Gender & Hisfory ISSN 0953-5233
Robert Gray. ’Factory Legislation and the Cendering of Job5 in the North of England, 1830-1860’
Gender & Hisrory. Vo1.5 No.1 Spring 1993, pp. 56-80.
Factory legislation and the Cendering of Jobs
in the North of England, 1830-1860
ROBERT GRAY
The textile factory industry of the north of England has often been considered
of central importance to British industrialization in the late eighteenth to midnineteenth centuries. In the cotton districts of Lancashire and the adjoining
woollen and worsted districts of western Yorkshire (known as the ‘West
Riding’), this period saw intensifying regional concentration of industry,
rapid expansion of textile production, and the development of mechanised
factory processes. Recent studies have rightly questioned images of the
’industrial revolution’ based on over-generalisationfrom this regional experience, and drawn attention to the uneven and regionally diverse character of
industrialization. With regard to the textile districts, images of the inexorable
spread of a homogeneous ‘factory system’ overlook varying patterns of transition to factory production and diverse experiences of labour within the
factory itself.’ The factory districts of the north of England nevertheless represent a regional experience of continuing historical interest, not least because
of its influence in shaping contemporary perceptions and responses, as well
as historical interpretations of the problems of an industrializing society.
Increased awareness of gender, focusing attention on sexual divisions of
labour and the gendering of jobs in the process of industrial change, has
made important contributions to reinterpreting industrialization. State intervention, in the form of ‘protective legislation’, has received some attention
as a factor shaping the gendering of jobs.2 The early British factory acts
(1833, 1844, 1847, 1850, 18531, which attempted to regulate juvenile and
female employment in textile factories, have a pivotal position in the history
of protective legi~lation.~
Controversy about factory conditions led to comparative investigation of other sectors, inspiring the Mines Act of 1842 and
subsequent extensions of the factory acts themselves beyond textiles. The
textile industries were central to the process of industrialization as perceived
by contemporaries, attracting the anxious scrutiny of diagnosticians of the
social ills of industrialism.
This article arises from a study of these debates, focused on key localities
in the Lancashire cotton region and the West Riding woollen and worsted
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF. UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge M A 02142, USA.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
57
distri~ts.~
One theme has been an exploration of the changing and contested meanings of the ‘factory question’, as these meanings were constructed in industrial and community contexts. It will be argued that the
pervasive presence of concerns about gender had practical effects which
varied over time and between industries and localities. The anticipated
effects of shared campaigns (for example, for a ten-hours bill) might vary,
while the actual terms of legislation as enforced might not embody all the
expressed concerns and hidden agendas of protagonists; consequences can
rarely be unambiguously read off from the intentions of historical actors.
Factory reform undoubtedly had some relationship to gender divisions in
industrial work. This took varied forms, including the exclusion of women
from sectors of employment, but also their continued presence in the workplace under regulated conditions. The period of effective factory regulation
from the mid-nineteenth century saw continued and, if anything, increased
female participation in textile factory employment.
The article considers, first, the varied forms in which patriarchal relations
were disrupted and reconstituted by industrial change. I then examine constructions of gender difference in campaigns for factory reform, drawing attention to the differing aims and strategies justified by appeals to values of
manly ’independence’ and the ’protection’ of persons categorized as
dependents. Finally, I suggest some ways in which ambiguities in the legislation and negotiated processes of enforcement helped validate job segregation within the factory.
The Lancashire and West Riding textile industries display a variety of
patterns of work organisation and technology, and it is important to beware
of taking the experience of particular, well documented occupational groups
as a model for what was happening to the working class as a whole. It i s
however possible to identify certain key categories of adult male workers,
whose concerns to stabilise their employment and family situations in the
face of economic insecurity and industrial change contributed to agitation for
factory reform, as well as to other popular movements of the period.
