But we know so little that we cannot attempt to enlarge
on the subject.
CHAPTER II.
WOMEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.
He ! an die Arbeit 1
Alle von hinnen !
Hurtig hinab !
Aus den neuen Schachten
schafft mir das Gold !
Euch griisst die Geissel,
grabt ihr nicht rasch !
Das keiner mir mussig
biirge mir Mime,
sonst birgt er sich schwer
meines Armes Schwunge :
Zogert ihr noch ?
Zaudert wohl gar ?
Zittre und zage,
gezahmtes Heer !
WAGNER, Das Rheingold.
THE cotton trade is the industry most conspicuously
identified with the series of complex changes that we
call the Industrial Revolution. Its history before that
period is comparatively unimportant ; we have there-
fore left it over from the previous chapter to the
present.
Cottons are mentioned as a Manchester trade in the
sixteenth century, but it seems probable that these
31
32 WOMEN AND THE
were really a coarse kind of woollen stuff, and not
cotton at all. Cotton wool had, it is true, been im-
ported from the East for some time, but was used only
for candle wicks and such small articles, not for cloth.
In the Poor Law of Elizabeth, cotton is not included
among the articles that might be provided by over-
seers to " set the poor on work." The first authorita-
tive mention of the cotton manufacture of Manchester
occurs in Lewis Roberts' Treasure of Traffike. It
appears from this tract, which was published in 1641,
that the Levant Company used to bring cotton wool
to London, which was afterwards taken to Manchester
and worked up into " fustians, vermilions, dimities,
and other such stuffs." The manufacture had there-
fore become an established fact by the middle of the
seventeenth century, but its growth was not rapid for
some time. Owing to the rudeness of the spinning
implements used fine yarn could not be spun and
fine goods could not be woven. In the second quarter
of the eighteenth century, however, Manchester and
the cotton manufacture began to increase very markedly
in size and activity, and the resulting demand for yarn
served to stimulate the invention of machinery. " The
weaver was continually pressing upon the spinner.
The processes of spinning and weaving were generally
performed in the same cottage, but the weaver's own
family could not supply him with a sufficient quantity
of weft, and he had with much pains to collect it from
neighbouring spinsters. Thus his time was wasted,
and he was often subjected to high demands for an
article on which, as the demand exceeded the supply,
the spinner could put her own price." Guest says it
was no uncommon thing for a weaver to walk three or
four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners,
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 33
before he could collect weft to serve him for the
remainder of the day, and when he wished to weave
a piece in a shorter time than usual, a new ribbon or
a gown was necessary to quicken the exertions of the
spinner. The difficulty was intensified in 1738 by
Kay's invention of the fly -shuttle, which enabled
the weaver to do twice as much work with a given
effort, and consequently of course to use up yarn in a
similar proportion. John Hargreaves, a Blackburn
weaver, contrived a spinning machine which multiplied
eightfold the productive power of one spinner, and
was, moreover, simple enough to be worked by a child.
Subsequent developments and improvements were
effected by Paul Wyatt and Arkwright, and the latter
being a good business man, unlike some other in-
ventors, made money out of his ideas.
The changes effected in rural social life by the
industrial revolution are excellently described by
W. Radcliffe. In the year 1770, when Radcliffe was
a boy nine or ten years old, his native township of
Mellor, in Derbyshire, only fourteen miles from Man-
chester, was occupied by between fifty and sixty
farmers ; rents did not usually exceed los. per statute
acre, and of these fifty or sixty farmers, there were
only six or seven who paid their rents directly from
the produce of their land ; all the rest made it partly
in some branch of trade, such as spinning and weaving
woollen, linen, or cotton. The cottagers were employed
entirely in this manner, except at harvest time. The
father would earn 8s. to los. 6d. at his loom, and his
sons perhaps 6s. or 8s. each per week ; but the " great
sheet-anchor of all cottages and small farms/' accord-
ing to Radcliffe, was the profit on labour at the hand-
wheel. It took six to eight hands to prepare and
D
34 WOMEN AND THE
spin yarn sufficient to keep one weaver occupied, and a
demand was thus created for the labour of every person,
from young children to the aged, supposing they
could see and move their hands. The better class of
cottagers and even small farmers also used spinning
to make up their rents and help support their families
respectably.
