CHAPTER V

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF PART I. 178

PART II

CHAPTER VI

WOMEN'S WAGES IN THE WAGE CENSUS OF 1906 213

CHAPTER VII

THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN 239

APPENDIX TO CHAPTERS II., IV., AND VII. 267

AUTHORITIES 299

INDEX 305

INTRODUCTORY

Little attention has been given until quite recent times to the position

of the woman worker and the special problems concerning her industrial and

commercial employment. The historical material relating to the share of

women in industry is extremely scanty. Women in mediaeval times must have

done a very large share of the total work necessary for carrying on social

existence, but the work of men was more specialised, more differentiated,

more picturesque. It thus claimed and obtained a larger share of the

historian's attention. The introduction of machinery in the eighteenth

century effected great changes, and for the first time the reactions of

the work on the workers began to be considered. Women and children who had

previously been employed in their own homes or in small workshops were now

collected in factories, drilled to work in large numbers together. The

work was not at first very different, but the environment was enormously

altered. The question of the child in industry at first occupied attention

almost to the exclusion of women. But the one led naturally to the other.

The woman in industry could no longer be ignored: she had become an

economic force.

The position of the industrial woman in modern times is closely related,

one way or another, to the industrial revolution, but the relation cannot

be stated in any short or easy formula. The reaction of modern methods on

woman's labour is highly complex and assumes many forms. The pressure on

the woman worker which causes her to be employed for long hours, low

wages, in bad conditions, and with extreme insecurity of employment, is

frequently supposed to be due to the development of industry on a larger

scale. It is, in my view, due rather to the survival of social conditions

of the past in an age when an enormous increase in productive power has

transformed the conditions of production. New institutions and new social

conditions are needed to suit the change in the conditions of production.

It is not the change in the material environment which is to blame, so

much as the failure of organised society so far to understand and control

the material changes. The capitalist employer organised industry on the

basis of a "reserve of labour," and on the principle of employing the

cheapest workers he could get, not out of original sin, or because he was

so very much worse than other people, but simply because it was the only

way he knew of, and no one was there to indicate an alternative

course--much less compel him to take it. Much more guilty than the

cotton-spinners or dock companies were the wealthy governing classes, who

permitted the conditions of work to be made inhuman, and yet trampled on

the one flower the people had plucked from their desolation--the joy of

union and fellowship; who allowed a system of casual labour to become

established, and then prated about the bad habits and irregularity which

were the results of their own folly.

Organised society had hardly begun to understand the needs and

implications of the industrial revolution until quite late in the

nineteenth century, and the failure of statesmanlike foresight has been

especially disastrous to women, because of their closer relationship to

the family. There is no economic necessity under present circumstances for

women to work so long, so hard, and for such low wages as they do; on the

contrary, we know now that it is bad economy that they should be so

employed. But the subordinate position of the girl and the woman in the

family, the lack of a tradition of association with her fellows, has

reacted unfavourably on her economic capacity in the world of competitive

trade. She is preponderantly an immature worker; she expects, quite

reasonably, humanly and naturally, to marry. Whether her expectation is or

is not destined to be fulfilled, it constitutes an element of impermanence

in her occupational career which reacts unfavourably on her earnings and

conditions of employment.

The tradition of obedience, docility and isolation in the family make it

hard for the young girl-worker to assert her claims effectively; both her

ignorance and her tradition of modesty make it difficult for her to voice

the requirements of decent living, some of the most essential of which are

taboo--not to be spoken of to a social superior or an individual of the

opposite sex. The whole circumstances of her life make her employment an

uncertain matter, contingent upon all sorts of outside circumstances,

which have little or nothing to do with her own industrial capacity. In

youth, marriage may at any time take her out of the economic struggle and

render wage-earning superfluous and unnecessary. On the other hand, the

sudden pressure of necessity, bereavement, or sickness or unemployment of

husband or bread-winning relative, may throw a woman unexpectedly on the

labour market. It is a special feature of women's employment that, unlike

the work of men, who for the most part have to labour from early youth to

some more or less advanced age, women's work is subject to considerable

interruption, and is contingent on family circumstances, whence it comes

about that women may not always need paid work, but when they do they

often want it so badly that they are ready to take anything they can get.

The woman worker also is more susceptible to class influences than are her

male social equals, and charity and philanthropy often tend in some degree

to corrupt the loyalty and divert the interest of working women from their

own class. These are some of the reasons why associations for mutual

protection and assistance have been so slow in making way among women

workers.

The protection of the State, though valuable as far as it goes, has been

inadequate: how inadequate can be seen in the Reports of the Women Factory

Inspectors, who, in spite of their insufficient numbers, take so large a

share in the administration of the Factory Act. Their Reports, however, do

not reach a large circle. The Insurance Act has been the means of a more

startling propaganda. The results following the working of this Act shew

that although women are longer lived than men, they have considerably more

sickness. The claims of women for sick benefit had been underestimated,

and many local insurance societies became nearly insolvent in consequence.