The best-known case is that of cotton mule-spinning. Mule-spinning emerged as a predominantly male occupation, although one that experienced
some insecurity in the 1830s and 40s. The degree to which mule-spinners’
‘skill’ was rendered ’artificial’ by the spread of self-acting machines (itself a
slow and uneven process, gradually extending from coarser to finer yarns)
has been much di~cussed.~
The 1840s, the period of intense short-time
agitation, seem to have seen the consolidation of Lancashire mule-spinning
as a male occupation, including the piecing process where women were displaced by boys and young men. Mule-spinners undoubtedly played an important role in labour struggles (including operatives’ short-time committees)
and the final spinning process was crucial to the production schedules and
cost structure of the mill, but it should be remembered that the spinners were
a minority of the labour force; spinning proper accounted for some ten per
cent of the number employed, but around half the wage
0 Basil Blackwell Lfd. 1993.
58
Gender and History
The majority of the work force engaged in various preparatory processes,
such as blowing, carding, and roving, in which raw cotton was cleaned and
the fibres separated and stretched into slivers ready for spinning. Employment records indicate that these preparatory processes employed a high
proportion of female and juvenile labour, with some adult men in the cardrooms and a few over looker^.^ Good preparation was important, especially
for quality products, and female card-room hands were said to require
careful supervision.8 It should also be noted that, although mule-spinning
had become the dominant technique in Lancashire cotton, throstle spinning
(basically a form of Arkwright’s frame) remained a viable technique for
coarse yarns, and accounted for a significant, if minority, sector of the
industry (including such manufacturing dynasties as the Fieldens and Gregs
as well as many more marginal rural mills).g In throstle mills women and
girls were engaged in the actual spinning, tending frames under the supervision of male overlookers.
The Yorkshire worsted industry, which had undergone a peculiarly rapid
process of concentration into factories, likewise adopted a form of spinningframe. Here it was the main preparatory process, combing, that constituted
a stronghold of male artisanal labour, carried on outside the mill or in
separate sheds attached to it.IoWith the development of machine-combing,
combing was incorporated into the factory, but like other innovations this
was a gradual process, retarded by difficulties in using machinery for higherquality grades of yarn as well as by the resistance of handcombers. The
worsted industry made intensive use of child labour in the spinning process
itself, a requirement reflected in worsted employers’ replies to the factory
commissioners’ questionnaire (1 833).11
In the woollen industry, finally, a series of artisanal workshop processes
were gradually brought into the mill, with preparation and finishing processes of relatively greater importance than the actual spinning. This sector
employed the highest proportion of adult men, and retained its complex
organisation of interlocking factory and out-work processes. Conflict seems
to have centred on the piecemeal mechanisation of finishing processes and
the introduction of teenaged male labour, and the changing balance between
factory work and the domestic clothier.12
In the weaving sector, the period was marked by the spasmodic growth
of power-loom factories, especially in coarse and medium cottons and in
worsted. While handloom weaving did employ women, and some men
were employed as factory weavers, the gender balance shifted with mechani~ at i0 n .l~
Weaving was the best paid factory work for women, whose earnings could at times overtake those of handloom weavers or other male trades
suffering reces~ion.~~
Power-loom weaving was probably the main focus for
the exclusionary component of short-time agitation, especially in the crisis
years of the early 1840s. On the other hand, at more prosperous times
employment of several family members in weaving factories could produce
high joint family earnings in the weaving districts of north Lancashire.15
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
59
Working-class struggles in the 1830s and 405, including the short-time
movement, can certainly be seen as attempts to reconstitute patriarchal
relationships in a changing environment, involving conflicts both with employers and with juvenile and female workers.16 But sustainable versions of
patriarchy would necessarily be different in different industrial and community contexts. In some predominantly masculine work areas, skilled men
could exercise authority over younger male trainees, as in the spinner-piecer
system. In processes employing women and young people, adult men commanded a monopoly of supervisory and other more specialised and betterpaid jobs. In out-working trades like handloom weaving or woolcombing,
men sought to control the time, labour inputs and general behaviour of their
households, and to retain economic power by preserving their trades against
the threat of factory production.