From the year 1770 to 1788 a complete change was
effected in the textile trade, cotton being largely used
in substitution for wool and linen. The hand-wheels
were mostly thrown into lumber-rooms, and the yarn
was all spun on common jennies. In weaving no great
change took place in these eighteen years, save the
increasing use of the fly-shuttle and the change from
woollen and linen to cotton. But the mule twist was
introduced about 1788, and the enormous variety of
new yarns now in vogue, for the production of every
kind of clothing from the finest book-muslin or lace
to the heaviest fustian added to the demand for
weaving, and put all hands in request. The old loom
shops being insufficient, every lumber-room, even old
barns, cart-houses, and out-buildings of every descrip-
tion were repaired, windows having been broken
through the old blank walls, and all were fitted up for
weaving. New weavers' cottages with loom-shops also
rose up in every direction, and were immediately occu-
pied. It is said that families at this period used to
bring home 405., 6os., 8os., iocs., or even 1205. a week.
The operative weavers were in a condition of prosperity
never before experienced by them. Every man had a
watch in his pocket, women could dress as they
pleased, and as Radcliffe records, " the church was
crowded to excess every Sunday/' Handsome furni-
ture, china, and plated ware, were acquired by these
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 35
well-to-do families, and many had a cow and a
meadow.
This prosperity was, however, ephemeral in duration.
With the increased complexity and elaboration of
machinery, a change came. The profitableness of the
trade brought in larger capital, and led to the erection
of mills, with water power as the motive force. In
such buildings as these machinery could be set up, and
labour could be drilled, organised and subdivided, so
as to produce a far greater return on the invested
capital than in the weavers' shops. These mills were
built in places at some distance from towns, and often
in valleys and glens for the sake of water-power ; they
were, however, kept as near towns as possible for the
sake of markets and means of transport. The first
mills were exclusively devoted to carding and spinning.
The gradual increase of this system soon influenced
the prosperity of the domestic manufacturer his
profits quickly fell, workmen being readily found to
superintend the mill labour at a rate of wages, high,
it is true, but yet comparatively much lower than the
recently inflated value of home labour. The intro-
duction of steam-power considerably hastened the
evolution of the factory industry.
The power-loom was invented, or rather its invention
was initiated, or suggested, not by a manufacturer, or
even by any one conversant with textile work, but by
a Kentish clergyman, named Cartwright. He heard of
Arkwright's spinning machinery in 1784 from some
Manchester men whom he met, apparently quite by
chance, at Matlock. One of these remarked that the
machines which had just been perfected would produce
so much cotton that no hands could ever be found
to weave it. Cartwright replied that in that case
36 WOMEN AND THE
Arkwright must invent a weaving mill. The Manchester
men all declared this to be impossible, and gave Cart-
wright all sorts of technical reasons for their belief.
He, however, went home and rapidly thought out a
rude contrivance which he employed a carpenter and
smith to make under his orders, got a weaver to put
in a warp, and found that the thing worked, though
in a rough and unwieldy manner. Unfortunately,
like so many inventors, he had little or no business
ability. His first factory was a failure. He made a
second attempt, in 1791, and erected considerable
buildings. By this time the weavers were already up
in arms. Cartwright received threatening letters, and
the factory was burnt. Nevertheless, the change was
progressing, and where one failed, others were destined
to succeed. Several weaving factories were started in
Scotland, at the end of the century, and in 1803
Horrocks put up some iron automatic looms at Stock-
port, which were soon copied in other towns of Lanca-
shire. The power-loom, however, was still imperfect
in detail, and did not come into general use until about
1833. The downfall of prices in weaving, which for
the workers concerned was as tragic as it was
astonishing, can be seen in a table in " Social and
Economic History," Victoria County History, Lanca-
shire, vol. ii. p. 327. Miss Alice Law gives the prices
for the whole series of years 1814-1833 ; as the work
is fairly accessible I reproduce only samples, which
show the trend sufficiently well.
