The Project Gutenberg eBook, Women in Modern Industry, by B. L. Hutchins

WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY

“What is woman but an enemy of friendship, an unavoidable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable affliction, a constantly flowing source of tears, a wicked work of nature covered with a shining varnish?”—Saint Chrysostom.

“And wo in winter tyme with wakying a-nyghtes,
To rise to the ruel to rock the cradel,
Both to kard and to kembe, to clouten and to wasche,
To rubbe and to rely, russhes to pilie
That reuthe is to rede othere in ryme shewe
The wo of these women that wonyeth in Cotes.”[1]
Langland: Piers Ploughman, x. 77.

“Two justices of the peace, the mayor or other head officer of any city (etc.) and two aldermen ... may appoint any such woman as is of the age of 12 years and under the age of 40 years and unmarried and forth of service ... to be retained or serve by the year, week or day for such wages and in such reasonable sort as they shall think meet; and if any such woman shall refuse so to serve, then it shall be lawful for the said justices (etc.) to commit such woman to ward until she shall be bounden to serve.”—Statute of Labourers, 1563.

“Every woman spinner’s wage shall be such as, following her labour duly and painfully, she may make it account to.”—Justices of Wiltshire: Assessment of Wages, 1604.

“Sometimes one feels that one dare not contemplate too closely the life of our working women, it is such a grave reproach.”—Miss Anna Tracey, Factory Inspector, 1913.

“The State has trampled on its subjects for ‘ends of State’; it has neglected them; it is beginning to act consciously for them.... The progressive enrichment of human life and the remedy of its ills is not a private affair. It is a public charge. Indeed it is the one and noblest field of corporate action. The perception of that truth gives rise to the new art of social politics.”—B. Kirkman Gray.

WOMEN IN
MODERN INDUSTRY

BY
B. L. HUTCHINS
AUTHOR OF “CONFLICTING IDEALS” AND (WITH MRS. SPENCER, D.SC.)
“A HISTORY OF FACTORY LEGISLATION”

WITH A CHAPTER CONTRIBUTED BY
J. J. MALLON

LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, Ltd.
1915

PREFACE.

It may be well to give a brief explanation of the scheme of the present work. Part I. was complete in its present form, save for unimportant corrections, before the summer of 1914. The outbreak of war necessitated some delay in publication, after which it became evident that some modification in the scheme and plan of the book must be made. The question was, whether to revise the work already accomplished so as to bring it more in tune with the tremendous events that are fresh in all our minds. For various reasons I decided not to do this, but to leave the earlier chapters as they stood, save for bringing a few figures up to date, and to treat of the effects of the war in a separate chapter. I was influenced in taking this course by the idea that even if the portions written in happy ignorance of approaching trouble should now appear out of date and out of focus, yet future students of social history might find a special interest in the fact that the passages in question describe the situation of women workers as it appeared almost immediately before the great upheaval. Moreover, [Chapter IVa.] contained a section on German women in Trade Unions. I had no material to re-write this section; I did not wish to omit it. The course that seemed best was to leave it precisely as it stood, and the same plan has been adopted with all the pre-war chapters.

The main plan of the book is to give a sketch or outline of the position of working women, with special reference to the effects of the industrial revolution on her employment, taking “industrial revolution” in its broader sense, not as an event of the late eighteenth century, but as a continuous process still actively at work. I have aimed at description rather than theory. Some of the current theories about women’s position are of great interest, and I make no pretence to an attitude of detachment in regard to them, but it certainly appears to me that we need more facts and knowledge before theory can be based on a sure foundation. Here and there I have drawn my own conclusions from what I saw and heard, but these conclusions are mostly provisional, and may well be modified in the light of clearer knowledge.

I am fully conscious of an inadequacy of treatment and of certain defects in form. Women’s industry is a smaller subject than men’s, but it is even more complicated and difficult. There are considerable omissions in my book. I have not, for instance, discussed, save quite incidentally, the subject of the industrial employment of married women or the subject of domestic service, omissions which are partly due to my knowledge that studies of these questions were in process of preparation by hands more capable than mine. There are other omissions which are partly due to the lack or unsatisfactory nature of the material. A standard history of the Industrial Revolution does not yet exist (Monsieur Mantoux’s valuable book covers only the earlier period), and the necessary information has to be collected from miscellaneous sources. In dealing with the effects of war, my treatment is necessarily most imperfect. The situation throughout the autumn, winter, and spring 1914-15, was a continually shifting one, and to represent it faithfully is a most difficult task. Nor can we for years expect to gauge the changes involved. With all our efforts to see and take stock of the social and economic effects of war, we who watch and try to understand the social meanings of the most terrible convulsion in history probably do not perceive the most significant reactions. That the position of industrial women must be considerably modified we cannot doubt; but the modifications that strike the imagination most forcibly now, such as the transference of women to new trades, may possibly not appear the most important in twenty or thirty years’ time. Even so, perhaps, a contemporary sketch of the needs of working women; of the success or failure of our social machinery to supply and keep pace with those needs at a time of such tremendous stress and tension, may not be altogether without interest.

I have to express my great indebtedness to Mr. Mallon, Secretary of the Anti-Sweating League, who has given me the benefit of his unrivalled knowledge and experience in a chapter on women’s wages. I have also to thank Miss Mabel Lawrence, who for a short time assisted me in the study of women in Unions, and both then and afterwards contributed many helpful suggestions to the work she shared with me. To the Labour Department I am indebted for kind and much appreciated permission to use its library; to Miss Elspeth Carr for drawing my attention to the “Petition of the Poor Spinners,” an interesting document which will be found in the Appendix; and to many Trade Union secretaries and others for their kindness in allowing me to interview them and presenting me with documents. Miss Mary Macarthur generously loaned a whole series of the Trade Union League Reports, which were of the greatest service in tracing the early history of the League. I regret that Mr. Tawney’s book on Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Trades; Messrs. Bland, Brown, and Tawney’s valuable collection of documents on economic history; and the collection of letters from working women, entitled “Maternity,” all came into my hands too late for me to make as much use of them as I should have liked to do.

B. L. H.
Hampstead, September 1915.

CONTENTS

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. 2½d. a day, or 4½d. 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 2½d. 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 ½d. 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 ¾d. a day, men being employed at the same time at 1½d. 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.

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.

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.

It is possible to exaggerate the extent of the change made by the industrial revolution in taking women out of the home. We must remember that domestic service, the traditional and long-standing occupation of women, is always carried on away from the home of the worker, and does in fact (as it usually involves residence) divide the worker from her family far more completely than ordinary day work. The instances given in [Chapter I.] also show that not only agriculture, but various other industries, afforded employment to women, long before the industrial revolution, in ways that must have involved “going out to work.” To the working classes it was nothing new to see women work, and, in point of fact, we do not find even the employment of married women exciting much attention or disapproval at the outset of the factory system. In the non-domestic industries the question of the wife taking work for wages was probably then, as mainly it still is, a poverty question. The irregular employment, sickness or incapacity of the male bread-winner that result in earnings insufficient for family maintenance, occurred probably with no less frequency in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than now, and these are causes that at all times drive married women to work, if they can get work to do. The class that felt it most keenly as an evil and a wrong, were the hand-loom weavers whose earnings were so depressed that they could not maintain their families, and found at the same time that the labour of their wives and daughters was more in demand than their own. Where the industry had been carried on by the family working together, and, for a time at least, had been sufficiently lucrative to afford a comparatively high standard of comfort, the disintegration of this particular type of organisation was, not unnaturally, resented as an outrage on humanity. The iron regularity of the factory system, the economic pressure that kept the workers toiling as long as the engines could run, the fixation of hours, were cruel hardships to a class that had formed its habits and traditions in the small self-contained workshop, and made continuous employment a terrible strain on the married woman. As the home centres round the woman, the problem for the working woman has been, and is, one of enormous difficulty, involving considerable restatement of her traditional codes and customs.