The restabilisation of patriarchy in textile communities cannot be defined
by any single way of organising work, but rather in locally specific combinations of these forms of relationship. Variability extended to the level of
individual families, whose composition and work patterns were constantly
shifting with demographic turnover, changing economic conditions, and the
general fluidity of family units. There could be no neat fit between employment and family
Employment patterns might cut across the
sectoral differences discussed here, especially in areas of mixed industrial
composition like Calderdale, where the wives and children of domestic
woollen weavers could provide a labour force for throstle-spinning cotton
mills; the husbands and fathers of mill workers might also be employed outside textiles entirely, for example as miners.I8
Given this diversity of employment patterns, no single change in the
labour process (such as the consolidation of the spinner-piecer system) can
provide the key to the reconstitution of patriarchy. The undoubted importance of family and kinship for employment rarely reproduced a ’complete’
nuclear family within the workplace, but more often links between mothers
and children, older and younger siblings, sons and fathers, uncles and
nephews, or other kin. Women might be crucial in negotiating their
children’s employment, a function reflected in their role in campaigns to
regulate child labour.19
Campaigns by male workers to preserve or restore their position certainly
underlay many of the embittered social conflicts of the period. But such
attempts cannot be encapsulated in a unitary conception of ’patriarchal
interests’. In cotton-spinning, where the introduction of the spinning-mule
had been associated with the masculinisation of a hitherto female occupation
(hand- and jenny-spinning), spinners did make consistent and successful
attempts to establish a male monopoly; this was reflected in their trade union
activities, but also to some extent in calls for factory legislation to restrict
women and young people. In the woollen and worsted districts, male outworkers under threat might see legislation as a means of limiting the growth
of factory production, as well as ensuring protection of their children’s health
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
60
Gender and History
and morals during a life-cycle phase of factory employment. In various sectors, men employed as overlookers (supervising women and young people),
mill mechanics and other specialised workers were concerned to maintain
wage differentials, security of employment and authority at work.
In all these cases demands for factory legislation played some part in male
workers’ struggles. These campaigns were often punctuated by exclusionary rhetoric, and exclusionary effects might be among the anticipated
benefits of reform.2o However, shorter hours for adult men themselves
was a consistent strategic aim, seen both as desirable in itself and as part of
an alternative economic policy to control trade fluctuations, stabilise markets
and employment, and in the longer run raise wages.21The earning-power
of adult men was crucial to the construction of a patriarchal family form
adapted to waged work in factory industry. This was often expressed in
terms of a ’male breadwinner’ ideal, which might however envisage the
man as the principal but not necessarily sole breadwinner. Some men could
look to the exclusion of ’protected’ workers from particular occupations as
a precondition for this, but the ability of the male breadwinner to support
his dependents could also be seen as the outcome of a longer-run process
of economic, social and moral ‘improvement’. Factory reform was a persistent theme in these struggles, but its significance varied in differing
contexts.
The ’factory movement’ of the 1830s and 40s drew active support from all
these sectors of employment. Recent studies have identified the basis of the
movement in operative short-time committees, which drew on the networks
of trade unionism, popular radicalism and Chartism.22 In Lancashire the key
role was played by the mule-spinners, whose short-time campaigns can be
traced back well before the 1830s. The campaigns of the 1830s and 40s are
distinguished by the involvement of West Riding woollen and worsted
trades; adult male operatives from the county giving evidence to Sadler’s
parliamentary committee (1832) comprised 15 woollen workers (clothdressers, slubbers, etc.) mainly from the Leeds and Huddersfield areas, 6
from the worsted industry (combers, weavers, a woolsorter and an overlooker), 5 (mainly overlookers) from flax mills, and 4 outside textiles, giving