[TABLE.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
37
PRICES FOR WEAVING ONE PIECE OF SECOND OR THIRD
74 CALICO.
1814.
1820.
1821.
1833-
s. d.
s. d.
s. d.
s. d.
Average price per piece .
6 6
2 II
3 2
i 4
Average weekly sum a
good weaver could earn
26 o
ii 8
12 7
5 4
Sum a family of 6, 3 being
weavers, could earn .
52 o
23 4
28 3 f
12
Indispensable weekly ex-
penses for repair of
looms, fuel, light
5 3
5 3
5 3
4 3
Sum remaining to six
persons for food and
clothing per week ,
46 9
18 i
23 of
7 9
Subjected to the competition of power-looms, the
hand-weavers were compelled either to desert their
employment and seek factory work, as in fact the
younger, more capable and energetic of them actually
did, or to reduce their rates of pay, which in time
reached the point of starvation.
It is extremely difficult to find much definite infor-
mation as to the condition of industrial women in
this period. The technical changes, commercial and
political controversies, the startling growth of wealth,
and the conflicts of labour and capital that made up
the more striking and dramatic side of the industrial
revolution have naturally impressed the imagination
of historians. Little attention has been given to the
state of women at this time. It is by inference from
known facts rather than by actual documentary
38 WOMEN AND THE
evidence that we can arrive at an estimate of the effects
on women of these extraordinary changes. A certain
proportion of women, no doubt a very small one, must
certainly have arrived at wealth and prosperity through
the rapid accession of fortune achieved by some of the
weavers and yeomen farmers, who became employers
on a large scale. This is scarcely the place to treat of
this subject, though it is by no means destitute of
interest. 1 There were, further, women who distinctly
benefited by the improved wages of men in certain
industries, when the spending power of the family
was increased by the new methods. This was the
case temporarily in the weaving trade during the period
of expansion through cheaper yarn noted above ;
Dr. Cunningham says that " the improved rates for
weaving rendered the women and children independent,
and unwilling to ' rival a wooden jenny/ " 2 Baines
also tells us at a later date, that where a spinner is
assisted by his own children in the mill, " his income
is so large that he can live more generously, clothe
himself and his family better than many of the lower
class of tradesmen, and though improvidence and mis-
conduct too often ruin the happiness of these families,
yet there are thousands of spinners in the cotton
districts who eat meat every day, wear broad cloth
on the Sunday, dress their wives and children well,
furnish their houses with mahogany and carpets,
1 Philip Gaskell, who was, however, so prejudiced against the
factory system that his views must be taken with caution, says that
the wives of manufacturers who had risen from poverty to affluence
were " an epitome of everything that is odious in manners," their
only redeeming point being a profuse hospitality, which however,
Grant attributes to " a sense of vain-glory." Manufacturing Popula-
tion, p. 60.
a Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, p. 654
(ed. 1907),
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 39
subscribe to publications, and pass through life with
much of humble respectability." 1
The effects of the industrial revolution on women
other than the two classes just indicated are more
complicated. In the first place, the rural labouring
class suffered considerably from the loss of by-
industries, which in some districts had been a great
help in eking out the wages of the head of the
family.
Decay of Hand-Spinning. In regard to this subject
the facts are fairly well known. Towards the end of
the eighteenth century spinning ceased to be remunera-
tive, even as a by -industry. As the work became
more specialised, as the machines came more and more
into use, it became more and more difficult for a mere
home industry to compete with work done under
capitalistic conditions. Numbers of families, previously
independent, became unable to support themselves
without help from the rates. Sir Frederick Eden gives
some concrete cases. At Halifax he notes that " many
poor women who earned a bare subsistence by spinning,
are now in a very wretched condition." He ascribes
this to the influence of the war in reducing the price of
weaving and spinning, but no doubt the competition
of the machine industry was already an important
factor. At Leeds, where the new methods had been
largely introduced, the workers were better off. In
another place he gives some instances of workers at
Kendal where the earnings of a whole family, the father
weaving and the wife and elder children weaving,
spinning, or knitting, were insufficient to maintain
them without the aid of the Poor Law. In an article
in the Gentleman's Magazine (May 1834, P- 53 1 )*
1 History of Cotton Manufacture, p. 446.
40 WOMEN AND THE
writer remarks, as if noticing a new phenomenon, that
the families of labourers are now dependent on the
men's labours or nearly so ; and adds rather brutally
" they [the families] hang as a dead weight upon the
rates for want of employment."