A cry of malingering was raised in various quarters, and we were asked to

believe that excessive claims could be prevented by stricter and more

careful administration. This solution of the problem, however, is quite

inadequate to explain the facts. There may have been some malingering, but

it has occurred chiefly in cases where the earnings of the workers were so

low as to be scarcely above the sickness benefit provided by the Act, or

even below it. In other cases the excess claims were due to the fact that

medical advice and treatment was a luxury the women had previously been

unable to afford even when they greatly needed it; or to the fact that

they had previously continued to go to work when unfit for the exertion,

and now at last found themselves able to afford a few days' rest and

nursing; or, finally, to the unhealthy conditions in which they were

compelled to live and work. As Miss Macarthur stated before the

Departmental Committee on Sickness Benefit Claims, "Low wages, and all

that low wages involve in the way of poor food, poor housing, insufficient

warmth, lack of rest and of air, and so forth, necessarily predispose to

disease; and although such persons may, at the time of entering into

insurance, have been, so far as they knew, in a perfectly normal state of

health, their normal state is one with no reserve of health and strength

to resist disease." Excessive claims may or may not, the witness went on

to show, be associated with extremely low wages. Thus the cotton trade,

which is the best paid of any great industry largely employing women,

nevertheless shows a high proportion of claims. Miss Macarthur made an

urgent recommendation (in which the present writer begs to concur), that

when any sweeping accusation of malingering is brought against a class of

insured persons, medical enquiry should be made into the conditions under

which those women work. If the conditions that produce excessive claims

were once clearly known and realised, it is the convinced opinion of the

present writer that those conditions would be changed by the pressure of

public opinion, not so much out of sentiment or pity--though sentiment and

pity are badly needed--but out of a clear perception of the senseless

folly and loss that are involved in the present state of things. Year by

year, and week by week, the capitalist system is allowed to use up the

lives of our women and girls, taking toll of their health and strength, of

their nerves and energy, of their capacity, their future, and the future

of their children after them. And all this, not for any purpose; not as it

is with the soldier, who dies that something greater than himself may

live; for no purpose whatever, except perhaps saving the trouble of

thought. So far as wealth is the object of work, it is practically certain

that the national wealth, or indeed the output of war material, would be

much greater if it were produced under more humane and more reasonable

conditions, with a scientific disposition of hours of work and the use of

appropriate means for keeping up the workers' health and strength. A

preliminary and most important step, it should be said, would be a

considerable reinforcement of the staff of women factory inspectors.

Nor do conditions of work alone make up the burden of the heavy debt

against society for the treatment of women workers. Housing conditions,

though no doubt greatly improved, especially in towns, are often extremely

bad, and largely responsible for the permanent ill-health suffered by so

many married women in the working class, by the non-wage-earning group,

perhaps not much less than by the industrial woman-worker.[2] Two other

questions occur in this connection, both of great importance. First, the

question of the relation of the employment of the young girl to her health

after marriage--a subject which appears to have received little scientific

attention. Only a minority of women are employed at any one time, but a

large majority of young girls are employed, and it follows that the

majority of older women _must have been employed_ in those critical years

of girlhood and young womanhood, which have so great an influence on the

constitution and character for the future. The conditions and kind of

employment from this point of view would afford material for a volume in

itself, but the subject needs medical knowledge for its satisfactory

handling, and a laywoman can but indicate it and pass on. Second, the need

of making medical advice and treatment more accessible. This would involve

the removal of restrictions and obstacles which, however necessary under a

scheme of Health Insurance, appear in practice to rob that scheme of at

least half its right to be considered as a National Provision for the

health of women.[3]

It will appear in the following pages that I see little reason to believe

in any decline and fall of women from a golden age in which they did only

work which was "suitable," and that in the bosoms of their families. The

records of the domestic system that have come down to us are no doubt

picturesque enough, but the cases which have been preserved in history or

fiction were probably the aristocracy of industry, under which were the

very poor, of whom we know little. There must also have been a class of

single women wage-earners who were probably even more easy to exploit in

old times than they are now, the opportunities for domestic service being

much more limited and worse paid. The working woman does not appear to me

to be sliding downwards into the "chaos of low-class industries," rather

is she painfully, though perhaps for the most part unconsciously, working

her way upwards out of a more or less servile condition of poverty and

ignorance into a relatively civilised state, existing at present in a

merely rudimentary form. She has attained at least to the position of

earning her own living and controlling her own earnings, such as they are.

She has statutory rights against her employer, and a certain measure of

administrative protection in enforcing them. The right to a living wage,

fair conditions of work, and a voice in the collective control over

industry are not yet fully recognised, but are being claimed more and more

articulately, and can less and less be silenced and put aside. The woman

wage-earner indeed appears in many ways socially in advance of the middle

and upper class woman, who is still so often economically a mere parasite.

Woman's work may still be chaotic, but the chaos, we venture to hope,

indicates the throes of a new social birth, not the disintegration of

decay.

Among much that is sad, tragic and disgraceful in the industrial

exploitation of women, there is emerging this fact, fraught with deepest

consolation: the woman herself is beginning to think. Nothing else at long

last can really help her; nothing else can save us all. There are now an

increasing number of women workers who do not sink their whole energies in

the petty and personal, or restrict their aims to the earning and

spending what they need for themselves and those more or less dependent on

them. They are able to appreciate the newer wants of society, the claim

for more leisure and amenity of life, for a share in the heritage of

England's thought and achievements, for better social care of children,

for the development of a finer and deeper communal consciousness. This is

the new spirit that is beginning to dawn in women.

CHAPTER I.

SKETCH OF THE EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL

REVOLUTION.

The traces of women in economic and industrial history are unmistakable,

but the record of their work is so scattered, casual, and incoherent that

it is difficult to derive a connected story therefrom. We know enough,

however, to disprove the old misconception that women's industrial work is

a phenomenon beginning with the nineteenth century.

It seems indeed not unlikely that textile industry, perhaps also

agriculture and the taming of the smaller domestic animals, were

originated by women, their dawning intelligence being stimulated to

activity by the needs of children. Professor Karl Pearson in his

interesting essay, _Woman as Witch_, shows that many of the folklore

ceremonies connected with witchcraft associate the witch with symbols of

agriculture, the pitchfork, and the plough, as well as with the broom and

spindle, and are probably the fossil survivals, from a remote past, of a

culture in which the activities of the women were relatively more

prominent than they are now. The witch is a degraded form of the old

priestess, cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, and preserving

in spells and incantations such wisdom as early civilisation possessed. In

Thüringen, Holda or Holla is a goddess of spinning and punishes idle

persons. Only a century ago the women used to sing songs to Holla as they

dressed their flax. In Swabia a broom is carried in procession on Twelfth

Night, in honour of the goddess Berchta. The "wild women" or spirits

associated with wells or springs are frequently represented in legends as

spinning; they come to weddings and spin, and their worship is closely

connected with the distaff as a symbol.

Women are also the first architects; the hut in widely different parts of

the world--among Kaffirs, Fuegians, Polynesians, Kamtchatdals--is built by

women. Women are everywhere the primitive agriculturists, and work in the

fields of Europe to-day. Women seem to have originated pottery, while men

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 demonstration

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 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 primitive 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

industrial 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 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. 2-1/2d. a day, or 4-1/2d. if without board. At a later

period, 1546-1582, 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 producing a texture by means of intertwining a loose thread across a

fixed warp. Any such device, however rude, must involve a degree of

culture much above mere savagery, and probably resulted from a long

process 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 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! 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 _naïveté_:

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

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 translated 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, backward, wasteful, and comparatively unskilled

in technique. 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 considerable degree of excellence in the cities and

monasteries. 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, describing

"webs woven with shuttles, filled with threads of 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 largely carried on in cottages as a bye-industry in

conjunction with agriculture. Bücher 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 Parvulorum_ 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 interesting illustration showing a queen and two

maidens; 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, 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 convenient 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 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 coarse 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 household 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.[4] 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 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, Brawdesters 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 impeachment 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 sometimes cloth-makers (see 4 Edw. IV. c. 1), 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

fourteenth 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 home

and hired out. It was ordered that henceforward 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 continue 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 seventeenth 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 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,[5] ignore women as textile workers altogether; the only women

mentioned in this assessment are agricultural workers and domestic

servants. Nevertheless, old accounts of the seventeenth 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, unqualified 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 unscrupulous

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, 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 widespread 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. Apprentice 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 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 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 instances of girls being apprenticed.