evidence as parents or as former child workers.23
Short-time agitation can readily be placed in the framework of a wider
growth of class identity and consciousness. But this was also a gendered
The ‘working-class public sphere’, to which the factory
de~elopment.~~
movement made important contributions, was partly defined by gender.25
In the activities characteristic of the movement, it was men who formed the
committees, made the speeches, wrote the placards and pamphlets, made
links with potential allies, organised the parliamentary lobbying. The rhetoric
of the movement reinforced the ’positioning of women as wives, mothers
and daughters within Radical culture’.26This could, however, imply the
presence of women as a crucial element in support of the cause. They must
have been central to the mobilisation of the factory children themselves in
0 Basil Blackwell Lfd. 1993.
61
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
opposition to the factory commissioners, and probably also played some part
in the street politics of the public denunciation of unpopular ’tyrannical’
Women were more publicly addressed as the mothers of innocent children
and bearers of domestic virtue. The Poor Man’s Advocate appealed to ‘the
mothers of children, we call upon the ladies of England’ as well as ‘the
mothers of those poor children themselves’ to join the struggle against ‘the
proud oppressor’.2* At meetings in the West Riding: ‘Here and there, a
mother clasping an infant to her breast, kissing it, and exclaiming: “Factory
slave thou shalt never be” gave to the proceedings a dramatic interest, remarkable, intense, and exciting’29 Such rhetoric might explore the boundaries of ’natural’ dependencies of sex and age, hinting at possibilities of
more active resistance. Richard Oastler made rhetorical play of the association of motherhood with ’nature’, drawing attention to the ferocity of a
lioness with cubs:
And think you not that English Christian mothers feel as fondly for their young as
does the lioness?Ah, yes, they do, yet they have not the power of the lioness, but
in solitude and confinement are condemned to mourn over the helpless fate of their
offspring, and it is on that account they now take a part in our meeting, while we
are attempting that which the public order of society prevents them from doingpublicly pleading the cause of their infant children.’O
The possibility of active resistance symbolises the fragility of moral constraints undermined by the short-sighted greed of overworking masters. This
is extended to the factory children themselves, as in Oastler’s famous ‘law
or the needle’ speech suggesting industrial sabotage; Joseph Firth, a Keighley
operative, described his desire for personal revenge for ill-treatment as a
factory child, ’but I have never yet had corporeal strength to do it, and now
I am more anxious to combat him with reason and arg~ment’.~’
As wives and mothers, women had an important symbolic function in
short-time propaganda, as well as a crucial role in the mobilisation of community sentiment. As factory workers themselves, they might testify to their
sufferings, but rarely, if ever, gained the space to propound solutions. Three
female operatives from the West Riding gave evidence at Sadler’s Committee, compared to 26 adult men and 9 male teenagers. It was the adult
men who were expected to offer expositions of the economics of short-time
w ~ r k i n g . )That
~
women might nevertheless want to share in the radical
search for an alternative political economy is indicated by a remarkable letter
to The Ten Hours Advocate from ’Elizabeth‘, apparently a weaver at a mill
near Todmorden. Presenting the ten-hours movement as ’this arduous and important struggle for the liberty of our sex, and the protection of our children’,
Elizabeth suggests that women’s indifference to the struggle arose from ‘the
want of . . . education’ and ‘mental improvement’ resulting from overwork,
which had made them ‘destitute of all knowledge respecting the rule which
governs wages’.33At one level, this can be read as the familiar complaint
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993
62
Gender and History
Memorial to Richard Oastler, a leading factory reformer. He is shown with two factory
children, ‘whom his left arm partly encircles. The boy stands in a rather shamefaced and
modest attitude, while the girl nestles to the boy as being of her own condition, but looks
up to him who i s their friend and advocate.’ l h r r a f e d London News, 15 May 1869.
Picture courtesy of Illustrated London News Picture Library.
of women’s ’apathy’ about the important ’public’ concerns defined by men.
But the language, which bears traces of Owenism, suggests a more assertive
claim for access to the ‘really useful knowledge’ of radical culture.