Whatever may have been the social misery and disorder brought about by the industrial revolution, one striking result was an increase in the earning power of women. Proof in detail of this statement will be given in [Chapter VI.]; for the present it will suffice to point to the fact. The machine, replacing muscular power and increasing the productivity of industry, does undoubtedly aid the woman in quest of self-dependence. In the era of the great industry she has become to an increasing extent an independent wage-earner. Low as the standard of women’s wages is, there is ample proof that it is on the whole higher under the factory system than under other methods, and as a general rule the larger and more highly organised factory pays higher wages than the smaller, less well-equipped. The cotton industry, which took the lead in introducing the factory system, and is in England by far the most highly organised and efficiently managed among trades in which women predominate, has shown a remarkable rise of wages through the last century, and is now the only large industry in which the average wage of women is comparatively high. Another point is that factory dressmaking, which has developed in comparatively recent years, already shows a higher average wage than the older-fashioned dressmaking carried on in small establishments, and a much smaller percentage of workers paid under 10s. a week. Monsieur Aftalion, in a monograph comparing factory and home work in the French clothing trade, finds wages markedly higher under the factory system. Yet another instance is offered by Italy, where women’s wages are miserably low, yet they are noticeably higher in big factories than in small.

The development of the single young woman’s position through the factory system has been obscured by the abuses incidental to that system, which were due more or less to historical causes outside industry. The absence of any system of control over industrial and sanitary conditions undoubtedly left many factories to become centres of disease, overwork and moral corruption, and the victims of this misgovernment and neglect are a reproach that can never be wiped out. On the other hand, later experience has shown that decent conditions of work are easier to secure in factories than in small work places, owing to greater publicity and facility for inspection. The very fact of the size of the factory, its economic importance, and its almost dramatic significance for social life, caused attention to be drawn to, and wrath to be excited by, evil conditions in the factory, which would have been little noticed in ordinary small work places.

The initiation of the “great industry” resulted in a kind of searchlight being turned on to the dark places of poverty. State interference had to be undertaken, although in flat opposition to the dominant economics of the day, and the better sort of masters were impelled by shame or worthier motives to get rid of the stigma that clung to factory employment. Now the girl-worker has profited by this movement in a quite remarkable degree. Domestic service is no longer her only outlook, and the conditions of domestic service have probably considerably improved in consequence. Her employment is no longer bound up with personal dependence on her own family, or personal servitude in her employer’s.

The wage contract, though not, we may hope, the final or ideal stage in the evolution of woman’s economic position, is an advance from her servile state in the mediaeval working class, or parasitic dependence on the family. The transition thus endows her with greater freedom to dispose of or deny herself in marriage, and is an important step towards higher racial ideals and development. Grievously exploited as her employment has been and still is, the evolution of the woman wage-earner, her gradual achievement of economic individuality and independence, in however limited a degree, is certainly one of the most interesting social facts of the time. The remarkable intelligence and ability of Lancashire working people was noticed by Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton, as long ago as 1848. And to this day the Co-operative Movement and the Trade Union Movement flourish among Lancashire women as they do not anywhere else. The Workers’ Educational Association draws many of its best students from these women who toil their ten hours in the mill and use their brains for study in the evening after work is over.

CHAPTER III.

STATISTICS OF THE LIFE AND EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN.

No very detailed or elaborate statistics will be here employed, the aim of this chapter being merely to draw attention to certain broad facts or relations disclosed by the Census and the Registrar-General’s Report.

The Surplus of Women.—It is a well-known fact that in this country women exceed men in numbers. The surplus increased slightly but steadily from 1851 to 1901, and remained almost stationary from 1901 to 1911. In 1901 and 1911 there were in every 1000 persons 484 males and 516 females. The excess of females varies at different ages. The number of boys born exceeds the number of girls in a proportion not far from 4 per cent, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. But boy infants run greater risks at birth and appear to be altogether more susceptible to adverse influences, for their death-rate is usually higher up to 3, 4 or 5 years old. The age-group 5 to 10 varies from time to time; in 1901-1910 the average mortality of girls was the higher: in 1912 the average mortality of boys was very slightly higher. From 10 to 15 the female death-rate is higher than the male.

The age-group 15 to 20 shows very curious variations in the relative mortality of males and females. From 1894 onwards the males of that group have had a higher mortality than the females, whereas previous to that date the female mortality was the higher, in all years of which we have a record save two—1876 and 1890. The Registrar-General can suggest no explanation of this phenomenon.[19] It may be remarked, however, that girls generally now obtain more opportunity for fresh air and physical exercise than in former years, which may account for some of their comparative improvement in this respect; also that in the industrial districts a great improvement has taken place in the administration of the Factory Act since the appointment of women inspectors and the general raising of the standard after the Act of 1891, and girls may naturally be supposed to have profited more by this improved administration than have youths of the other sex, who are not included under the Act when over 18 years, and in many cases pass into industries unregulated by law.

The following table shows the death-rates per 1000 of male and female persons in England and Wales, 1913, and the ratio of male per cent of female mortality at age periods, as calculated by the Registrar-General.

Death-Rates at Ages, 1913.

As might be expected from these figures, the Census shows that males are in excess of females in very early life, but are gradually overtaken, and in later years especially men are considerably outnumbered by women. The disproportion of women is mainly due to their lower death-rate, but also in part to the fact that so many men go abroad for professional or commercial avocations. Some of these are accompanied by wives or sisters, but a large proportion go alone.

The disproportion of women is more marked in town districts than in rural ones. This may be partly due to the lower infant death-rate in the country, for a high rate of infant mortality on an average affects more boys than girls. But no doubt the large demand for young women’s labour in factories and as domestic servants is another cause of the surplus of women in towns. In rural districts there is a surplus of males over females up to the age of 25. The disproportion of women does not show any marked tendency to increase except among the elderly, the preponderance becoming increasingly marked towards old age. It would overload this chapter too much to give figures illustrating the changes in the last half century; those who wish to make themselves acquainted with the matter can refer to the very full and interesting tables given near the end of Vol. VII. of the Census, 1911.

Marriage.—The preponderance of young women, though not very considerable in figures, is, however, in fact a more effective restriction of marriage than might be expected, because women are by custom more likely to marry young than men, and thus the numbers of marriageable young women at any given date exceed the corresponding numbers of men in a proportion higher than the actual surplus of young women in particular age-groups.

The old-fashioned optimistic assumption that women will all get married and be provided for by their husbands, cannot be maintained. It is possible, however, to be needlessly pessimistic on this head, as in a certain weekly journal which recently proclaimed that “two out of every three women die old maids.” If we are to regard marriage as an occupation (an idea with which, on the whole, I disagree), it is still the most important and extensively followed occupation for women. In 1911 over 6½ millions of women in England and Wales were married, or rather more than one-half the female population over 15; and considerably more than one-half of our women get married some time or other. In middle life, say from 35 to 55, three-fourths of all women are married. In early life a large proportion are single; in later life a large proportion are widows. Or we might put it in another way. From the age of 20 to 35, only two out of every four women are married, nearly all the rest being still single, and a very small proportion widowed; from 35 to 55, three in every four women are married; over 55, less than two in every four are married, most of the others having become widows. The proportion of women married has increased since the previous Census, but has decreased slightly at all ages under 45.

The following table displays the proportion married and widowed per cent of the different age-groups.

If the figures were drawn in curves, it would be seen that the proportion of single women falls rapidly from youth onwards, and is quite small in old age; that the proportion married rises rapidly at first, remaining high for 20 or 30 years, and falls again, forming a broad mound-shaped curve; while the proportion widowed rises all the way to old age.

