavour to protect a highly skilled, highly organised
industry of independent craftsmen against the evils
of capitalism, but the closer researches of Professor
Unwin show that this is idealism ; the craftsmen were
merely pawns in the hands of town merchants who
dreaded to see some of the trade pass into the hands
of a new class of country capitalists. This is an
historical controversy too difficult to follow closely
here ; what we have to note is the part played by
women in the change.
We may as well admit that women's work during
this industrial transition appears mostly as part of the
problem of cheap unorganised labour. " The spinners
seem never to have had any organisation, and were
liable to oppression by their employers, not only
through low wages, but through payment in kind,
and the exaction of arbitrary fines." Irregularity of
employment was another trouble : in the play of King
Henry VIII. the clothiers were shown making in-
creased taxation a pretext for dismissing hands.
The clothiers all, not able to maintain
The many to them 'longing, have put off
The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers.
20 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
To compensate their masters' greed and extortion
they had recourse to petty dishonesties on their own
part, and were frequently accused of keeping back part
of the wool given out, or of making up the weight by
the addition of oil or other moisture to the yarn. In
1593 a Bill was presented to Parliament which imposed
penalties on frauds in spinning and weaving, but also
pointed out that the workers were partly driven to
fraud " for lack of sufficient wages and allowance,"
and proposed to raise the wages of spinners and weavers
by one-third. 1 This Bill (which may be regarded as a
kind of ancestor of Mr. Winston Churchill's Trade
Boards Act, 1909) failed to pass.
In the seventeenth century the rates of spinners'
wages appear very low, even measured by contemporary
standards. Mr. Hamilton has reproduced the wages
assessed at Quarter Sessions by the Justices of Exeter
in 1654. Weavers were to have 2|d. a day with food
or 8d. without. It is difficult to guess whether these
weavers were supposed to be men or women ; the rates
fixed are less than those for husbandry labourers (which
were fixed at 3d. and iod.), but rather more than those
for women haymakers, which were 2d. and 6d. Spinsters,
however, were to have " not above " 6d. a week with
food or is. 4d. without. In 1713 at the same place
spinsters were to have not above is. a week, or 2s. 6d.
if without board, which again compares very un-
favourably with the other rates mentioned. It is
difficult to understand the extreme lowness of these
rates of pay to spinsters, unless on the assumption
that they were intended to apply to servants actually
living and working in the clothiers' houses ; or that
1 S.P. Dom. Eliz. 1593, vol. 244. Reprinted in English
Economic History, Bland, Brown and Tanney, p. 336.
HISTORICAL SKETCH 21
spinning was supposed not to occupy a woman's whole
time, which no doubt was often the case. But the
rates fixed on that assumption should of course have
been piece rates. Altogether Mr. Hamilton's research
here raises more questions than it can settle.
No doubt the Poor Law helped in some degree to
depress wages, for another form taken by this many-
sided industry of wool was that of relief work under
the Poor Law. Spinning was the main resource of
those whose duty under the Poor Law was to find work
for the unemployed, and in institutions such as Christ's
Hospital, Ipswich, children were set to card and spin
from their earliest years. Such instances might be
multiplied indefinitely. A charitable workhouse in
Bishopsgate used to give out wool and flax every
Monday morning to be spun at home to " such poor
people as desire it and are skilful in spinning thereof." l
Nevertheless we do occasionally get glimpses of women
as an important factor in industry. For instance, in
Edward VI. 's time, there had been an attempt to require
clothiers to be apprenticed. This law was repealed in the
first year of Queen Mary, with the remark that " the
perfect and principal ground of cloth making is the
true sorting of wools, and the experience thereof con-
sisteth only in women, as clothiers' wives and their
women servants and not in apprentices."
A still more remarkable development of female
employment, perhaps, was the beginning of the factory
system in the sixteenth century. These were chiefly
in the west of England industry, and in Wiltshire.
Leland in his Itinerary mentions a man called Stumpe
who had actually taken possession of the ancient Abbey
1 Cf. a report of a workhouse in 1701 (catalogued as 816. m. 15.
48 in the Brit. Mus. Library), where ten poor women were employed
to teach the children to spin.