Elizabeth was, however, a rare (possibly even unique) instance of a factory
woman enabled to make comments of a discursive nature on the general
issues involved. Otherwise women’s opinions are recorded in summary
form, in response to the questions of politicians, officials and journalists. This
material does indicate widespread support for the ten-hour day. Leonard
Horner‘s sarcastic remark following the restrictions placed on women by the
1844 Act, that he knew of no cases of women ‘having expressed any regret
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
63
at their rights being thus far interfered with’, should be read with caution,
but his survey of operative opinion following the Ten Hours’ Bill of 1847
indicated a majority of women (albeit a narrow one) favouring the shorter
It i s worthy of note that Horner did seek out the views of women
operatives, on the same terms as the men questioned; and he posed the issue
of preference for shorter hours even at lower wages, thus broaching some
of the economic arguments surrounding short time. The responses suggest
predictable differences in the reported use of ’free’ time, implying a particular women’s version of economic calculation as well as the differential
burden of domestic duties. Men referred to improved ‘health and comforts’
and sometimes to opportunities for self-education; women devoted their
increased time outside the factory to ’needlework and other useful occupations at home’. Some replies indicate that these domestic activities were seen
as saving on household expenditure, and therefore discounted against the
reduced wages; women may also have earned extra money by taking in
needlework or washing, or exchanged such services on an informal basis.35
If the short-time campaigns constructed women as wives and mothers, or
as younger workers anxious to retain their feminine virtue during a phase of
factory employment, they constructed men as the active protectors of
dependents, struggling to enjoy the right to independent livelihood from
honest toil. The public language of the movement drew on a number of
sources. The radical tradition, with its ideal of the male free citizen counterposed to the ’slave’, was particularly important for working-class culture.
Evangelical religion, romantic sensibilities, and medical views of childhood,
adolescence and sexuality might also be appropriated in working-class, as
well as middleclass, p~blics.~6
The figure of the helpless child was an appeal to a chivalric crusade,
cutting across divisions of class or creed, by ’sincere and bold men . ,
pledged to secure the emancipation of little children’.37 Moral duty to the
weak and dependent is an important theme in professional middle-class
versions of manly conduct. Leonard Horner wrote to his wife, complaining
of the ‘dull and mechanical and unvaried’ character of his job: ‘I recover my
spirits by thinking that I am the instrument of making the lives of many
innocent children less burthen~ome.’~~
Condemnation of the selfishness of
parents who lived off children’s earnings was one piece of moralism common to middle-class reformers and working-class activists, though for the
working class this might be seen in terms of undermining the collective
position of their class, and be tempered by awareness of the economic
pressures in v ~ l v e d . ~ ~
Appeals to ‘sincere and bold men’ to act as protectors of the weak and
dependent embodied definitions of a masculine identity appropriated across
class boundaries-from skilled men resisting encroachments on their trade
to aristocratic legislatorsand middle-class administrators. But notions of adult
men as free agents could also be undermined by an awareness of the
dependence and subjugation of all labour, forced as it was into unequal
.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd.
1993.
64
Gender and History
bargains with capital. As the Chartist surgeon, Peter McDouall, argued, the
adult male worker was ‘deprived of his free agency as much as the
But this lack of free agency has a special significance for men: the enslavement of men was an affront to their manhood, ’the act of stripping men of
large portions of their property by ~iolence’.~’De-skilling undermined
masculine identity, forcing adult spinners to ‘go “piecing” for children’s
wagesI.42 Dependence was the natural condition of women and children,
of which employers took unnatural advantage; the reduction of adult men
to an analogous condition was itself an unnatural act. Active rebellion was
the sign of masculinity. ‘The father-worst and most wonderful of all-looks
on and lives-not a man, but a dumb soul-bound thrall . . . who, were there
but a spark of life within the bondsman‘s breast, dare as soon thrust his hand
in the fire as thus pluck his neighbour’s wife and babes from his bosom.’43
Only ‘power in his own hands of shortening the hours of labour’ would
reinstate the male operative as a free man.44Women and children, defined
by their weakness and vulnerability, had meantime to await deliverance
from the gothic factory hells to which they had been consigned.
The figure of the adult working man as citizen and free labourer was
central to the class identity expressed in campaigns for factory legislation.
But attempts to regulate young people’s and women’s work were not
necessarily envisaged in directly exclusionary terms; nor were rhetorical
appeals to the ‘male breadwinner’ readily translated into specific legislative
proposals. The common demand for a ten-hour bill could be seen as the
means to differently understood objectives. Some of these differences were
to be clarified in the confused and bitter conflicts that followed the Act of
1847.