It will be seen that, even on the assumption that all wives are provided for by their husbands, which is by no means universally true, a very large proportion of women before 35 and after 55 are not thus provided for, and that an unknown but not inconsiderable proportion never marry at all. In the case of the educated middle class, as Miss Collet pointed out in 1892, the surplus of women over men is considerably above the average, and consequently the prospect of marriage is less in this than in the working class. “Granted an equal number of males and females between the ages of 18 and 30, we have not therefore in English society an equal number of marriageable men and women. Wherever rather late marriage is the rule with men—that is, wherever there is a high standard of comfort—the disproportion is correspondingly great. In a district where boy and girl marriages are very common, everybody can be married and be more or less miserable ever after: but in the upper middle class equality in numbers at certain ages implies a surplus of marriageable women over marriageable men.”[20]

In some quarters the adoption of professions, even of the teaching profession, by women, is opposed on the ground that women are thereby drawn away from marriage and home-making. It is difficult to understand how such an objection can be seriously raised in face of the facts of social life. The adoption of occupations by women may in a few cases indicate a preference for independence and single blessedness; but it is much more often due to economic necessity. It is perfectly plain that not all women can be maintained by men, even if this were desirable. The women who have evolved a theory of “economic independence” are few compared with the many who have economic self-dependence forced upon them. Human nature is far too strong to make it credible that any large number of women will deliberately decline the prospect of husband, home and children of their own for the sake of teaching little girls arithmetic or inspecting insanitary conditions in slums. If a woman has to choose between marrying a man she cares for and earning her own bread, I am sentimental enough to believe that nearly all women would choose the former. The choices of real life are seldom quite so simple. When a woman has to choose between an uncongenial marriage and fairly well-paid work, it is quite likely that nowadays she frequently chooses the latter. In former days the choice might easily have been among the alternatives of the uncongenial marriage, the charity, willing or unwilling, of friends and relations, and sheer starvation, not to mention that even the bitter relief of the uncongenial marriage, usually available in fiction, is not always forthcoming in real life. The case grows clearer every year, that women need training and opportunity to be able to support themselves, though not all women will do so throughout life.

Occupation.—If we have any doubt of the fact that there is still “a deal of human nature” in girls and women, we have only to compare the Census statistics of occupation and marriage. We have already seen that the numbers married increase up to 45. As the number married increases the number occupied rapidly falls off. The percentage of women and girls over 15 who are occupied was, in 1911, 35.5; an increase of 1.0 since 1901.

This does not, however, mean that only a little more than one-third of all women enter upon a trade or occupation. In point of fact a very large proportion are workers in early youth, as the following tables show. In order to illustrate the relation of occupation to marriage, we place the two sets of figures side by side.

The highest percentage of employment therefore occurs at the age of 18.

The next table shows the proportions of workers in age-groups.

Women and Girl Workers over Ten Years old.

Over 49 per cent of the total are under 25, and are therefore in ordinary speech more commonly termed girl than women workers. The rise in the proportion married compared with the drop in the proportion occupied as age advances, indicates how strong the hold and attraction of the family is upon women. Conditions in factories are undoubtedly improved; many a girl of 20 or 22, perhaps earning 18s. a week, with her club, her classes, her friends, and an occasional outing, has by no means a “bad time.” On the other hand, the life of the married woman in the working class is often extremely hard, taking into account the large amount of work done by them at home, cooking, cleaning, washing, mending and making of clothes, in the North also baking of bread, tendance of children and of the sick, over and above and all but simultaneously with the bringing of babies into the world. Moreover, the working girl is not under illusions as to the facts of life, as her better-off contemporary still is to some extent. Taking all this into consideration, the Census results shown above form an illuminating testimony to the strength of the fundamental human instincts.

The distribution of women in occupations illustrates both the deeply rooted conservatism of women and, at the same time, the modifying tendency of modern industry. The largest groups of women’s trades are still their traditional activities of household work, the manufacture of stuffs, and the making of stuffs into clothes. Two-thirds of the women occupied are thus employed.

It is convenient to picture to oneself the female working population as three great groups: the domestic group, the textile and clothing group, and the other miscellaneous occupations, which also form about one-third of the total. Now, while it is true that the two former groups, the traditional or conservative occupations of women, are still the largest, they are not, with the exception of textiles, increasing as fast as population, whereas some of the newer occupations, the non-textile industrial processes that have been transformed by machinery and brought within the capacity of women, are, though much smaller in numbers, increasing at a rapid rate. The following table shows the change from 1901 to 1911 in the most important industrial groups including women. It should be read bearing in mind that the increase of the female population over 10 in the same period is 12·6 per cent.

England and Wales, 1901-1911.

But even with the occupations I have dubbed “conservative,” or traditional, modern methods are transforming the nature of the work done by women. The statistical changes in the so-called domestic group are an interesting illustration of the changes we can see going on in the world around us. Note especially the tendency towards a more developed social life outside the home indicated by the large percentage increase in club service, hotel and eating-house service; the tendency to supersede amateur by expert nursing, shown in the large increase in hospital and institutional service; and the slight but perceptible tendency for household work to lose its domestic character. Not only do the charwomen show an increase much larger than that of the group total, while the domestic indoor servant has decreased, but a new sub-heading, “day servants,” has had to be introduced. The laundry is fast becoming a regular factory industry, and shows a decrease in numbers, no doubt due to the introduction of machinery and labour-saving appliances.

Changes in Employment of Women in Certain Domestic Occupations.

Textiles, which as a whole have increased exactly in proportion to population, show a great variety in movement. The following shows the movement in the numerically more important groups.

In “Dress” the most noticeable feature is that in a decade of rapidly increasing wealth and certainly of no diminution in the feminine tendency to adornment and display, the numbers of dressmakers decreased by a few hundreds. Tailoresses, on the other hand, increased considerably more than the increase in the whole group, and “Dealers” also show a large increase. The Census unfortunately throws very little light so far on the development of the various factory industries for making clothes, and the Factory Department statistics are now so considerably out of date as to be of little value. In default of further information we may guess that a very considerable economy of methods has been effected in the making of women’s clothes by the introduction of machinery and the factory system, and that some of the large mass of customers of moderate incomes are tending to desert the old-fashioned working dressmakers and buy ready-made clothes, which have noticeably improved in style and quality in recent years. But the older-fashioned methods probably hold the larger part of the field, even now.

The increasing employment of women in metal trades is certainly a very remarkable feature of the present Census, the numbers having jumped up from 63,000 to 101,000 in ten years. The cycle and motor manufactures, which employed less than 3000 women in 1901, employed not far short of 7000 in 1911. Nearly all the small groups and subdivisions of metal work show an increase of female employment. For instance, women employed in electrical apparatus-making increased from 2490 in 1901 to over 9000 in 1911.

The whole subject is one of great interest, as illustrating the progress of the industrial revolution in the trades affected, but is impossible to treat here at length.

The Reaction of Status on Industry.—In spite of the increased range of occupations open to women, it must be added that the position of woman is a highly insecure one, and that she is considerably handicapped by the reaction of status on occupation. We have seen that while most women work for wages in early life, their work is usually not permanent, but is abandoned on marriage, precisely at the time of life when the greatest economic efficiency may be looked for. On the other hand, the superior longevity of women and the greater risks to which men are exposed, leave many women widows and unprovided for in middle or even early life. Some women are unfortunate in marriage, the husband turning out idle, incompetent, of feeble health or bad habits, and in such circumstances women may need to return to their work after some years’ cessation. But factory industries and indeed nearly all women’s occupations make a greater demand for the young than for the middle-aged or old. Wages are supposed to be based upon a single woman’s requirements. Even if the destitute widow or the deserted wife can succeed in obtaining fairly well-paid work, there emerges the difficulty of looking after her home and children simultaneously with doing work for wages.

The ordinary view of the subject is that a woman need not be paid as much as a man, because her requirements are less, and she is likely to be partially maintained by others. The question of wages will be discussed in a later chapter, but it may here be pointed out that the facts revealed by the Census show that the status of women is a very heavy handicap to their economic position. Normally, women leave their occupation about the time when they might otherwise expect to attain their greatest efficiency, and those who return to work in later years are under the disadvantage of having spent their best years in work which by no means helps their professional or industrial efficiency, though it may be of the greatest social usefulness. If a woman cannot expect to be paid more than the commercial value of her work when she has children entirely dependent on her, it seems inconsistent that she should be expected to take less than the value of her work when she is partially maintained at home; surely the wiser course would be to strive to raise the standard of remuneration so as to benefit those who have the heavier obligations.

The same kind of thoughtless inconsistency is seen in dealing with the problem of married women’s work. Many observers of social life are struck by the fact that it is sad and in some cases even disastrous for a woman to go out to work and leave her infant children unprotected and untended. The proposal is constantly forthcoming to prohibit married women’s employment. But many persons, even those who dislike the employment of married women, think that when a woman is left a widow, the best thing is to take her children away from her and get her into service.[21] In point of fact, the young children of a widow need quite as much care and attention as those who have a father living; and neither a married woman nor a widow can give her children that care and attention if she is without the means of subsistence.