There were also women who, though unapprenticed, 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 company,

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 inheritance 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-earners. 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 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 Gloucestershire in search of

water-power for his fulling mills or finer wool for his weavers, or

forsook the manufacturing 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 regulations intended to prevent the masters giving out wool to the

weavers in other parts so long as there were 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

organisation 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 legislation was devoted to the protection

of the town manufacture 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 increased 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.

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.[6] 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 2-1/2d. 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 10d.), 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 1s. 4d. without. In 1713 at the same place spinsters

were to have not above 1s. a week, or 2s. 6d. if without board, which

again compares very unfavourably 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

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."[7] 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

consisteth 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 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 craftsmen, 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 consumption 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 grievously

exploited, and the reduction of the craftsman 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 handicraft 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 5s. a week, and many women earning as much.[8]

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 about 1s.

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 sometimes 1/2d. 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

described 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 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

recognition and self-determination than formerly.[9]

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.[10]

_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 watching her at work he

acquired a mastery of the mesh or stitch, and anger at her being so

engrossed with her 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 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 unwrought, as

they were wont to bring heretofore, to the final destruction of the said

mysteries and occupations, 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, 1 Rich. III. c. 10, and 1 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 Derbyshire 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 manufacture 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.

In Macclesfield silk-throwing 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 7s. a week, the women doublers 3s. 6d., children 6d. to 1s.

The manufacture of broad silk was established 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 journeywomen.

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 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 1d. a day, and were assisted by four

girls at 3/4d. a day, men being employed at the same time at 1-1/2d. 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 recorded. In 1770 Arthur

Young found women working in lead mines and earning as much as 1s. a day,

a man earning 1s. 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

Burslem, 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

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. 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!

Alle von hinnen!

Hurtig hinab!

Aus den neuen Schachten

schafft mir das Gold!

Euch grüsst die Geissel,

grabt ihr nicht rasch!

Das keiner mir müssig

bürge mir Mime,

sonst birgt er sich schwer

meines Armes Schwunge:

* * *

Zögert ihr noch?

Zaudert wohl gar?

Zittre und zage,

gezähmtes 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 therefore

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 were really a coarse kind of woollen stuff,

and not cotton at all. Cotton wool had, it is true, been imported 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 overseers to "set

the poor on work." The first authoritative 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 therefore 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, 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 inventors,

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 Manchester, was occupied by between

fifty and sixty farmers; rents did not usually exceed 10s. 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 10s. 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," according to Radcliffe, was

the profit on labour at the handwheel. It took six to eight hands to

prepare and 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

description 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

occupied. It is said that families at this period used to bring home 40s.,

60s., 80s., 100s., or even 120s. 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

furniture, china, and plated ware, were acquired by these 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 introduction 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 Arkwright must invent a weaving mill. The Manchester men all

declared this to be impossible, and gave Cartwright 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

Stockport, which were soon copied in other towns of Lancashire. 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,

Lancashire_, 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.

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 11 | 3 2 | 1 4 |

|Average weekly sum a | | | | |

| good weaver could earn | 26 0 | 11 8 | 12 7 | 5 4 |

|Sum a family of 6, 3 being| | | | |

| weavers, could earn. | 52 0 | 23 4 | 28 3-3/4| 12 0 |

|Indispensable weekly | | | | |

| expenses 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 1 | 23 0-3/4| 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 information 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 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.[11] 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.'"[12] 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 misconduct 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, subscribe

to publications, and pass through life with much of humble

respectability."[13]

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 remunerative, 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. 531), 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 movement 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 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 : 15s. in

1794, £2 in 1796, £1 : 16s. 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 agreement. 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 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 impoverishment 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, took evidence from disconsolate

broken-hearted men, who showed that their earnings were utterly inadequate

for family subsistence 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 combing 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 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 suffering, 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 conceives 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 difficulties, 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 use 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 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 restricted 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 environment, 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

themselves 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 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 beneficial 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-Gävernitz 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 work in

factories, and could seldom or never be induced to go back again? How are

we to account for the extraordinarily different views of men of the same

period, intelligent, kind-hearted, and with fair opportunities of judging

the facts of social life? I am far from expecting to solve these questions

entirely, but a few considerations may be helpful. In the first place we

have to remember that the change brought about by the great industry and

the factory system was so far-reaching and so complex that it was

impossible for any one human brain at once to grasp the whole. Thus it

happened that one set of facts would appeal strongly to one observer, and

another set, equally strongly, to another observer. Each would overlook

what to the other was of the greatest importance. Political sentiment also

counted for a good deal, the landed interest (mostly Tories) being

extremely keen-sighted to any wrongdoing of the manufacturers and their

friends (mostly Liberal), while these last were not slow to reciprocate

with equally faithful criticism. By taking the optimists alone, or the

reformers alone, we get a consistent but inadequate view of industrial

conditions. By combining them we arrive at a contradictory, unsatisfactory

picture, which may, however, be somewhat nearer the truth than either can

give us alone.

It is also necessary to bear in mind the unspoken assumptions, the

background, so to speak, existing in any writer's brain. It would make a

great difference in a man's view of social conditions in 1825, say, if he

was mentally contrasting them with the terrible scarcity and poverty that

prevailed at the turn of the century, or if his recollections were mainly

occupied with that bright period of prosperity enjoyed by the weavers some

years earlier, a prosperity brief indeed, but lasting long enough to make

a profound impression on the minds of those who shared in or witnessed it.