Exclusionary strategies could operate at several levels, seen in more or less
direct and immediate terms. Calls for the direct exclusion of women were
~ ~ years saw deep
most widespread in the early and m i d - l 8 4 0 ~ .These
recession down to 1842, the spread of power-loom weaving and a crisis in
mule-spinning associated with self-actors and other devices such as ‘doubledecking’. This coincided with and reinforced national attention to the
’problem‘ of women’s labour manifested in the Mines Act and the restriction
of women by the 1844 Factory Act. In this context influential public opinion
(often remote from the industrial situations it sought to reform) reinforced the
exclusionary efforts of male workers.46
However, the aim of exclusion, on the lines of the prohibition of women
working underground in mines, coexisted uneasily with the tactic of using
protected categories to reduce men‘s hours and impose a standard working
day. Demands for exclusion were also tempered by a recognition of the
pressures that led women to seek factory employment. A West Riding deputation to Westminster in 1842 is the main instance where exclusion was
presented as part of a formal programme of demands; the ensuing dialogue
with Peel indicates some sensitivity to the prime minister’s appeal to the
need of ‘a widow with two daughters‘ to ‘support yourselves by your own
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993
65
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
labour’, although the deputation maintained its view.47 It is also of some
significance that this call emanated from the West Riding, where domestic
workers, artisans and small clothiers were threatened by the growth of
factory production and the disruption of family economies.48
Apart from directly exclusionary demands, other measures such as restrictions on hours might be supported in the expectation that they would reduce
the incentive to employ protected workers and so expand employment for
adult men. As regards mule-spinning, the restriction of women by the 1844
Act is a case in point: by subjecting women to the same restrictions as young
persons the Act removed the possibility of employing them as piecers to
work extended hours. This probably helped consolidate male control in
spinning, as well as limiting the hours worked by spinners with juvenile
piecers. This came at a point of transition in the trade, when the increased
ratio of spindles to operatives threatened the future employment of skilled
men, creating surpluses of trained piecers awaiting promotion and spinners
forced to work as senior piecers.49
Restrictions on women’s hours thus aided a process of exclusion in mulespinning. For other groups (including male card-room hands and overlookers
in spinning preparatory processes) legislation may have had a longer term
and less direct significance for the pursuit of the male breadwinner ideal.
Diminishing employment of women might figure as a generalised and indistinct aspiration, rather than a specific strategy. Shorter hours formed part
of an alternative political economy espoused by working-class radicals,
which would in the long run reduce the dependence of working-class households on the earnings of women, young persons and children, by increasing
the earning power of adult men.
The ten-hours movement certainly provided a platform for the ‘domestic
ideal’ in an industrial context. The Ten Hours Advocate used the rhetoric of
moral improvement, and, in addition to information and argumentation in
support of the movement, included some of the features of a ‘family’ journal
of the kind becoming popular in the 1840s, with serial stories, articles on
domestic skills and miscellaneous filler
This perspective might look
forward to ‘the day . . . when the husband will be enabled to provide for his
wife and family, without sending the former to endure the drudgery of a
cotton mill’.51 But the expected arrival of that ’day’ was necessarily vague,
and open to interpretation by readers in diverse situations. Dependence on
the unaided effort of the male breadwinner could be seen as a further stage
in a protracted process, for which the ten-hours bill would be a necessary,
but not sufficient condition.
In the immediate prospect, establishing adult men as the principal, but not
necessarily sole, breadwinners was a more realistic motive for short-time
agitation. Given the importance of earnings by all employable family
members, whether in the factory, at home or elsewhere, the patriarchal
interests of adult men were more likely to be expressed in the hierarchy of
pay and status and job segregation within the factory than in exclusion from
0 Basil Blackwell
Ltd. 1993.
Gender and History
66
it of protected categories. The ’class politics’ of short-time working could
indeed form part of a patriarchal strategy by working-class men; but it was
a strategy that worked through improvement in the bargaining power of
labour, and especially adult male labour, rather than through direct exclusion of other categories.