The pressure on widows to seek employment, whatever their home ties, is seen with tragic pathos even in the bald figures of the Census.

Although widows in the very nature of the case are older on an average than married women, although the whole tendency of modern industry is towards the employment of the young, yet the percentage of widows occupied is three times as great as the percentage of married who are occupied.

There are no short and easy paths to the solution of the difficulties of woman, but those who uphold such measures as the prohibition of employment to married women, are bound to consider, firstly, how the prohibition should be applied in cases where the male head of the family is not competent or sufficiently able-bodied to support it; secondly, whether the children of widows can flourish on neglect any better than the children who have a living father, and, if not, why it is more desirable for the widow than for the married woman to go to work outside her home and away from her children.

Conclusion.—The following points summarise the results obtained from a study of the statistics in regard to women, supplemented by facts of common knowledge. Women outnumber men, especially in later life. Not all women can marry. A large majority of girls and a small minority of adult women work for wages. A large majority of women marry some time or other. The majority of young women leave work when they marry. Some women depend upon their own exertions throughout life, and some of them have dependents. Some women, after being maintained for a period by their husbands, are forced again to seek work for wages; and many of these have dependents.

CHAPTER IV.

WOMEN IN TRADE UNIONS.

Early Efforts at Organisation.—It is probably not worth while to spend a great deal of time in the endeavour to decide what part women played in the earlier developments of trade unionism, very little information being so far obtainable. It seems, however, not unlikely that some of the loose organisations of frame-work knitters, woollen weavers, etc., that existed in the eighteenth century and later, may have included women members, as the Manchester Small-Ware Weavers certainly did in 1756, and Professor Chapman tells us that women were among the members of the Manchester Spinners’ Society of 1795. At Leicester there appears to have been an informal organisation of hand-spinners, called “the sisterhood,” who in 1788 stirred up their male friends and acquaintances to riot as a demonstration against the newly introduced machines.[22] We find some women organised in the unions that sprang up after the repeal of the Anti-Combination Act in 1824. The West Riding Fancy Union was open to women as well as men, and although the General Association of Weavers in Scotland expressly excluded female apprentices from membership it added the proviso, “except those belonging to the weaver’s own family.”

In December the Lancashire Cotton Spinners called a conference at Ramsey, Isle of Man, to consider the question of a national organisation. The immediate motive of the conference was the failure of a disastrous six months’ strike at Hyde, near Manchester, which convinced the leaders that no local unions could succeed against a combination of employers. At the Ramsey Conference, after nearly a week’s discussion, it was agreed to establish a “Grand General Union of the United Kingdom,” which was to be subject to an annual delegates’ meeting and three national committees. The Union was to include all male spinners and piecers, the women and girls being urged to form separate organisations. The General Union lasted less than two years.[23]

A few years later, in 1833, an attempt which met with limited success was made by Glasgow spinners to procure the same rates of pay for women as for men, in spite of the masters’ protest that the former did not turn out so much or so good a quality of work as the latter. No doubt the men’s action was taken chiefly in their own interests. Many of the male operatives objected altogether to the employment of women as spinners and for a time hindered it in Glasgow, though shortly after the great strike of 1837 as many women were spinning there as men. In Manchester women were spinning in 1838, and, indeed, had done so from early times. One regrets to note that they acted as strike-breakers (along with five out of thirty-three male spinners) in a mill belonging to Mr. Houldsworth, as the latter reported in evidence to the Committee on Combinations of Workmen. A representative of the Spinners’ Association, Glasgow, J. M‘Nish, gave some rather interesting evidence before the same Committee. He said it was not the object of the association that the employment of women should cease, although they were “not fond of seeing women at such a severe employment,” but it was their object to prevent the women from being “paid at an under rate of wages, if possible.” Although the women spinners were not members of the association, they were in the habit of appealing to it for advice in the complicated business of reckoning up their rates of pay, and the association had occasionally advised them to strike for an advance.[24]

Some years later women were to be found among the members of the Spinners’ Unions in Lancashire. Objections were raised to their employment on the grounds of health and decency, as the spinning-rooms were excessively hot and work had to be done in the lightest possible attire. Probably the strongest objection was the danger to wages and to the customary standard of life through women’s employment. The feeling was that women would not resist the encroachment of the masters, that their customary wage was low, and that many of them were partially supported at home, consequently that when men and women were employed together on the same kind of work, the wages of men must fall. The hand-loom weavers of Glasgow would not admit adult women to their society, though many were in fact working; and the warpers discouraged women warpers. In 1833, however, the Glasgow women power-loom weavers are said to have had a union under the direction of the male operatives.[25]

The great outburst of unionism in 1833-34 fostered by Owen, the formation of a “Grand National Consolidated Trades Union” did not leave the women untouched. A delegates’ meeting was held in February 1834 at which it was resolved that the new body should take the form of a federation of separate trade lodges, usually of members of one trade, but with provision for “miscellaneous lodges,” in places where the numbers were small, and even for “female miscellaneous lodges.” Within a few weeks or months this union obtained an extraordinary growth and expansion. About half a million members must have joined, including tens of thousands of farm labourers and women, and members of the most diverse and heterogeneous classes of industry. Among the women members we hear of lodges for tailoresses, milliners and miscellaneous workers. Some women gardeners and others were prominent in riots at Oldham. At Derby women and children joined with the men in refusing to abandon the union and were locked out by their employers. The Grand National endeavoured to find means to support them and find employment, but the struggle, though protracted for months, ended in the complete triumph of the employers. The Grand National did not long survive.

In some of the strikes and disturbances that took place in the following years there is clear evidence that women took part, but very little can be ascertained as to their inclusion in unions beyond the bare fact that the Cotton Power-Loom Weavers’ Union, as is generally stated, has always had women members. In cotton weaving the skill of women is almost equal to men’s, in some cases even superior; and as the power-loom came more and more into use, women were more and more employed, as we have seen. The men had thus in their industry an object lesson of the desirability of association and combination in the interests of both sexes. A Weavers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1840 on the occasion of the Stockport strike. But the establishment of unions on a sound basis was a little later, about the middle of the century.

Cotton Weavers.—Numerous strikes occurred in Lancashire about the middle of the nineteenth century, and several unions of cotton weavers formed in those years are still in existence. The first sound organisation of power-loom weavers was established at Blackburn in 1854, but the Padiham Society and the Radcliffe Society can trace their existence back to 1850. The organisation of cotton weavers thenceforward proceeded rapidly. The Chorley weavers date from 1855, the Accrington Society from 1856, Darwen and Ramsbottom from 1857, Preston, 1858, Great Harwood and Oldham and District, 1859. The East Lancashire Amalgamated Society was also formed in 1859, and was afterwards known as the North-East Lancashire Amalgamated Society.

For many years, however, contributions were too small to admit of forming an adequate reserve, and before 1878 the unions were not really effective. A number of local strikes about that date led the Union officials to perceive that higher contributions were necessary for concerted action, and cases of victimising of officials brought home the need for larger Unions with officials who could be placed beyond the risk of victimisation. The new demands made upon the workers no doubt caused some dismay. Some members were lost at first, but most of these returned after a few months. In course of time the weavers have built up an organisation which as far as women are concerned is without parallel in this country.

The Weavers’ Amalgamation was formed in 1884. It includes 38 districts in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and one or two in Derbyshire, with nearly 200,000 members, the majority being women. In one or two districts political forces have favoured the growth of rival Unions outside the Amalgamation, and these also include a large proportion of women. This division in the weavers’ camp is greatly to be regretted, but the rival societies do not appear so far to have done any great harm to the great Amalgamation, whose lead they usually follow, save in political matters, and from whose influence they, of course, indirectly benefit considerably, though they pay no contributions to its funds.

Piece rates in textile trades are extremely complicated. The lists and exceptions are indeed so technical in their nature that many of the operatives themselves do not understand them, and it is quite possible that some employers do not fully grasp the working of the lists.

