The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry's historiography nonetheless. This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills. In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers' experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. 'Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.
The use of child workers was widespread in textile manufacturing by the late eighteenth century. A particularly vital supply of child workers was via the parish apprenticeship trade, whereby pauper children could move from the 'care' of poor law officialdom to the 'care' of early industrial textile entrepreneurs. This study is the first to examine in detail both the process and experience of parish factory apprenticeship, and to illuminate the role played by children in early industrial expansion. It challenges prevailing notions of exploitation which permeate historical discussion of the early labour force and questions both the readiness with which parishes 'offloaded' large numbers of their poor children to distant factories, and the harsh discipline assumed to have been universal among early factory masters. Finally the author explores the way in which parish apprentices were used to construct a gendered labour force. Dr Honeyman's book is a major contribution to studies in child labour and to the broader social, economic, and business history of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.