Demands for regulation could also, as is often suggested, be a tactic to
shorten the hours of adult men.52Such tactical use of protected categories,
which evidently cut against the logic of exclusion, seems to have been a
consistent and abiding theme of factory agitation. It was, for example, quite
explicitly claimed that men, too, required ‘more time for rest and for recreation’ to maintain life, health and working strength; ten hours was cited
as the norm in many artisan trades.53 Conventional arguments about the
moralising role of women in the home could even, in another rhetorical shift,
be claimed for adult men ‘because the preservation of decency, if not of strict
morality, in the male part of any population is an indispensable requisite to
the preservation of female modesty . . there never existed a society in
which the men were profligate and the women virtuous.’54
But the explicit demand to shorten men’s hours does not mean that the
emphasis on protecting women and juveniles can be seen simply as a
tactical adaptation to prevailing opinions about the sanctity of free labour,
in a struggle whose real meaning is to be sought at the level of economic
class interests. If a ten-hour day for women and young persons meant de
fact0 the same hours for men, the form in which this was achieved still
worked to construct gender difference.
Some of the contradictions of this process became apparent in the rather
confused battles that followed the failure of the 1847 Act to deliver its
promise of a uniform ten-hour day. In a sense, the form of factory legislation-and of the demands of the short-time movement-enabled adult men
to have their cake and eat it: to sustain a definition of themselves as the free
agents postulated by political economy, while enjoying the legislative
protection of a standard working day.55 The well-organized Bolton spinners
saw this in terms of trade custom, secured by formal or informal bargaining
procedures, in which the working day followed that for young persons and
women.56Men could then achieve, apparently by their own efforts, the
hours applied to restricted categories.
Conceptions of customary regulation of working practices, with a rather
indistinct line between law and custom, legality and popular legitimacy,
help explain the outraged response to employers‘ strategems to work a
longer day while arguably remaining within the strict provisions of the law.
This successful resistance, especially in the Ashton and Stalybridge area,
led to bitter conflicts, and to complicated divisions in the short-time
movement itself. Some sections of the movement, apparently centred on
Oldham, called for legal restriction on the moving-power (i.e. stopping the
millengine after ten hours), while others looked to voluntary agreement
and trade practice to align men’s hours with the standard day. The proposed
.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
67
parliamentary compromise of a ten-and-a-half hour day, plus removal of
some of the legal anomalies, was a further bone of contention. The basis of
the divisions remains obscure, but they seem in part to reflect differences
between the better organised and pragmatically inclined spinners and such
groups as weavers, male card-room hands, and the surplus of piecers unable
to find openings as spinners.57Personalities such as Oastler and Stephens,
with their local followings, no doubt also had some influence.
Stopping the mill-engine may, as Valverde suggests, constitute a more
radical position, which would ’unite the working-class rather than divide it
along age and gender lines’; it would also have been a more substantial
But both restriction on the engine
breach in the principles of lais~ez-faire.~~
and the alternative strategy of regulating men’s hours by trade custom and
collective bargaining could be justified in terms of shared notions of labour
as property and the rights of free-born Englishmen. Thus it was argued that
adult men needed regulated hours to conserve their property in their own
persons and labour; the claim of labour to the same protection as other forms
At an Oldham
of property was, after all, a staple of radical
election meeting, ‘the man in the gallery wanted to know if life and health
were not of more value than protection to the present law of the country
which enabled working men to break down their constitutions!’bO Legislative intervention was needed ’to do that for them which they cannot do for
themselves’, to empower men to achieve what they all desired but could not
attain individually; longer hours were imposed ‘against the will and in spite
of the entreaties of the employed’.61Arguments for radical state intervention to enforce a standard working day regardless of sex or age still incorporated gender difference. Such measures were represented as enabling
adult men to preserve their inalienable property in person and labour;
women were to enjoy the benefits of protection, preserve feminine moral
virtue and become better wives and mothers.
The establishment of a standard day by trade custom and voluntary agreement seems to have commanded broader support in the short-time movement. The eventual settlement of the question after 1853 was based on this
approach, and followed further legislative tightening of clauses regarding
protected workers, rather than restrictions on the millengine. It should be
emphasised, however, that the standardisation of hours was the result of
considerable struggle and bargaining, not an inherent necessity of mechanised production. There were concerted refusals to work more than ten hours,
political and industrial pressure on hard-line employers, demonstrations and
mass pickets to enforce shorter hours in outlying areas. This contention over
working hours added to the tensions of 1848 and its aftermath, and at times
raised fearful memories of Luddism or the Chartist strike of 1842.62Confrontation was sharpest in the Ashton-Stalybridge and Oldham area. After
enforcing uniform hours in Ashton by ‘the peaceable and constitutional
method of ceasing labour at Six o’clock’ the short-time committee ‘carried
the moral warfare to Stalybridge, then to Mossley, then to Hyde, and then
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd
1993.