The loss of these by-industries as a supplementary
source of income was no doubt one of several causes
that impelled the drift of labour from the country to
the town. It is also worth noting that the women
lost, not only their earnings, but something in variety
of work and in manual training.
The Hand- Loom Weaver's Wife. More miserable
still was the fate of those hand-weavers who found the
piece-rates of their work constantly sagging downwards,
and were unable or unwilling to find another trade.
It appears that there was a kind of reciprocal move-
ment going on between the spinners and weavers
during the transition, which is of interest as illustrating
the kind of skill and intelligence that was required.
The weavers, who had been enjoying a period of such
unusual prosperity and might be expected therefore
to have more knowledge of the progress of trade and
to be possessed at least of some small capital, not
infrequently abandoned the loom, purchased machinery
for spinning, and gradually rose more and more into
the position of an employer or trader rather than a
mere craftsman.
On the other hand, the spinner of the poorer sort,
being unable to keep pace with the growing expense
of the improved and ever more elaborate machinery,
not infrequently threw aside the wheel and took to
weaving, as the easier solution of the immediate problem
of subsistence for a hand-worker who had neither
capital nor business ability to enable him to succeed
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 41
in the new conditions of the struggle. Thus the ranks
of the hand-weavers tended to be swollen by the
failures of other industries and depleted of the most
capable men, and as Mantoux notes, "the fall in
weavers' wages actually preceded the introduction of
machinery for weaving."
From 1793 the reduction of weavers' rates was
constant. The weaving of a piece of velvet, paid at
4 in 1792, brought the worker only 2 : 155. in 1794,
2 in 1796, i : i6s. in 1800. At the same time the
quantity in a piece was increased. This violent
depreciation of hand-work was caused at first by
surplus labour, and was subsequently aggravated by
machinism. The workers who were most capable
cast in their lot with the new system and the new
methods. But the misery of the slower, older, less
energetic worker was terrible.
In the Coventry ribbon trade wages were lowered
by the employment of young people as half-pay
apprentices, who were taken on for two, three or five
years, and bound by an unstamped indenture or agree-
ment. These were principally girls ; the boys, for
the sake of the elective franchise, were generally bound
for seven years. It was stated before Peel's Committee
in 1816, by the Town Clerk of Coventry (p. 4), that in
1812, the demand for labour being very great, numbers
of girls had been induced to leave their situations, for
the sake of the higher wages in the ribbon trade. The
boom collapsed, and many of them came upon the poor
rates, or, as it was alleged, on the streets. Weavers'
earnings were reduced by one half. Another witness,
a master manufacturer, saw in the system a transition
to the factory system, and prophesied that if the half-
pay apprentice system were not done away with, it
42 WOMEN AND THE
would " cut up the trade wholly, so that there will be
no such thing as a journeyman weaver to be found. . . .
We shall all build large manufactories to contain from
fifty to a hundred looms or upwards, and we must all
have these half -pay apprentices, and the journeymen
will all be reduced, and they must come to us and work
for so much a week or go to the parish."
The effects of industrial change are felt by women
directly as members of the family ; the impoverish-
ment of the male wage-earner whose occupation is
taken away by technical developments means the
anguished struggle of the wife and mother to keep her
children from starving. The wife could often earn
nearly as much as her husband, and the intensest
dislike to the factory could not stand against those
hard economic facts. The Select Committee on
Handloom Weavers, 1834, tk evidence from dis-
consolate broken-hearted men, who showed that their
earnings were utterly inadequate for family subsist-
ence and must needs be supplemented by the wives
working in factories. One poor Irishman said that
he and his little daughter of nine between them
minded the baby of fifteen months. Another weaver,
a man of his acquaintance, must have starved if he
had not had a wife to go out to work for him. The
bitterness of the position was accentuated by the fact
that the weaver's traditions and associations were
bound up with the domestic system, and in no class
probably was factory work for women more unwelcome.