Another consideration which is of use in clearing up the chaos of

historical evidence on these questions, is the immense variety in

conditions from one factory to another. This is the case even at the

present day, when the Factory Act requires a certain minimum of decency

and comfort. The factory inspectors record the extraordinary difference

still existing in these respects, and, as a personal experience, the

present writer well remembers the extreme contrast between two match

factories visited some years ago at a very short interval; the one

crowded, gloomy, with weary, exhausted, slatternly-looking girls doing

perilous work in a foul atmosphere; the other with ample space, light, and

ventilation, the workers cleanly dressed, and supplied with the best

appliances known to make the work safe and harmless. Such an experience is

some guide in helping the modern student to comprehend more or less why

Fielden wrote of _The Curse of the Factory System_, while Ure could

maintain: "The fine spinning mills at Manchester ... in the beauty,

delicacy and ingenuity of the machines have no parallel among the works of

man nor _in the orderly arrangement_, and the value of the products."

There is no doubt that the early factories were often run by men who,

whatever their energy, thrift, and ability for business, did not mostly

possess the qualities necessary to a man who is to have the control,

during at least half the week, of a crowd of workers, many of them women

and children. Men like Owen and Arkwright were working out a technique and

a tradition, not only for the mechanical side, but for the human side of

this new business of employment on a large scale. But not all employers

were Owens or even Arkwrights. P. Gaskell writes: "Many of the first

successful manufacturers were men who had their origin in the rank of mere

operatives, or who had sprung from the extinct class of yeomen.... The

celerity with which some of these individuals accumulated wealth in the

early times of steam spinning and weaving, is proof that they were men of

quick views, great energy of character, and possessing no small share of

sagacity ... but they were men of very limited general information--men

who saw and knew little of anything beyond the demand for their twist or

cloth, and the speediest and best modes for their production. They were,

however, from their acquired station, men who exercised very considerable

influence upon the hordes of workmen who became dependent upon them."

Here Gaskell has brought out a point which is singularly ignored by the

writers of what may be called the optimistic school. We may fully agree

with these last in their contention that the working class benefited by

the increased production, higher wages, and cheapened goods secured by the

factory system, or "great industry," as it is called. But they overlook

the point of the immense power that system put into the hands of

individual masters, over the lives, and moral and physical health of

workers. For the whole day long, and sometimes for the night also, the

operative was in the factory; the temperature of the air he breathed, the

hours he worked, the sanitary and other conditions of his work were

settled by those in control of the works, who were not responsible in any

way to any external supervising authority for the conditions of

employment, save to the very limited extent required by the early Factory

Acts, which were ineffectively administered. In a curious passage the

elder Cooke Taylor, who was in many ways a most careful and intelligent

observer, shows how completely he fails to grasp the position:

A factory is an establishment where several workmen are collected

together for the purpose of obtaining greater and cheaper conveniences

for labour than they could procure individually at their homes; for

producing results by their combined efforts, which they could not

accomplish separately.... The principle of a factory is that each

labourer, working separately, is controlled by some associating

principle, which directs his producing powers to effecting a common

result, which it is the object of all collectively to attain.

Factories are therefore a result of the universal tendency to

association which is inherent in our nature, and by the development of

which every advance in human improvement and human happiness has been

gained.

Every sentence here is true; but the combined effect is not true. Taylor

ingenuously omits one important fact. The "associating principle" is the

employer working for his own hand, and the "common result" is that

employer's profit. Marx saw that the subordination of the workman to the

uniform motion of machines, and the bringing together of individuals of

both sexes and all ages gave rise to a system of elaborate discipline,

dividing the workers into operatives and overlookers, into "private

soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army." But it is not necessary to

call in the rather suspect authority of Marx. Richards, the Factory

Inspector, who by no means took a sentimental view of mill work, had

written quite candidly:

A steam engine in the hands of an interested or avaricious master is a

relentless power, to which old and young are equally bound to submit.

Their position in these mills is that of thraldom; fourteen, fifteen,

or sixteen hours per day, is exhausting to the strength of all, yet

none dare quit the occupation, from the dread of losing work

altogether. Industry is thus in bonds; unprotected children are

equally bound to the same drudgery.[14]

This cast-iron regularity of the factory system was felt as a terrible

hardship, especially in the case of women, and often amounted to actual

slavery.

Wholesale accusations were brought against the factory system as being in

itself immoral and a cause of depravity. Southey said of the factory

children, that:

The moral atmosphere wherein they live and move and have their being

is as noxious to the soul, as the foul and tainted air which they

inhale is to their bodily constitution.... What shall we say then of a

system which ... debases all who are engaged in it?... It is a wen, a

fungous excrescence from the body politic.

Here we may as well admit that the agitators, though possibly right in

their facts, did not represent them in a true perspective. Perhaps the

worst feature of working-class life at this time was the scandalous state

of housing. The manufacturing towns had grown up rapidly to meet a sudden

demand. The progress of enclosing, the decay of home industry, and the

call of capital for labour in towns had caused a considerable displacement

of population. The immigrants had to find house-room in the outskirts of

what had but lately been mere villages. Sanitary science was backward, and

municipal government was decadent and could not cope with the rush to the

towns. The immigrant population and the existing social conditions were of

a type favourable to a rapid increase in numbers, economic independence at

an early age not unnaturally tending towards unduly early marriage and

irresponsibility of character. Dr. Aikin writes:

As Manchester may bear comparison with the metropolis itself in the

rapidity with which whole new streets have been raised, and in its

extension on every side toward the surrounding country; so it

unfortunately vies with, or exceeds the metropolis, in the closeness

with which the poor are crowded in offensive, dark, damp, and

incommodious habitations, a too fertile source of disease.[15]

There is abundant evidence of equally bad conditions in other towns. Such

circumstances are inevitably demoralising, and they served to give the

impression that the factory population, as such, was extraordinarily wild

and wicked. But these particular evils were not specially due to the

factory system. In the matter of sanitation and housing there can be

little doubt that the rural population was no better, perhaps even worse

cared-for than the urban or industrial, the main difference of course

being that neglect of cleanliness and elementary methods of sewage

disposal are less immediate and disastrous evils among a sparse and

scattered population than they are in towns.