22 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
of Malmesbury and filled it with looms, employing
many hands. A still more celebrated instance was
the factory of John Winchcomb, a prudent man who
married his master's widow and had a fine business
at Newbury, described in a ballad which shows him
employing 200 men weaving, each with a boy helper,
and 100 women carding wool :
And in a chamber close beside
Two hundred maydens did abide
In petticoats of stammel red
And milk-white kerchiefs on their head.
These pretty maids did never lin
But in that place all day did spin.
In 1567 the Weaver's Gild of Bristol prohibited
its members from underselling one another in the prices
of their work, and also forbade them to allow their
wives to go for any work to clothiers' houses, which at
least implies that there was some demand for their
labour. Now, although the growth of capital may
have seriously affected the position of the male crafts-
men, as Professor Unwin tells us, and reduced them to
be mere wage-earners, it seems not impossible that the
economic position of women may have been improved
by the opportunity of work for wages outside the
home. Women had worked for the use and consump-
tion of their own households, and, as wives of craftsmen,
they had worked as helpers with their husbands. The
new organisation of work by a capitalist employer
opened up the possibility to women and girls of earning
wages for themselves. The additional earnings of wife
and children even if very small make a great difference
in the comfort of a labourer's family. It is likely
enough, indeed it is evident that their work was often
HISTORICAL SKETCH 23
grievously exploited, and the reduction of the crafts-
man to the position of a mere wage-earner may have
diminished the spending power of the family. Of
all this we know little or nothing definitely, but
it seems probable that the supersession of handi-
craft by a quasi -capitalistic form of organisation
affected women less adversely than men. In the
eighteenth century, the palmy days of the domestic
system, some women in the industrial centres were
earning what were considered very good wages. Arthur
Young says of the cloth trade round Leeds : " Some
women earn by weaving as much as the men." Of
Norwich he says : " The earnings of manufacturers (i.e.
hand- workers) are various, but in general high," the
men on an average earning 55. a week, and many
women earning as much. 1
It must be also remembered that each weaver kept
several spinners employed, so that unless his family
could supply him, he might easily be forced to have
recourse to the services of women workers outside.
Mr. Townsend Warner quotes an estimate that 25
weavers might require the services of 250 spinners to
keep them fully supplied with yarn.
Mantoux thinks this excessive, though it has to be
remembered, as Mr. Townsend Warner points out,
that the spinners usually did not give their whole time.
Again, the description of the organisation of the trade,
end of eighteenth century, quoted by Bonwick, conveys
the impression that women, in some cases at all events,
were taking a responsible part.
I went to York, to buy wool, and at that time it averaged
1 Tour in East of England, vol. ii. pp. 75, 81. I am indebted to
Mrs. C. M. Wilson for drawing my attention to these passages and
for suggesting the remarks immediately following.
24 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
about is. per pound. I then came home, sorted and combed
it myself. After being combed, it was oiled and closed,
that is, the long end of the wool and the short end were put
together to form a skein. It took a number of skeins to
make a top, each top making exactly a pound. Then I
took it to hand-spinners 20 or 30 miles distant. The mother
or head of the family plucked the tops into pieces the length
of the wool, and gave it to the different branches of the
family to spin, who could spin about 9 or 10 hanks per day ;
for the spinning I gave one half penny per hank, and some-
times Jd. for every 24 hanks over.
Another interesting account is given by Bamford :
Farms were most cultivated for the production of milk,
butter and cheese. . . . The farming was mostly of that
kind which was soonest and most easily performed, and it
was done by the husband and other males of the family,
whilst the wife and daughters and maid servants, if there
were any of the latter, attended to the churning, cheese-
making, and household work, and when that was finished,
they busied themselves in carding, slubbing, and spinning
of wool and cotton, as well as forming it into warps for the
loom. The husband and sons would next, at times when
farm labour did not call them abroad, size the warp, dry
it, and beam it in the loom, and either they or the females,
whichever happened to be least otherwise employed, would
weave the warp down. A farmer would generally have
3 or 4 looms in his house.