The change was resented as a break-up of family
life. Hargreaves' spinning jenny, Cartwright's comb-
ing machine, Jacquard's loom, to mention no others,
were at different times destroyed by an angry mob.
With desperate energy the unions long opposed the
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 43
introduction of women workers. What drove the
men to these hopeless struggles was the lowering of
wages that they discerned to be the probable, nay,
certain result of both changes. The tragedy of the
man who loses his work, or finds its value suddenly
shrunken by no fault of his own, is as poignant as any
in history. It means not only his own loss and suffer-
ing, but the degradation of his standard of life and the
break-up of his home. It is not simply man against
woman, but man plus the wife and children he loves
against the outside irresponsible woman (as he con-
ceives her) whose interests are nothing to him.
The Factory. The great inventions were not, as
we so often are apt to imagine them, the effort of a
single brain, of " a great man " in the Carlylean sense.
Mechanical progress, in its early stages at all events,
is often the result of the intelligence of innumerable
workers, brought to bear on all kinds of practical diffi-
culties, and mechanical problems. Thus one of the
many attempts at a spinning machine was set up in a
warehouse in Birmingham in 1741 ; the machine was
set in motion by two asses walking round an axis, and
ten or a dozen girls were employed in superintending
and assisting the operation ! This highly picturesque
arrangement proved unworkable and was given up as
a failure. Again, at a later date, the first spinning
machines that came into general jase by the country
people of Lancashire were small affairs, and the
awkward position required to work them was, as
Aikin tells us, " discouraging to grown-up people,
who saw with surprise children from nine to twelve
years of age manage them with dexterity/' In these
cases and others like them, we still call the work
spinning, because the result is the same as from
44 WOMEN AND THE
hand-spinning, viz. yarn ; but in reality the process
is new, the work is a rearrangement of human activity,
rather than a transfer.
We may very well admit, in the light of present day
knowledge, that the transfer of the occupation from
the home to the outside factory or workshop was by
no means an unqualified loss, was indeed a social
advance. The discomfort of using a small and re-
stricted home as a work place, the litter and confusion
that are almost inevitable, not to mention the depression
of being always in the midst of one's working environ-
ment, are such as can hardly be realised by those who
have not given attention to industrial matters. But
this was not the aspect that the poor weavers them-
selves could see, or could possibly be expected to see.
The break-up of the customary home life endeared to
them by long habit and association was only a less
misfortune than their increasing destitution. The
family ceased to be an industrial unit./ The factory
demanded " hands." The machines caused a complete
shifting of processes of work, a shifting which, I need
hardly say, is going on even up to the present time.
Much work that had previously been regarded as
skilled and difficult, demanding technical training and
apprenticeship, became light and easy, within the
powers of a child, a young girl, or a woman. On the
other hand, work that had been done in every cottage,
now was handed over to a skilled male operative,
working with all the help capital and elaborate
machinery could give him.
The effects of the factory system were the subject
of much keen and even violent controversy during
the first half of the nineteenth century. During the
first two or three decades child-labour was the most
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 45
prominent question ; women's labour appears to have
been very much taken for granted (Robert Owen, for
instance, says little about it) and it became a subject
of controversy only about the time of the passing
of the first effective Factory Act, in 1833. Baines,
Ure, and the elder Cooke Taylor, may be mentioned
among those who took an extremely optimistic view
of factory industry and devoted much energy and
ingenuity to proving it to be innocuous, or even bene-
ficial to health, and on the other hand were P. Gaskell,
John Fielden, Philip Grant, and others, who violently
attacked it. Even in modern times Schultze-Gavernitz
and Allen Clarke have presented us with carefully
considered views almost equally divergent. The
modern reader, who tries to reconcile opinions so
extraordinarily antagonistic may well feel bewildered
and despair of arriving at any coherent statement.
How are we to account for the fact, for instance, that
the development of the factory, with its female labour
and machinery, was viewed with the utmost hostility
by the workers, and yet on the other hand that the
rural labourers streamed into the towns to apply for