Much has been written and spoken about the evils of factory life in

withdrawing the mother from the home, and causing neglect of children and

infants. Yet even this, an evil which no one would desire to minimise, is

not peculiar to factory towns. A report on the state of the Agricultural

Population says that:

Even when they have been taught to read and write, the women of the

agricultural labouring class (viz. in Wilts, Devon, and Dorset), are

in a state of ignorance affecting the daily welfare and comfort of

their families. Ignorance of the commonest things, needlework,

cooking, and other matters of domestic economy, is described as

universally prevalent.... A girl brought up in a cottage until she

marries is generally ignorant of nearly everything she ought to be

acquainted with for the comfortable and economic management of a

cottage ... a young woman goes into the fields to labour, with which

ends all chance of improving her position; she marries and brings up

her daughters in the same ignorance, and their lives are a repetition

of her own.

Material progress had completely outdistanced the social side of

civilisation. It was easy to see that old-fashioned restrictions on

commerce needed to be swept away, as a trammel and a hindrance; but where

was the constructive effort and initiative to shape the new fabric of

society that should supply the people's needs?

It was the misfortune of the factory system that it took its sudden

start at a moment when the entire energies of the British legislature

were preoccupied with the emergencies of the French Revolution.... The

foundations on which it reposes were laid in obscurity and its early

combinations developed without attracting the notice of statesmen or

philosophers.... There thus crept into unnoticed existence a closely

condensed population, under modifying influences the least understood,

for whose education, religious wants, legislative and municipal

protection, no care was taken and for whose physical necessities the

more forethought was requisite, from the very rapidity with which men

were attracted to these new centres. To such causes may be referred

the incivilisation and immorality of the overcrowded manufacturing

towns.[16]

It is curious to compare the criminal neglect here indicated with the

self-complacency of the governing classes of this country, and the immense

claims for admiration and respect often put forth on account of their

control of home and local administration. In this tremendous crisis in the

social life of the country, the complex changes of the industrial

revolution, the classes in power sat by, apathetic and uninterested,

taking little or no pains to cope with the problem, or interfered merely

with harsh or even cruel repression of the workers' efforts to combine for

self-defence. Although Dr. Percival and Dr. Ferrier had drawn attention to

the disease and unhealthy conditions existing in factories as far back as

1784 and 1796, it was not until 1833 that a Factory Act was passed

containing any administrative provisions that could be deemed effective.

Public health measures came later still. Much as the industrial employers

were abused by the landowners, it is a fact that reforms and ameliorative

projects were started originally by the former. Sir Robert Peel, who owned

cotton factories, was the pioneer of factory legislation, and Robert Owen

gave the impetus to industrial reform by the humanity and ability that

characterised his management of his own mill, and the generosity of his

treatment of his own employees.

_The Woman Wage-Earner._--The initiation of the factory system undoubtedly

fixed and defined the position of the woman wage-earner. For good or for

evil, the factory system transformed the nature of much industrial work,

rendering it indefinitely heterogeneous, and incidentally opening up new

channels for the employment, first, unfortunately, of children, afterwards

of women.

In the case of spinning, the division of work between men and women was

attended with considerable complications, and it appears that the masters

confidently expected to employ women in greater proportions than was

actually feasible. A comparison of the evidence by masters and men

respectively given before the Select Committee on Artizans and Machinery

throws some interesting sidelights on the question, though it does not

make it absolutely clear. Dunlop, a Glasgow master, had frequent disputes

with the "combination" as the union was then called. He built a new mill

with machinery which he hoped would make it unnecessary to employ men at

all. In a few years he was, however, again employing men as before, and

his account of the matter was that this change of front was due to the

violence of the men's unions. Two of the operative leaders, however, came

up at a later stage to protest against Dunlop's version. They showed that

the persistent violence attributed to the men really narrowed down to a

single case of assault some years before, when there was not sufficient

evidence to commit the men accused. They denied the alleged opposition to

women's employment and declared that there was absolutely no connexion

between the outrage complained of and the substitution of men for women,

which had in fact been effected by Dunlop's sons during his absence in

America, and was due to the fact that the women could not do as much or as

good work on the spinning machines as men could. Dunlop also had given an

exaggerated account of the wages paid, making no allowance for stoppage

and breakdown of machinery, which were frequent.

A few years later we find some interesting evidence as to the efforts of

further developments in spinning machinery. A Mr. Graham told the Select

Committee on Manufactures and Commerce that he was introducing self-acting

mules, and did not yet know whether women could be adapted to their use,

but hoped to get rid of "all the spinners who are making exorbitant

wages," and employ piecers only, giving one of the piecers a small

increase in wages. He was also employing a number of women upon a

different description of wheels, and others in throstle spinning.

According to him the women got about 18s. a week, a statement which it

would probably be wise to discount. Being asked whether the self-acting

mules or the spinning by women would be cheapest, he replied that it was

hoped the spinning by self-acting mules would be cheapest, as even the

women were combining and giving trouble. In 1838, Doherty, a labour man,

showed that although women were allowed to spin in Manchester, "whole

mills of them," the number was being reduced, the physical strength of

women being insufficient to work the larger wheels which had come into

use. It is useful to obtain some idea of the views of the employing class

at a time of such complex changes, and it seems evident that some at least

were almost taken off their feet by the exciting prospects opening out to

them, and hoped to dispense very largely with skilled male labour, or even

with adult labour altogether.

At the present time though there have been great developments in

machinery, spinning is the one large department of the cotton industry in

which men still exceed women in numbers. The employment of women in

ring-spinning is increasing, but there are special counts which can only

be done on the mule, which is beyond the woman's strength and skill.

Between 1901 and 1911 male cotton-spinners increased in numbers 31 per

cent, female 60 per cent. The totals were in 1911 respectively 84,000 and

55,000.

The introduction of the power-loom was a very important event in the

history of women's employment. Even in 1840 a woman working a power-loom

could do "twice as much" as a man with a hand-loom, and the assistant

commissioner who made this observation added the prophecy that in another

generation women only would be employed, save a few men for the necessary

superintendence and care of the machinery. "There will be no weavers as a

class; the work will be done by the wives of agricultural labourers or

different mechanics." Gaskell, a writer who gave much thought and

consideration to the problems before his eyes, and saw a good deal more

than many of his contemporaries, also thought that machinery would soon

reach a point at which "automata" would have done away with the need of

adult workmen.

He says, however, on another page, that "since steam-weaving became

general the number of adults engaged in the mills has been progressively

advancing inasmuch as very young children are not competent to take charge

of steam-looms. The individuals employed at them are chiefly girls and

young women, from sixteen to twenty-two."

Gaskell attributed the employment of women in factories, not so much to

their taking less wages, as to their being more docile and submissive than

men.