The weaving operation begins when the warp, or the longitudinal threads of the piece to be woven, has been fixed in position on the loom. The threads used for the warp are what in spinning are called “twist.” These long threads, or “ends” as they are sometimes called, when placed on the loom pass through the openings of the “reed,” a sheet of metal cut like a comb into spaces of the width required for the special coarseness or fineness of the material to be woven. The twist also passes through loops known as “healds.” Thus the first element to be taken into account is the thickness of the threads of the warp, the number of threads going to make up an inch of width, and the total width of the piece to be woven. The work of the loom is to throw across the warp the cross threads or “weft.” These threads are carried in the shuttle which flies to and fro and passes over and under the warp threads alternately, or at such angles and intervals as are provided for by the arrangement of the warp in the “healds” and “reed.” The weft or cross threads are termed “picks.” Thus the second element in determining the price is the fineness and closeness of the weft. The fineness is determined by the number of counts of the yarn. The closeness may be determined by counting the number of threads or picks in a given length actually woven, or by a calculation based upon the mechanical action of the machine. In many cases the number of picks can be easily settled by counting, but in almost every instance the most exact method is by calculation, based upon the sizes and divisions of the wheels and of the “beam” in the loom. The “beam” is the bar or pole round which the cloth is rolled in process of weaving. The third element is the total length woven, and a fourth is the nature and quality of the material used. This latter is an especially important element in price. The smaller the openings in the “reed” through which the threads pass, the finer and closer the crossing of the weft, the greater in number and more delicate are the threads to be watched by the weaver, and the greater is the liability to breakage of threads. Closer attention and greater dexterity are needed in the weaving of fine than of coarse materials, but on the other hand the weaving of the coarser yarns may mean harder physical labour though not requiring so much skill. The harder work is paid for at an increased rate, though less wages may be earned by the operative.

The weavers’ work is to fetch the cops of weft (unless they have tenters or assistants to do the fetching and carrying), keep the shuttles full, and repair broken threads. The standard upon which the uniform list is based is calculated on the capacity of an ordinary loom, forty-five inches in the reed space, weaving according to certain particulars given in the list, which are somewhat too technical to set down here. The standard conditions are in practice varied in every conceivable way, and exceptions of every kind have to be provided for by making additions and deductions per cent. There are also subsidiary lists for special kinds and qualities, and local lists for special characters of goods made in certain districts. To find the price of weaving the various allowances have to be deducted or added one by one. A minute fraction of a penny per yard may make a perceptible difference in a weaver’s earnings.

These lists are a comparatively modern development, and date from the time of the labour troubles mentioned above. In 1853 the Blackburn Society prepared a list of uniform prices for weavers as a basis for a permanent agreement. This list was based upon prices previously paid at the various mills in the town, on an average of a month’s earnings. The Blackburn list was in operation till 1892, and was the most important of all the lists regulating weavers’ wages. It was then, with many others, replaced by the uniform list, which is now generally recognised throughout Lancashire, but rates for some subsidiary processes are still regulated by local lists.

The complication of these lists has necessitated a high degree of specialised skill in the secretaries, who must possess practical and intimate experience of the work and a competent knowledge of arithmetic for elaborate calculations. Subjects of complaint and suspected miscalculations can be referred to the secretary, who immediately inquires into the matter. If he considers the complaint justified or the calculations incorrect, he visits the mill and puts the case before the employer. The matter can very likely be settled amicably, as in point of fact these matters often are, but if dispute occurs, it is referred first to the local association, and may be settled by negotiation. In case of failure there is a machinery needless to detail here by which meetings of employer and employed can be arranged through successively higher grades of representative authority, until in the last resort, if all attempts at settlement fail, a strike is called. The impressive feature about all this negotiation from our present point of view is that the whole strength of the Union, the brains and time and care of the secretary, can be invoked for the protection of the woman, the youthful or childish worker, as much as for the adult skilled worker at a craft.

Cases of wrongful withholding of earnings, as for instance unfair fines, can be taken into the County Courts. In at least one district the secretary has successfully asserted the right to visit the mill and inspect cloth, when the employer claims deductions. The cotton weavers’ secretaries have in fact to play a part not unlike that of the solicitor in other social grades. They have to look after their clients’ interests, protect them from fraud and injury, and advise them in cases of doubt as to their legal rights and position.

A fertile source of trouble is in bad cotton. Most of us have probably laughed over the story of the pious weaver in the cotton famine who prayed for supplies of raw material, “but, O Lord, not Surats!” The matter is far from amusing to the workers themselves. Every breakage of a thread means that their wages are stopped by so much, and defective material means that they have to work harder and with more harass and interruption, and accomplish less in the time. If inferior material is persistently supplied, the cotton-workers consider themselves entitled to an increase of 5 per cent or 7½ per cent on earnings, and it is the secretaries’ duty to get it for them.

It is perhaps worth while to note the peculiar sense given in Lancashire speech to the expression “bad work.” In Lancashire “bad work” means bad cotton, and is actually so used in the terms of an agreement between employer and employed as a subject for compensation to the worker.

Constant anxious care is needed to safeguard the payment of wages. A Weavers’ Local Association advises their members that “whenever the earned wages of a female or young person is being detained for being absent or leaving work, except to the amount of damage their employer has sustained in consequence, such a young person should at once lay their case before the Committee.”[26] Even at the present time it is not unknown for a girl to be fined to the amount of a whole week’s earnings, but, as my informant added, such a case is now rare. As a rule the Trade Union Secretary will be appealed to, will take the steps necessary, and the fine will be returned or considerably reduced.

Any one who is used to considering the case of the girl and women worker in the unorganised trades of London or other great towns, any one who has read in the Women Factory Inspectors’ Reports of the difficulty of enforcing the Truck Act and of the special proneness of the woman worker to be oppressed and cheated out of what is morally or even legally her due, will appreciate at once the extraordinary difference between her position and that of the cotton weaver who is backed up by her Association, and has an expert adviser to appeal to.

The position of women (and of course of other members also) has been greatly improved since the early days of power-loom weaving by the greater financial strength and security of the Unions. The history of the Burnley weavers is instructive on this point. The Union dates from about 1870, and started with a few hundred members on penny contributions. Numbers, however, increased, in spite of some troubles and persecution from individuals of the employing class. In 1878, Lancashire, as we have seen, was involved in a great industrial struggle. The Burnley Society, on its penny contributions, was unable adequately to sustain its members through the crisis, and only survived the crisis after a very severe strain. It was decided to adopt a sliding scale of payments and higher contributions, with the result that a good reserve was established, and benefits were granted on a higher scale. Considerable sums are paid not only in this, but in other Unions for breakdown or stoppage of work from various causes, such as fire, accident, or failure of trade, stoppage of machinery for repairs, dissolution of partnership, etc. The weavers give benefit to members losing work through scarcity of cotton, or waiting for wefts or warps. Whether it is altogether wise from the tactical point of view for trade associations to devote so much of their funds to provident purposes of this nature is not a question I propose to discuss; the relevant point is the economic security given to the worker. The following shows the contributions graded according to benefit, and the benefit accruing either for strikes brought on by the Society’s action, or for stoppage of work at the mill.

Chorley Weavers.

The Weavers’ Unions do not, as a rule, pay sick or maternity benefit save under the Insurance Act. On the other hand, funeral benefit appears to be the invariable custom, and disablement through accident also entitles members to benefit. A penny per member per week is paid to the Amalgamation towards a Central Strike Fund, the remainder of the contributions being in the hands of the local branch.

The unusual strength of this Union, combining men and women in a single organisation, seems to be due in the first place to the increasing local concentration of the industry. In towns where many large mills are placed near together the ease and rapidity with which a secretary can call a meeting is surprising. In the second place, it must be remembered that the organisation of women has been of great importance to the men, the women forming the majority of the workers. It has been worth the men’s while to consider the women, and so far at least as the economic position is concerned, they have done it with considerable effectiveness. The organisation is utterly dependent on the membership and solidarity of women, and it has successfully safeguarded their economic interests, but it has been built up mainly by the initiative and under the control of a minority of men.

