Women Workers In The Industrial Revolution

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"I am not living upon my friends or doing housework for my board but am a factory girl," asserted Anna Mason in the early 1850s. Although many young women who worked in the textile mills found that the industrial revolution brought greater independence to their lives, most working women in nineteenth-century New England did not, according to Thomas Dublin. Sketching engaging portraits of women's experience in cottage industries, factories, domestic service, and village schools, Dublin demonstrates that the autonomy of working women actually diminished as growing numbers lived with their families and contributed their earnings to the household. From diaries, letters, account books, and censuses, Dublin reconstructs employment patterns across the century as he shows how wage work increasingly came to serve the needs of families, rather than of individual women. He first examines the case of rural women engaged in the cottage industries of weaving and palm-leaf hatmaking between 1820 and 1850. Next, he compares the employment experiences of women in the textile mills of Lowell and the shoe factories of Lynn. Following a discussion of Boston working women in the middle decades of the century-particularly domestic servants and garment workers-Dublin turns his attention to the lives of women teachers in three New Hampshire towns.

"Women in Modern Industry" by B. L. Hutchins is a book that gives 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. The author has aimed at description rather than theory. Some of the current theories about women's position are of great interest, and he makes no pretense to an attitude of detachment in regard to the. The question of the child in the industry at first occupied attention almost to the exclusion of women. But the one led naturally to the other. The woman in the industry could no longer be ignored: she had become an economic force.

From the mid-18th century, new machines powered by steam and coal began to produce goods on a massive scale. This was known as the Industrial Revolution. Workers were poorly paid and their working conditions were harsh. Life was even harder for working women, who received lower wages and fewer rights than men. Some women, however, would not stand for the poor treatment of themselves or others. These are the stories of four trailblazers who achieved amazing things in difficult circumstances: Known as the Angel of the Prisons,] Elizabeth Fry brought about changes for female and child inmates. Florence Nightingale did the unthinkable for a woman of the time and, instead of getting married, became a nurse and reformed the nursing system. Sarah G. Bagley was a pioneering labor activist who fought against harsh factory conditions. Mother Jones earned the title of most dangerous woman in America by traveling around the country urging coal miners and mill workers to stand up for their rights. Many of the rights women have today are thanks to their actions. They helped change society's image of women forever.

Britain and America were the first two countries with mechanised cotton manufacturing industries, the first major factory systems of production and the first major employers of women outside of the domestic environment. The combination of being new wage earners in the first trans-national industry and their public prominence as workers makes these women's role as employees significant; they set the early standard for women as waged labour, to which later female workers were compared. This book analyses how women workers influenced patterns of industrial organization and offers a new perspective on relationships between gender and work and on industrial development. The primary theme of the study is the attempt to control the work process through co-operation, coercion and conflict between women workers, their male counterparts and manufacturers. Drawing upon examples of women's subversive activities and attitudes toward the discourses of labour, the book emphasizes the variety of women's work experiences. By using this diversity of experience in a comparative way, the book reaches conclusions that challenge a variety of historical concepts, including separate spheres of influence for men and women and related economic theories, for example that women were passive players in the workplace, evolutionary theories with respect to industrial development, and business culture within and between the two industries. Overall it provides the fresh approach that highlights and explains women's agency as operatives and paid workers during industrialization.

A major study of the role of women in the labour market of Industrial Revolution Britain. It is well known that men and women usually worked in different occupations, and that women earned lower wages than men. These differences are usually attributed to custom but Joyce Burnette here demonstrates instead that gender differences in occupations and wages were instead largely driven by market forces. Her findings reveal that rather than harming women competition actually helped them by eroding the power that male workers needed to restrict female employment and minimising the gender wage gap by sorting women into the least strength-intensive occupations. Where the strength requirements of an occupation made women less productive than men, occupational segregation maximised both economic efficiency and female incomes. She shows that women's wages were then market wages rather than customary and the gender wage gap resulted from actual differences in productivity.