Out of 800 weavers employed in one establishment, and which was ...

composed indiscriminately, of men, women, and children--the one whose

earnings were the most considerable, was a girl of sixteen.... The

mode of payment ... is payment for work done--piece-work as it is

called.... Thus this active child is put upon more than a par with the

most robust adult; is in fact placed in a situation decidedly

advantageous compared to him.... Workmen above a certain age are

difficult to manage.... Men who come late into the trade, learn much

more slowly than children ... and as all are paid alike, so much per

pound, or yard, it follows that these men ... are not more efficient

labourers than girls and boys, and much less manageable.... Adult male

labour having been found difficult to manage and not more

productive--its place has, in a great measure, been supplied by

children and women; and hence the outcry which has been raised with

regard to infant labour, in its moral and physical bearings.

This passage, involved as it is in thought and expression, is not without

interest as a reflection of the mind of that time, painfully working out

contemporary problems. Gaskell confuses women's labour with child labour,

and it is difficult to discover from this book that he has ever given any

thought to the former problem at all. The family for him is the social

unit, and women are classed with children as beings for whom the family as

a matter of course provides. He omits from consideration the woman thrown

upon her own exertions, and the grown-up girl, who, even if living at

home, must earn. It is not difficult to find other instances of similar

_naïveté_; thus in the supplementary Report on Child Labour in Factories,

it was gravely suggested that it may be wrong to be much concerned because

women's wages are low.

Nature effects her own purpose wisely and more effectually than could

be done by the wisest of men. The low price of female labour makes it

the most profitable as well as the most agreeable occupation for a

female to superintend her own domestic establishment, and her low

wages do not tempt her to abandon the care of her own children.

Here again, there is apparently no perception of the case of the woman,

who, by sheer economic necessity, is forced to work, whether for herself

alone, or for her children also.

It is hardly necessary to remark that the estimate quoted above, according

to which the girl weaving on a power-loom could do twice as much as a man

on a hand-loom, has since been enormously exceeded. Schultz-Gävernitz in

1895 thought that a power-loom weaver accomplished about as much as forty

good hand-weavers, and no doubt even this estimate is now out of date.

Partly for technical, partly for other reasons, the woman's presence in

the factory is now much more taken for granted.

The girl who is to be a weaver begins work usually at twelve years old,

the minimum age permitted by law, and may spend six weeks with a relation

or friends learning the ways. She thus becomes a "tenter" or "helper," and

fetches the weft, carries away the finished goods, sweeps and cleans. At

thirteen or fourteen she may have two looms to mind, and will earn about

12s. a week. At sixteen she will be promoted to three looms, and later on

to four, beyond which women seldom go; a man sometimes minds six looms,

but needs a helper for this extra strain. The work needs considerable

skill and attention. Often a four-loom weaver will be turning out four

different kinds of cloth on the four looms. It is also fatiguing, as she

is on her feet the whole ten hours of her legal day, sometimes,

unfortunately, lengthened by the objectionable practice known as

"time-cribbing," which means that ten or even fifteen minutes are taken

from the legal meal times, and added to the working hours. It takes some

years to become an efficient weaver, and the drain on the weaver's

strength and vitality is considerable. Where steaming is used, colds and

rheumatism are very prevalent. It is noticed by the weavers that the

sickness rate is lower in times of bad trade, and indeed slack seasons are

regarded as times for much-needed recuperation. Women, although they equal

or here and there even excel men in skill and quickness, fail in staying

power. Many get fagged out by three o'clock in the afternoon. The great

increase in speed is also a factor in sickness. Weavers are now said to be

doing as much work in a day as in a day and a half twelve or thirteen

years ago, and the wages have increased, but not proportionately. The work

involves not only physical, but mental strain, and many cases of nervous

break-down and anaemia are known to occur among weavers. It should not be

forgotten that many women and girls have domestic work to do after their

day's work in the mill is over, and the high standard of comfort and

"house pride" in Lancashire makes this a considerable addition.

Another large class of women cotton operatives are the card-room workers,

officially described as "card-and blowing-room operatives." In this

department men and women do different work. The men do the more dangerous,

more unhealthy, and also the better paid work. Women's work also is

dangerous, and unhealthy from the dust and cotton fibre that pervade the

atmosphere. An agitation is on foot to have a dust-extractor fixed to

every carding-engine. The operatives suffer chiefly from excessive speed

and pressure. They are continually pressed to keep the machines going, and

not to stop them even for necessary cleaning, and I am assured by a

card-room operative that in the card-room the highest percentage of

accidents for the week occurs on Friday, when the principal weekly

cleaning takes place, and the lowest on Monday, when cleaning is not

required; also that the highest percentage of accidents during the day

occurs on an average between 10 A.M. and 12 noon, when the dirtiest parts

of the machinery are usually wiped over. The chief cause of these

accidents is cleaning while the machinery is in motion. The present rate

of speed produces extreme exhaustion in the workers, and some consider

that card-room work is altogether too hard for women, and not suitable to

their physical capacity. It is said to be done entirely by men in

America.

The male weaver is by no means extinct, as the prophets we have quoted

seemed to expect. Cotton-weaving offers the very unusual, perhaps unique

example of a large occupation employing both man and woman, and on equal

terms. The earnings of the male weaver are, however, very inferior to

those of the spinner, and he cannot unaided support a family without being

considerably straitened, according to the Lancashire standard. But, in

point of fact, a weaver when he marries usually marries a woman who is

also working at a mill, and if she is a weaver her earnings are very

likely as good as his. In this industry women attain to very nearly as

great skill and dexterity as do men; in some branches even greater. In

Lancashire the standard of working-class life and comfort is high, and a

woman whose husband is a weaver will not brook that her next-door

neighbour, whose husband may be a spinner or machine-maker, should dress

their children better, or have better window-curtains than she can. She

continues to work at her own trade, and the two incomes are combined until

the woman is temporarily prevented working at the mill. An interval of

some months may be taken off by a weaver for the birth of her baby, but

she will return to the mill afterwards, and again after a second; at the

third or fourth child she usually retires from industry. Later on the

children begin earning. Thus the male weaver's most difficult and troubled

times are when his children are quite young, his wife temporarily

incapacitated, and his earnings their sole support. When both husband and

wife are earning, their means are good relatively to their standard; and

again as the young people grow up, the combined income of the family may

be even ample. The young children whose mother is absent at work are

looked after in the day-time by a grandmother, or by a neighbour who is

paid for the work. It was stated, half-ironically, perhaps, before the

Labour Commission that there was a "standard list for this sort of

business." Opinions differ as to whether the children are or are not

neglected under this system. There is, however, evidence to show that many

Lancashire women, at least among those who are relatively well paid, are

good mothers and good housekeepers even though they work their ten hours a

day. They go to work because their standard of life is high, and they

cannot live up to it without working.