Of course it is not to be inferred that the women thus
employed were always free to control or spend their
own earnings ; in law they undoubtedly were not, if
married. The domestic system so picturesquely de-
scribed by Defoe (in his Tour], under which the family
worked together, each, from the oldest to the youngest,
doing his or her part, no doubt often involved a quite
patriarchal distribution and control of the resulting
HISTORICAL SKETCH 25
earnings. Still the mention of women as separate and
individual earners that occurs often in eighteenth-
century works on the subject must indicate that they
were attaining a greater measure of individual recogni-
tion and self-determination than formerly. 1
It is interesting also to notice that the cloth industry
was sometimes carried on socially in the eighteenth
century. Bradford Dale was covered with weavers
and spinners, and the women and children of Allerton,
Thornton, and other villages in the valley, used to flock
on sunny days with their spinning wheels to some
favourite pleasant spot, and work in company. 2
Frame -Work Knitting. The frame- work knitting
trade has many points of resemblance with the woollen
weaving trade. Hand-knitting, we are told by Felkin,
was not introduced till the sixteenth century. It
became extremely popular and was pursued by women
in every class of life from the palace to the cottage.
A kind of frame or hand-machine was invented in the
seventeenth century by Lee. It is said that Lee invented
this machine in a spirit of revenge and bitterness against
a young lady he had fallen in love with, who was so
intent on her knitting that she could never give him
her attention when he made love to her. From watch-
ing her at work he acquired a mastery of the mesh or
stitch, and anger at her being so engrossed with her
1 Defoe in his Plan of English Commerce says that after the great
plague in France and the peace in Spain the run for goods was so
great in England, and the prices so high that poor women in Essex
could earn is. or is. 6d. a day by spinning, and the farmers could
hardly get dairymaids. This was, however, only for a time ; demand
slackened, and the spinners were reduced to misery.
2 James, History of Worsted, p. 289. This pleasant custom may
remind us of lines in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, i. 4 :
" The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones."
26 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
employment impelled him to make a machine that
would deprive her of her work.
The frame-work knitters were incorporated under
Charles II., and the company made rather drastic
rules, trying to exclude women from apprenticeship,
though they might become members on widowhood, as
in so many of the old guilds. Frame- work knitting also
gave employment to women and children in seaming up
the hose. In the eighteenth century the trade became
sweated and underpaid. The hours of work were as
much as fifteen a day. Women, however, were paid
at the same rates per piece, and were subject to the
same deductions, and some of them were good hands
and could earn as much as men.
Silk. The broad difference between linen and
woollen on the one hand, and silk and cotton on the
other, is that the two former, so ancient that their
origins are lost to history, arose as household industries
at the very early stage of civilisation in which the family
is self-sufficient, or nearly so, providing for its own
needs and consumption by the work of its own members ;
the two latter, on the contrary, appear chiefly as trades
carried on not for use but for payment, and are also
sharply differentiated from the more ancient industries
by the fact that the raw materials silk and cotton
are not indigenous to these islands, but have to be
imported.
In the manufacture of silk, women early appear as
independent producers and manufacturers, for in the
fifteenth century they were sufficiently organised to be
able collectively to petition Parliament for measures
to check the importation of ribbons and wrought silk,
and on their behalf was passed an Act (1455) 33 Hen.
VI. c. 5, which states that " it is shewed ... by the
HISTORICAL SKETCH 27
grievous complaint of the silk women and spinners of
the mystery and occupation of silk-working, within
the city of London, how that divers Lombards and
other strangers, imagining to destroy the said mystery
and all such virtuous occupations of women in the said
realm, to enrich themselves and to increase them and
such occupations in other strange lands, have brought
and daily go about to bring into the said realm such
silk so made, wrought, twined, ribbands and chains
falsely and deceitfully wrought, all manner girdels
and other things concerning the said mystery and
occupation, in no manner wise bringing any good silk
un wrought, as they were wont to bring heretofore, to
the final destruction of the said mysteries and occupa-
tions, unless it be the more hastily remedied by the
King's Majesty." The importation of silk, ribbons,
etc., was forthwith prohibited, and we find similar
prohibitions in 3 Edw. IV. c. 3 and c. 4, 22 Edw. IV.
c. 3, i Rich. III. c. 10, and i Hen. VII. c. 9. Henry
VII. dealt with several silk women for ribands,
fringes, and so forth, as recorded in his accounts.