As a general rule, in spite of the exceptional success of the Weavers’ Unions in retaining the continued membership of women, the fact remains that it is still unusual for women to be actively interested in the work of organisation. As a general rule the women rarely attend meetings unless they have a special grievance to be removed, and they seldom nominate one of themselves for the Committee. There are places where no woman has ever been nominated at all. This is a subject of regret and surprise, not only to the secretaries, but to those women here and there who are themselves keenly interested. These would fain see women representatives on the Committee, and some proportion of women acting as secretaries and collectors. Such women feel strongly that “we need the two points of view,” and it is disheartening and incomprehensible to them to find that they cannot get their women friends to turn up at meetings and support the nomination of a woman. There appears to be little ground for the supposition that men would object to share their Committee labours with women, and even if they did, it is obvious that in an industry where women predominate, the latter could have no difficulty in packing the Committee with their own representatives. In all these weavers’ Unions the women have precisely the same rights and privileges as men. All positions are open to women, and women command a majority of votes. It is not the men’s fault that the management so often is mainly left in their hands.

If we enquire as to the reasons for this apathy among women-workers, a great many can be given. One is the danger of victimisation, which may fall very hardly on collectors and Committee members. Another is the fatigue of the long day in the mill, the natural desire for a little amusement, or the amount of house-work to be done. Lancashire women are “house-proud” to an extraordinary degree, and cannot be satisfied without a high standard of comfort in such matters as cleanliness, food, and furniture. All this means work, and though the high wages current in the cotton towns might seem to make it possible to pay for household help, such help is not very easy to come by. Domestic service has hitherto been demanded only by a limited class in the community, because very few outside that class could afford to pay for it. A highly paid industry like the cotton trade makes servants scarce, and anything like a general demand for domestic help on a broad democratic scale could not possibly be satisfied as things are now. Even help in washing is not easily had. So the Lancashire woman or girl contrives to work her ten hours in the mill, and come back to a second day’s work in the evening, with such assistance as may be given by the older members of the family. Lancashire is really suffering from the service question in an acute form, so acute that it is taken for granted it cannot be answered. A surprising part of the matter is that a class of women so intelligent, so industrious, and comparatively so well-paid, should not ere this have made a concerted demand for better labour-saving devices in their houses.

But after all the domestic difficulty does not explain the whole problem of woman’s apathy and indifference in Trade Unions. Supposing the meeting occurs only once a quarter, as in some places, house-work cannot be an insuperable obstacle to attendance at such rare intervals. One weaver told me she had been “bread-winner, nurse, and cleaner” at home, and yet had found time to attend meetings. Probably the real explanation of the attitude of women generally towards the Union is to be found in their education and outlook. Lloyd Jones, in his life of Robert Owen, explained the failure of the early co-operative societies by the fact that at that time the working-class had no habit of association. The old forms had gone; the new had been legally suppressed. Under the changed conditions of modern life the working-class has had to evolve a new set of social habits and a new code of social duty. The habit of association has developed more slowly among women than among men, because to some extent it does undeniably come in conflict with the traditional moralities of women. To a great many women the idea of home duty means duty within the home; they are only beginning to find out by slow degrees that their home is largely dependent for its very existence on outside impersonal forces about which it is incumbent on the home-maker to know something, even if she has to go outside to get knowledge. The Weavers’ Secretary, even in Lancashire, still finds that “females are a deal more arduous to organise than males”; he supposes, because “they’ve been brought up to be different.” They cost more in collecting expenses, and the propensity of girls to get married, to leave work or change their occupation is a constant source of anxiety. “They are always on the move,” and perpetual watchfulness is needed to enrol the young ones as they enter the mill. Tact and diplomacy are expended in inducing the women-workers to keep an eye on the younger members, to bring them in as early in their industrial careers as possible. Even such homely arguments as “it saves your money from stamps,” are not disdained in the effort to persuade the women to use their own personal influence to keep the flame alive. Small commissions are given to a member of a Union who brings in a new member. But without commissions women do a good deal of recruiting in the mills. The Lancashire cotton Unions do not run themselves; their efficiency is very largely the result of constant watchfulness and patient effort on the part of the officials, backed up by the pluck, tenacity, and high standard of comfort of the Lancashire woman herself.

A strong feeling, however, is now arising that there is a need for organisation of women within the Union, to induce them to come out more, to take more pains to understand the civic machinery of life which so largely controls their work, their livelihood, and the possibilities of health and strength both for themselves and their children. There is always a splendid remnant in Lancashire who feel themselves to be citizens; but a more general movement seems now to be beginning. This movement is partly due to economic changes in the distribution of the industry. Some mills nowadays employ scarcely any men. Such are mills or sheds for ring-winding, cop-winding, reeling and beaming, occupations exclusively appropriated to women. In such mills there will be a man employed as overlooker, and a mechanic to repair or look after the machines, and there is or should be a man or strong lad to carry the “skips,” But the industry itself is here carried on by women, and in such cases women often develop powers hitherto latent for undertaking the Committee work and management of the Union. The same thing happens in districts where the demand for male labour in other occupations is sufficiently urgent to draw men away from weaving altogether.

At Wigan the Committee is wholly staffed by women. At Stockport all but the president, secretary, and one member are women. At Oldham about half the Committee are women. In the largest centres of the industry things are moving more slowly. In one very large and important Union the first woman representative has recently been elected to the Committee. At Blackburn two places on the Committee are now appropriated to the winders and warpers, who are all women; this has the effect of reserving two places exclusively for women. Here also the practice obtains of appointing a worker in each mill as a representative of the Union, to keep the secretary in touch with what is going on, and about twenty women, chosen chiefly from the winders, now fill the post of mill representative. The Insurance Act also has had the indirect effect of bringing in a certain number of women as sick visitors or pay stewards. Women are thus gradually being drawn forward, with results that indicate that custom is to blame for their previous isolation, rather than any inherent incapacity or unwillingness on their part.

There is a good deal that men might do to meet the women half-way. The secretary may regretfully remark that the women members make no use of the handsome institute and comfortable rooms that are at the disposal of all members of a Union, but the women complain privately that there is no room appropriated to their use. This is felt as a difficulty by women, while it is unnoticed and unconsidered by men. However heartily one may agree that men and women would be better for the opportunities of social intercourse such as an institute provides, however much one may wish to see women making use of its amenities yet, as a beginning, perhaps always, it would obviously be advisable to set apart for them a sitting-room of their own. Women would like to go in to look at the papers and so on, but are deterred by the idea that they are not expected, or not wanted, or that their appearance may cause surprise in the minds of their male colleagues. “They did stare a bit, but they weren’t a bit disagreeable,” one woman weaver remarked after having valiantly entered her own institute and read her own magazines. Pioneers may do these doughty deeds; the average young woman, even in Lancashire, is singularly shy in some ways, however much the reverse she may appear in others. There is no doubt that social life in England suffers from the unwholesome segregation of women from the affairs of the community. They are too much cut off from the interests of men, most of which ought rather to be the interests of human beings. The beginnings of better things are now being made, but comradeship and consideration on both sides are needed.

A movement for shorter hours is going on in the Cotton Operatives’ Unions, and has been sympathetically regarded for many years by the Women Factory Inspectors, who realise the intensity of the work in cotton factories as few outsiders can do. The actual operations of joining threads, removing cops, replacing shuttles and so forth are not in themselves very laborious. The strain occurs in the long hours the women are at work, most of them having to stand all the time, and the close attention that has to be given. Every broken thread means pro tanto a stoppage of wages, and eyes and fingers have to be constantly on the alert to see and do instantly what is necessary. All this time, in most cases, the women are on their feet; all this time, in many cases, breathing an unnaturally heated air, sickened by the disagreeable smell of the oil and size, the ceaseless din of machinery in their ears, dust and fluff continually ready to invade the system. In recent years the increased speed has enormously increased the strain of work. It would seem that here is a clear case for shorter hours by law, but strange to say in practice some women are found to be rather nervous about such a measure. I know one highly intelligent girl who fears that shorter hours may mean increased speed, and thinks that that would be “more than flesh and blood could bear.” Others fear a loss in earnings. These fears, however, are not shared by all, and after considerable discussion with different persons, I incline to hope that they are not justified. It is, of course, true that in the cotton trade conditions are very different from those in certain trades where shorter hours have resulted in an actual increase of output. The machinery is of enormous value, and is already speeded up to such an extent that no great increase of output on the present machines seems possible or thinkable. On the other hand, there might quite possibly be a very much smaller deficit on shorter hours than the uninitiated would expect. One result would probably be a greater regularity of output through the day. Girls will own that they literally cannot keep going all the time, that they are forced to relax at intervals, and they add; “if we had shorter hours we should be able to work right through.” There are masters who think the early morning hours’ work is hardly worth the trouble. The Trade Union secretaries with many years’ knowledge and experience of the working of the Factory Acts behind them, do not fear any permanent reduction of wages. A forty-eight hours’ week, or an eight hours’ day would quite likely result in diminished earnings for the first few weeks or months. But given time to work itself out, it would regularise production and tend to smooth out alternatives of “glut” and slack time. A second probable result would be some increase in piece rates, and the workers would in no wise be worse off. No doubt this change will meet with considerable resistance, but judging by past history, it will probably not cause any permanent injury to the interests of either labour or capital.