_The Industrial Revolution in Non-Textile Trades._--This subject, though

sociologically of great interest, cannot here be treated at length; it

must suffice to indicate a few points in regard to women, trusting that

some later writer will some day paint for England a finished picture on

the scale of Miss Butler's fine study "Women and the Trades," of

Pittsburgh, U.S.A.

The factory system has now invaded one manufacturing industry after

another, and the use of power and division of work in numerous processes

have opened a considerable amount of employment to women. There have been

two lines of development; on the one hand, occupations have been opened

for women in trades with which previously they had nothing, or very little

to do; on the other hand, industries hitherto almost entirely in the hands

of women, and carried on chiefly in homes or small workrooms or shops,

such as dressmaking, the making of underclothing, laundry work and so on,

have been to some extent changed in character, and have in part become

factory industries of the modern type.

In 1843 the sub-commissioner who investigated Birmingham industries for

the Children's Employment Commission, was struck by the extent of women's

and children's employment. Very large numbers of children were employed in

a great variety of manufacturing processes, and women's labour was being

substituted for men's in many branches. In all trades there were at the

same time complaints of want of employment and urgent distress, involving

large numbers of mechanics. Mr. Grainger saw women employed in laborious

work, such as stamping buttons and brass nails, and notching the heads of

screws, and considered these to be unfit occupations for women. In screw

manufactories the women and girls constituted 80 to 90 per cent of the

whole number employed. A considerable number of girls, fourteen and

upwards, were employed in warehouses packing the goods, giving in and

taking out work. Non-textile industries were as yet quite unregulated, and

many of the reports made to this commissioner indicate very bad conditions

as to health and morals. The sanitary conditions were atrocious, except

where the employers were specially conscientious and gave attention to the

subject; there was little protection against accident, and child-labour

was permitted at very early years. Most of the abuses noted had to do

either with insanitary conditions or with child-labour. The women and

girls are described as having been often twisted or injured by premature

employment, and as being totally without education. One witness who gave

evidence considered that the lack of education was more disastrous for

girls than for boys.

In 1864 the Children's Employment Commission found that the number and

size of large factories had grown since 1841, and the number of women in

the Birmingham district employed in metal manufactures was estimated at

10,000.

In 1866, when the British Association visited Birmingham, Mr. S. Timmins

prepared a series of reports on local industries, the index of which gives

no less than thirty-six references to women, which is some indication how

widely they were employed. In the steel pen trade, for instance, which had

developed from a small trade in hand-made pens, costing several shillings

each, into a large factory industry, numbers of girls and women were

employed, and a comparatively small proportion of men. In 1866, there were

estimated to be 360 men, 2050 women and girls employed in Birmingham

pen-works. Women were employed extensively in the light chain trade, also

in lacquering in the brass trade, and in many other occupations.

Successive censuses show very rapid increases in the employment of women

in the metal trades generally, though, of course, they bear a much lower

proportion to men in these trades taken as a whole than in the textile

trades.

Similar developments are taking place in food and tobacco trades, soap,

chemicals, paper and stationery. The boot and shoe trade is a good example

of the rapid opening-out of opportunities for women's employment. At the

time of the Labour Commission (1893) it was noted that Bristol factories

were mostly not up to date or efficient. Since that time there has been a

rapid extension of factory work for women, and the methods in the boot and

shoe trade have been revolutionised by the introduction of the power

sewing-machine, and by production on a large scale. The new factories in

or near Bristol have lofty rooms, modern improved sanitary and warming

apparatus, and the best are carefully arranged with a view to maintaining

the health and efficiency of the workers.

In 1903 a committee of the Economic Section of the British Association

found in Sheffield that machinery had been displacing file cutlery made by

hand for fifteen years past, and some women were already finding

employment on the lighter machines. In Coventry the cycle industry

employed an increasing number of women; watchmaking was becoming a factory

industry, and the proportion of women to men had increased rapidly. Women

are even employed in some processes subsidiary to engineering, such as

core-making. But it should be remembered that these openings for women do

not necessarily mean permanent loss of work for men, though some temporary

loss there no doubt very often is. The rearrangement of industry and the

subdivision of processes mean that new processes are appropriated to

women; and it is likely enough that among factory operatives women are,

and will be, an increasing proportion. But therewith must come an

increasing demand for men's labour in mining, smelting and forging metal,

and in other branches into which women are unlikely to intrude.

In the clothing trades the industrial revolution has made some way, and is

doubtless going to make still more way, but it is unlikely that the

older-fashioned methods of tailoring and dressmaking can ever be

superseded as completely as was the hand-loom weaving in the cotton trade.

Dress is a matter of individual taste and fancy, and much as the

factory-made clothing and dressmaking has improved in the last ten or

twenty years, it is unlikely ever to supply the market entirely.

Stay-making is a rapidly developing factory industry at Bristol, Ipswich

and elsewhere. In underclothing and children's clothing also the factory

system is making considerable advances. It is startling to see babies'

frocks or pinafores made on inhuman machines moved by power, with rows of

fixed needles whisking over the elaborate tucks; but if the resulting

article be both good and cheap, and the women operatives paid much better

than they would be for the same number of hours' needlework, sentimental

objections are perhaps out of place.

In such factories as I have been permitted to visit, mostly non-textile, I

have noticed that men and women are usually doing, not the same, but

different kinds of work, and that the work done by women seems to fall

roughly into three classes. My classification is probably quite

unscientific, and indicates merely a certain social order perceived or

conceived by an observer ignorant of the technical side of manufacturing

and chiefly interested in the social or sociological aspect. In the first

place, there is usually some amount of rough hard work in the preparing

and collecting of the material, or the transporting it from one part of

the factory to another. Such work is exemplified by the rag-cutting in

paper-mills, fruit-picking in jam factories, the sorting soiled clothes in

laundries, the carrying of loads from one room to another, and such odd

jobs. I incline to think that the arrangements made for dealing with this

class of work are a very fair index to the character and ability of the

employer. In good paper-mills, for instance, though nothing could make

rag-cutting an attractive job, its objectionable features are mitigated by

a preliminary cleansing of the rags, and by good ventilation in the work.