A statute of Charles II. 14 Ch. II. c. 15 says many
women in London were employed in working silk.
The manufacture of silk was introduced into Derby-
shire at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
John Lombe's silk mill was the first textile mill at
work in that county. A rather considerable manu-
facture of piece silks and silk ribbons and braid grew
up in Derby and Glossop, a large proportion of women
and girls being employed. The numbers of operatives
in this industry increased up to the census of 1851 and
1861, when about 6000 operatives were employed,
after which it began to go down, reaching the low
figure of 662 in the county in 1901 ; in 1911, 442.
28 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
In Macclesfield silk -thro wing mills were erected
in 1756, the manufacture of silk goods and mohair
buttons having been already carried on for centuries.
The silk throwsters of Macclesfield for many years
worked for Spitalfields and supplied them with thrown
silk through the London manufacturers. In 1776, it
is recorded, the wages paid to the millmen and stewards
were 75. a week, the women doublers 35. 6d., children
6d. to is. The manufacture of broad silk was estab-
lished at Macclesfield in 1790. We know by inference
that many women must have been employed, but
information is unfortunately scanty in regard to the
social conditions of this trade, so specially adapted
to industrial women. It is evident, however, that
women kept their place in it, for the apprenticeship
rules laid before the Committee on Ribbon Weavers in
1818 expressly included women, both as apprentices
and journey women.
The inherent delicacy of many of the processes,
and the fact that silk as a luxury trade is especially
susceptible to changes of fashion, have retarded the
use of machinery and preserved the finer fabrics as an
artistic handicraft. But this, in itself a development
to be welcomed, must also indicate that capital and
labour can be more advantageously employed in the
industries that have evolved more fully on modern
lines, for the silk trade is undoubtedly declining in
England.
Other Industries. If information respecting the
traditional employments of women in the linen and
woollen trades is sparse and unsatisfactory, much more
is it difficult to trace out their conditions in other
industries of a less " womanly " character. Yet even
in such callings it is sufficiently evident that women
HISTORICAL SKETCH 29
were employed. Traill's Social England tells us of
women making ropes as early as the thirteenth century.
Women are known to have worked in the Derbyshire
lead mines, temp. Edward II. They washed and
cleaned the ore at a id. a day, and were assisted by
four girls at f d. a day, men being employed at the same
time at i|d. a day. Mr. Lapsley, in his account of a
fifteenth-century ironworks, records that two women,
wives of the smith and foreman respectively, performed
miscellaneous tasks, from breaking up the iron-stone
to blowing the bellows. In 1652 a Parliamentary
commission found that many of the surface workers
employed in dressing the ore (i.e. freeing it from the
earth and spar with which it was mixed) were women
and children. An Account of Mines, dated 1707, tells
us that vast numbers of poor people at that time were
employed in " working of mines, the very women and
children employed therein, as well as the men, especially
in the mines of lead." Women worked in coal-mining
at Winterton, " for lack of men," in 1581, and with
children were employed in the " great coal- works and
workhouses " started by Sir Humphrey Mackworth
at Neath. They evidently worked underground, as
several deaths of women in mine explosions are re-
corded. In 1770 Arthur Young found women working
in lead mines and earning as much as is. a day, a
man earning is. 3d.
In Birmingham trades, especially the making of
buttons and other small articles, women were employed
as far back as we can find any records. At Bur si em,
Young found women working in the potteries, earning
5s. to 8s. a week. Near Bristol he found women and
girls employed in a copper works for melting copper
ore, and making the metal into pins, pans, etc. At
30 WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY
Gloucester he found great numbers of women working
in the pin manufacture. In the Sheffield plated ware
trade he found girls working, but does not mention
women. Of the Sheffield trades generally he says that
women and girls earn very good wages, " much more
than by spinning wool in any part of the kingdom."
It is unfortunate that we have, so far, very little
information in regard to women's work in non-textile
trades previous to the industrial revolution. It is
tolerably safe to infer that the above scattered hints
indicate a state of things neither new nor exceptional.
There can be little doubt that women constantly
worked in these trades, either assisting the head of
the family, or as a wage-worker for an outside employer.