Winders.—Winding is the process of running the yarn off the spinner’s cop on to a “winder’s bobbin.” There are two processes, “cop-winding” and “ring-winding,” the latter being a comparatively new process. The winders, though included usually in the same unions with weavers, are far less strongly organised. Neither process has as yet a uniform list, but the cop-winders have lists which cover large areas. The ring-winders are still less protected, and as a result they are underpaid.

Increasing discontent among the winders at Blackburn lately caused a demand for direct representation on the Committee. The position is curious, there being a woman winder and a warper now serving on the Committee while the weavers, a larger and better paid body of women, are represented only by men. Winding is said to be harder and worse paid than weaving, and “driving” has been introduced in recent years. “If there is one operative who earns the money she receives it is the winder.”[27] Nevertheless, there are some women who cannot stand the strain of weaving, and take to winding. Further enquiry into this apparent inconsistency elicited the fact that winding, although hard and monotonous work with its continual removing cops and joining threads, is in some ways a less continuous, unremitting strain than weaving.[28] Winders do not often work on Saturday morning, and they may occasionally have short intervals of rest. They also have the chance of promotion to be a warper, a post which admits of much more sitting down than either of the other two, and is consequently coveted.

The defective organisation of the winders appears to be due to the absence of men among the ranks. The close community of interests which produced the exceptional success of the Weavers’ Union has been lacking, and the winders appear to have been overlooked. Faults in quality or mistakes made in the spinning-room are often credited to the winder, beamer or reeler. It is, however, constantly pointed out in the reports of the Amalgamation that they have the remedy in their own hands, and should organise more strongly to get the advantages enjoyed by the weavers. The recent awakening at Blackburn, indicated above, is a most hopeful sign. At Stockport also, the secretary is making a special effort to organise the winders, and at Padiham it has recently been proposed to give them special representation on the Committee as at Blackburn.

Card-room Operatives.—Unions of card- and blowing-room operatives began to accept women members about 1870, or a little later. Women are now organised in the same Union with men, and form about 90 per cent of the workers. The work forms part of the process of preparing cotton for spinning, and is heavy and dangerous in character. The conditions under which, and the purposes for which, benefit is granted resemble those of the weavers’ Unions. The organisation of card-room operatives was greatly improved from 1885 to 1890 or 1894, and may be now considered to have reached a condition of comparative permanence and stability. The usual complaint is, however, made that women are apathetic and take little interest in Union affairs. This state of things is keenly regretted by the secretary, who would gladly see women members on the Committee. The difficulties in effective organisation of industries with so large a proportion of young and irresponsible workers are seen in a recent report of a card-room operatives’ society. “Ring-room doffers are about the most difficult class we have to deal with in the matter of keeping them organised, and we can only assume, as most of them are young persons, that it is mostly their parents who are to blame for this apparent carelessness. So we appeal to the parents of this class of operative to take a keener interest in the welfare of those for whom they are responsible, and would remind them that the writer of this article well remembers the time when this class of operative was looked upon as well paid at 5s. 2d. per week, while at the present time the lowest wage paid to our knowledge is 9s. 3d., an advance of 4s. 1d. per week. Surely the few coppers required could easily be spared from this advance, and the benefits returnable are as good an investment as it is possible to find.”

Card-room operatives have usually been regarded as socially somewhat inferior to the weavers, the work being more arduous and done in more dangerous conditions and the women usually of a rougher class. It seems, however, probable that this condition is changing. Card-room work is becoming more popular as comparatively good wages come at an earlier age than in weaving. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of effective organisation to this class of workers. In its absence the large proportion of women can be taken advantage of to lower conditions of work all round. Closer co-operation with Unions of other classes of workers might be very useful, especially on the question of speeding up. The card-room operatives are speeded and “rushed,” working under high pressure, and at the same time the winder, beamer and warper complain of bad cotton, and the weaver strikes on account of the same grievance. Surely the remedy is obvious.

Ring-spinners are often included in the same Union with card-room operatives, and quite recently a special effort has been made to improve the organisation of ring-room workers. A “universal list” was obtained in 1912.[29]

Other Workers.—Outside the cotton operatives there are a comparatively small number of women organised with men in Unions of varying strength and effectiveness. As regards linen and jute there is a Union at Dundee which includes over 5000 women, but appears to have made little progress in numbers in quite recent years. The secretary states that the majority of women in the jute trade have very little conception of what Trade Unionism really means, but that the same applies also to many of the men. He considers that the women’s outlook has become broadened within recent years. There are some women now serving on the Committee, and the women generally are reported to take a “fair amount of interest” in the work of the society. The other Unions belonging to this industry are scattered over Ireland and Scotland.

Wool and worsted is backward in organisation, both for men and women. The Union at Huddersfield includes 4000 women, but a correspondent writes that the General Union, which has branches in all the important textile centres of the West Riding, in actual strength is scarcely one in ten of its possible membership. The apathy of the women, in the Huddersfield district at all events, cannot be due to poverty, for the subscriptions are low while the women’s average wage is high. Nor is it due to the temporary nature of women’s work, for in this district many continue work after marriage. The Yorkshire women are said by one correspondent to take little interest in public affairs in any way; by another, “not as much as they should, but more than they used to do. It’s a big work organising and keeping women in. Marriage, flightiness, lack of vision, lack of help and encouragement from fathers and brothers all tend to make it hard. The lower the wages, the harder the task of making them into Unionists.” The difficulty of organising them is great, and outside Huddersfield they are extremely badly paid—so badly, indeed, that in our correspondent’s opinion the trade needs to be scheduled under the Trade Boards Act. At Bradford considerable efforts have been made from time to time to get the women into the Union, but these have failed; and even during the last boom, due to the flourishing state of trade and to the Insurance Act, very little progress has been made.

The Clothing Unions are making rapid progress, including nearly 10,000 women in 1912, and the Trade Boards will assist the movement. In Leeds there has been some natural indignation at the low minimum fixed, which has impelled to organisation. The Unions follow the Lancashire pattern in organising women along with men. The standard rate for women in the Amalgamated Society of Clothiers operatives at Leeds is 4d. an hour, which is held to be achieved if the piece rates yield as much to 70 per cent of any section or grade of work. In the Boot and Shoe Unions a considerable percentage increase was registered for 1910 to 1912, and the numbers reached 8720 in the latter year.

Printing offers some of the most difficult problems connected with the organisation of women.[30] Men in these trades have undeniably offered serious obstacles to the inclusion of women. In 1886 a Conference of Typographical Societies of the United Kingdom and of the Continent, held in London, being “of the opinion that women are not physically capable of performing the duties of a compositor,” resolved to recommend their admission to societies upon the same conditions as journeymen, to be paid strictly the same rate. This resolution was adopted by the London Society of Compositors, and it became practically impossible for a woman to join the society, as women could not keep up to the standard and efficiency of men. One woman joined in 1892, but subsequently left. The women were practically excluded from the Compositors’ Union by the fixing of equal rates of pay. This was not so much discrimination against women because they were women, as a demonstration against the black-leg competition of the unskilled against the skilled. It is stated that women compositors are regarded as so inferior to men that only among employers in a small way of business, working with small capital, where low wages constitute an advantage sufficient to counter-poise the lack of technical skill, can they find employment. In 1894 a militant Union of women was organised, and struck for increased wages and improved conditions, the women going out to show their sympathy with the men, who had been locked out. In recognition of the women’s sympathy the men gave some help and support to this Union, which, however, after increasing to 350 began to decline. It was subsequently recognised as a branch of the Printers, Stationers, and Warehousemen.