In ill-managed factories of various kinds the carrying of heavy loads is

left to the women workers' unaided strength, and is a most unpleasing

sight to those who do not care to see their sisters acting as beasts of

burden, not to mention that heavy weight-carrying is often highly

injurious, provoking internal trouble. In the case of trays of boiling

fruit, jam, etc., it may lead to horrible accidents. In well-managed

factories this carrying of loads is arranged for by mechanical means or a

strong porter is retained for the purpose.

The second class of work noticed as being done by women is work done on

machines with or without power, and this includes a whole host of

employments and an endless variety of problems. Machine tending,

press-work, stamp-work, metal-cutting, printing, various processes of

brass work, pen-making, machine ironing in laundries, the making of

"hollow ware" or tin pots and buckets of various kinds; such are a few of

the kinds of work that occur to me. Many of them have the interesting

characteristic of forming a kind of borderland or marginal region where

men and women, by exception, do the same kinds of work. It is in these

kinds of work that difficulties occur in imperfectly organised trades; it

is here that the employer is constantly pushing the women workers a little

further on and the male workers a little further off; it is here that

controversies rage over what is "suitable to women," and that

recriminations pass between trade unions and enterprising employers. These

kinds of work may be very hard, or very easy, they may need skill and

afford some measure of technical interest, or they may be merely dull and

monotonous, efficiency being measured merely by speed; they may be badly

paid, but on the other hand they include some of the best paid of women's

industrial occupations. They are in a continual state of flux, responding

to every technical advance, and change in methods; they represent the

industrial revolution at its tensest and most critical point. And to

conclude, it is here that organisation for women is most necessary and

desirable in the interests of all classes.

The third kind of work noted by the detached observer is more difficult to

define in a word; it consists in the finishing and preparing goods for

sale, and in the various kinds of work known as warehouse work. As a

separate class it results mainly from the increasing size of firms and the

quantity of work done. Paper-sorting or overlooking in paper-mills is

typical of this class of work; it consists in separating faulty sheets of

paper from those that are good, and is done at great speed by girls who

have a quick eye and a light touch. It is said to be work that men

entirely fail in, not having sufficiently sensitive finger-tips. In nearly

all factories there is a great deal of this kind of work, monotonous no

doubt, but usually clean in character, and less hard and involving

considerably less strain than either of the two former classes of work. In

confectionery or stationery works, for instance, to mention two only,

troops of girls are seen busily engaged at great speed in making up neat

little packets of the finished article, usually with an advertisement or a

picture put inside. In china or glass works girls may be employed wrapping

the goods in paper, and similar jobs are found in many classes of work. In

a well-known factory in East London where food for pet animals is made or

prepared, I was told some years ago that no girls at all had been employed

until recently, when about forty were taken on for the work of doing up

the finished article in neat packets for sale. It is noticeable that the

girls who are thus employed are usually of a social grade superior to the

two former classes, though they by no means always earn better wages. They

are very frequently the daughters of artisans earning good wages, and

expect to marry in their own class and leave work. The women employed in

the second class of work indicated, viz. chiefly on or about the machines,

are on the whole more enterprising, and more likely to join unions. These

again are socially superior to No. 1. No. 1 class, those who do the rough

hard kind of work, are mainly employed for the sake of cheapness, are

often married women, and are probably doing much the same kinds of work

that were done by women in those trades before the transformation of

industry by machinery. (This is merely an inference of mine, and can

scarcely be proved, but it seems likely to be true.) The more perfectly

the industry develops and becomes organised, the more machinery is used

and different processes are adapted to utilise different classes of

skilled effort, the less need will there be for class No. 1 work to be

done at all.

It should be noted before we leave this subject that No. 2 class work is

especially liable to change and modification, which means change in the

demand for labour, and often means a demand for a different class of

labour, or a different kind of skill. There are some who think

pessimistically that improved machinery must mean a demand for a lower

grade of skill. No doubt it often _has_ meant that, and still does in

instances. But it is far from being universally true. As the hand-press is

exchanged for the power-press, the demand occurs for a worker sufficiently

careful and responsible to be trusted with the new and more valuable

machinery. Again, when a group of processes needing little skill is taken

over by an automatic machine that performs the whole complex of

operations, several unskilled workers will be displaced by one of a higher

grade. The new automatic looms worked by electric power are, I am told,

involving the employment of a class of young women superior in general

intelligence and education to the typical weaver, though not necessarily

so in manual skill.

_Conclusion._--Frau Braun sees in the machine the main cause of the

development of woman's industrial employment.[17] A more recent writer,

Mrs. Schreiner, takes exactly the opposite view:

The changes ... which we sum up under the compendious term "modern

civilisation," have tended to rob woman, not merely in part, but

almost wholly, of the more valuable of her ancient domain of

productive and social labour; and where there has not been a

determined and conscious resistance on her part, have nowhere

spontaneously tended to open out to her new and compensatory fields.

It is this fact which constitutes our modern "Woman's Labour Problem."

Our spinning-wheels are all broken; in a thousand huge buildings

steam-driven looms, guided by a few hundred thousands of hands (often

those of men), produce the clothings of half the world; and we dare no

longer say, proudly, as of old, that we, and we alone clothe our

peoples.[18]

It is a striking instance of the extraordinary complexity of modern

industry that two distinguished writers like Frau Braun and Mrs.

Schreiner, both holding advanced views on the feminist question, should

thus come to opposite conclusions as to the influence of the machine. In a

sense, the opposition is more apparent than real. Mrs. Schreiner is

thinking of production for use by the woman at home, and there is no

question that production for use is being superseded by production for

exchange. Frau Braun, in the passage quoted, is writing of wage-earning

employment. There can be little question that the evolution of machinery

has favoured woman's employment. Woman has no chance against man where

sheer strength is needed; but when mechanical power takes the place of

human muscle, when the hard part is done by the machine, then the child,

the girl, or the woman is introduced. The progressive restriction of

child-labour has also favoured women, so that over the period covered by

the factory statistics, the percentage of women and girls employed has

increased in a very remarkable way.