In the cigar trade, as in printing, it has to be owned that women came in “not for doing more, but for asking less.” Their labour was at first employed chiefly for the less skilled branches, a small number only being employed in skilled work; but in both divisions they worked for a lower rate than men. It was not until 1887 that a Union for women was established. They still, unfortunately, continued to undersell men, until at last the men, who at first were hostile to their female competitors, saw that it was hopeless to try and keep them out, and that for their own sakes amalgamation was the wiser course. The adjustment of the wage-scale was a problem of some delicacy. To raise the scale of women’s wages to the same as men’s would probably have meant driving the women from the trade; to leave them on the lower scale would mean that women would contrive to undersell men. It was finally decided to take the highest existing rates of pay for women as the basis of the women’s Union rates. After the Amalgamation had been achieved, women’s wages rose 25 per cent, and the recognised policy of the Union was to make advantageous terms with each employer opening a new factory. Women are not, on the whole, such valuable workers as are men; they are slower, and often do not remain very long in the trade.[31] Lower rates of pay, as long as they are not permitted to fall indefinitely, are a distinct advantage to women in getting and keeping employment. The numbers in Unions in food and tobacco were only 2000 in 1910, and have since fallen slightly.

There are also a good many small Unions of women only, some of which are affiliated to the Women’s Trade Union League. The numbers of women organised in the trades especially their own, such as dressmaking, the needle trades, and domestic work, are disappointingly small. It has to be remembered, however, that such occupations as these are still for the most part carried on either in the employers’ or the workers’ homes. The factory system has begun to make some way in dressmaking, but not to a considerable extent. It is not surprising that the workers in these industries are behind the factory workers in learning the lesson of combination for mutual help and protection.

Unions in the lower grade industries, which till lately have been unorganised, will be treated in a later section.

The Women’s Trade Union League.—The Society now known as the Women’s Trade Union League was founded mainly by the efforts of a remarkable woman named Emma Smith, afterwards Mrs. Paterson (1848-1886). She was the daughter of a schoolmaster and became the wife of a cabinet-maker. Her life from the age of eighteen was devoted to endeavours on behalf of the working class and especially of women. Being a woman of natural ability and remarkable concentration of purpose, she succeeded in starting pioneer work of a difficult and unusual kind. She was secretary for five years to the Workmen’s Club and Institute Union, and afterwards secretary to the Women’s Suffrage Association. She was the first woman admitted to the Trade Union Congress, and attended its meetings from 1875 until 1886, with the exception only of one year, in which her husband’s last illness prevented her attendance. Although the name of the League has been altered, and its policy considerably widened and in some measure modified, it is pleasant to note that it still keeps up a continuity of tradition with Mrs. Paterson’s Protective and Provident League. Her portrait, as foundress, hangs upon the office wall, and the annual Reports are numbered continuously from the start in 1875.

Sick benefit was the main feature of the propaganda initiated by the League in its early years. The first society formed was for women employed in the printing trade. The need of a provident fund had been badly felt by these women during a trade depression three years previously, and there was no provision for the admission of women as members of the men’s societies, even if women’s wages had been (as they were not) sufficient to pay the necessary subscription to the men’s society. Mr. King, Secretary of the London Consolidated Society of Bookbinders, however, promised to support and assist the efforts to organise women in this trade. The appeal for a separate organisation of women met with a ready response. Some hundreds of women employed in folding, sewing, and other branches of the bookbinding trade, attended the first meeting, held in August 1875; a provisional committee was formed, and in October the society was formally established with a subscription of 2d. per week, and an entrance fee of 1s. Its history, however, was uneventful. It refused to join with men in making demands upon the employers, and its representatives at Trade Union Congresses and elsewhere were imbued with Mrs. Paterson’s prejudice against the Factory Act, and resisted legal restrictions upon labour. Employers have been known to urge the formation of “a good women’s Union,” on the ground that the fair-minded employer was detrimentally affected by the “gross inequalities of price” that existed. The backwardness and narrow views of the Women’s Union were resented by the men, and in the time of the eight hours agitation, 1891-1894, would not take part, and there was considerable ill-feeling between the two sections. This society was mainly a benefit club, and the same remark holds good of other early societies established by the Women’s Protective and Provident League, which included societies for dressmakers, hat-makers, upholsterers, and shirt- and collar-makers. The foundress, although a woman of unusual energy and initiative, whose efforts for the uplifting of women-workers should not be forgotten, was in some degree hampered by the narrow individualism characteristic of what may be designated as the Right Wing of the Women’s Rights Movement. She was an opponent of factory legislation for grown women, and did not lead the Unions under her control to attempt any concerted measures for improving the conditions of their work. The first Report of the League indicates her attitude in the remarks which she reports (evidently with sympathy) from a Conference held in April 1875: “It was agreed” (viz. at this Conference) “that any further reduction of hours, if accompanied by a reduction of wages, as it probably would be if brought about by legislation, would be objectionable.” (Italics added.) In the same Report (pp. 14-15) the writer, doubtless Mrs. Paterson herself, sums up the advantages to be obtained for women through union. The League is to be a “centre of combined efforts” to “improve the industrial and social position of ... women”; it is “to acquire information which will enable friends of the working classes to give a more precise direction than at present to their offers of sympathy and help. Without interfering with the natural course of trade, the Societies will furnish machinery for regulating the supply of labour....” (Italics added.) “The object of the League is to promote an entente cordiale between the labourer, the employer, and the consumer; and revision of the contract between the labourer and employer is only recommended in those cases in which its terms appear unreasonable and unjust to the dispassionate third party, who pays the final price for the manufactured goods and is certainly not interested in adding artificially to their cost.” No direct action for raising wages is suggested.

Delegates from three Women’s Societies—shirt-makers, bookbinders, and upholsterers—were admitted to the 8th Annual Trade Union Congress, held at Glasgow, October 1875.[32] At the meeting of the T.U. Council in 1879, five women representing Unions were not only present but took an active part in the proceedings, successfully moving a resolution for additional factory inspectors, and for the appointment as such of women as well as men.

In 1877, the Amalgamated Society of Tailors having been asked by one of its branches to resist the increasing employment of women in that trade, resolved instead that the work of women should be recognised, and the women organised and properly paid. The League was asked to co-operate in forming a Union, and a Tailoresses’ Union was subsequently formed. At Brighton a Union of Laundresses was formed. Various other societies were formed in these early years, many of which are now defunct.

Mrs. Paterson died in 1886, at the sadly early age of thirty-eight. During the years following, the policy of the League was enlarged and developed in a very considerable degree. Miss Clementina Black was secretary for a few years, and her second Report (1888) contains interesting remarks on the position of women: “All inquiry tends to show more and more that disorganised labour is absolutely helpless; good wages, lessened hours, better general conditions, and, on the whole, better workmanship prevail in the trades that are most completely organised. It also tends to show the injury done to men and women alike by the payment to women of unfairly low wages.... Even in employments in which the work can be done by women at least as well as by men, the wages of women are greatly inferior to those of men. And in those branches in which superior efficiency is shown by the male workers, the inferiority of the wages of the female employees is altogether out of proportion to the difference in the character of the work done by the two sexes. From this cause—the payment of unfairly low wages to women simply because they are women—arises a desire on the part of grasping employers to reduce the wage-standard by engaging women in preference to men, while in many cases the conditions of female employment are onerous and oppressive to an extent which involves the greatest danger to health.”

In 1889 the representation of the Society of Women Bookbinders at the Trade Union Congress, held at Dundee, moved a resolution in favour of the appointment of women factory inspectors, which was adopted. In the same year, at the International Workers’ Congress, held in Paris, the representative of the London Women’s Trade Council, Miss Edith Simcox, moved the following resolution, which was unanimously adopted by the representatives of all nationalities: “That the Workmen’s Party in all countries should pledge itself to promote the formation of trade organisations among the workers of both sexes.”