Gender and History
68
to that beautiful, but slavedriven valley of G l o ~ s o p ’ .Praising
~~
action taken
by Oldham piecers, the Ashton committee called on the spinners to follow
their example: ‘Have the laws of nature to be reversed-boys to display the
heart of lions and their fathers those of hens?’64
This continuing disturbance over working hours indicates that a major goal
of the movement was the regulation of adult men’s hours by bringing them
into line with those of protected workers. Far from satisfying patriarchal
aspirations to displace women, the substitution of adult men to work longer
hours provoked further militancy. These developments, following the
achievement of the long-sought goal of a ten-hour day in the 1847 Act,
represent a shift in emphasis from the mid-1840s when exclusionary
elements in factory reform seem most prominent. The prolonged battle to
enforce the operatives’ interpretation of the 1847 Act was also, it should be
noted, localised to certain parts of the Lancashire cotton district, where the
issue of working hours always loomed larger in factory act enforcement,
while the West Riding had seen the strongest expressions of exclusionist
senti ment.65
As these shifts in emphasis indicate, it i s important not to over-generalise
from specific calls to exclude women from factory employment or from
changes in the sexual division of labour in specific processes such as mulespinning. To over-generalise from specific instances is to mis-recognise the
basic significance of gender for the class relationships manifest in short-time
struggles. This involved a broader, less specific, more widely resonant theme
of improvement in the position of adult male labour, achieved through the
enforcement of an alternative political economy. This is not to say that the
exclusionary rhetoric of short-time platforms was unimportant; such language was a ’strategy of gender struggle’, not merely a tactic of class
struggle.66It contributed to a general atmosphere reinforcing male monopolies in specific well-paid jobs such as mule-spinning. As they bargained with
employers or the state, male workers exercised differential power, which
was all the more real for being at times implicit, unconscious and taken for
granted. The struggle over regulating factory labour, whether by legislation,
trade unionism, or other means, was part of the construction of a maledominated world of work, politics and collective action. The practice of state
regulation and authoritative discourses surrounding it point to some less
obvious ways in which this occurred.
The approach adopted by factory inspectors was shaped by a number of
forces6’ These include programmes of education and moral reform influential in governing and opinion-forming circles (Leonard Horner, the inspector
responsible for Lancashire and the most outspoken official commentator on
the need for strengthened legislation, had especially close links to such
circles); continued popular agitation for a ten-hours bill and the general
background of social disturbance in the Chartist years; and employers’
lobbies and resistance to aspects of legislation. Nominees of Whig patronage,
the inspectors defined their practice in response to such pressures, and one
0 Basil
Blackwell Lid 1993.
factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
69
should beware of exaggerating the coherence or zeal of projects of state
reform and moral regulation.68
The development of regulation is marked by shifts in emphasis, partly related to the parallel history of popular agitation. Concerns about gender
might be explicit and direct or more obliquely expressed; rhetorical allusions
to the dangers of women’s work could lead to rather limited forms of specific
intervention in this sphere. Restrictions on adult women began in 1844, but
previous measures organised in terms of age-categories (children aged 12
and under, ‘young persons’ aged 13 to 17) often connoted sexual difference.
The adult man represented the opposite pole to the helpless and dependent
child, often personified as a female ~ h i l d . 6The
~ educational and registration
requirements of the 1833 Act may have encouraged a more systematic and
formal division of the labour force by age-groupings, although much remains
to be discovered about the precise impact of these measures on work
experience and family life. (The very availability of records is itself an effect
of the legislation, as well as parallel extensions of information-gathering by
the state, such as the census.)
Dangers to young people (whose hours were in effect the working hours
for all employees in many, though not all, factories) received some attention
in the continuing debate, with female puberty a particular focus of concern.
It should, however, be emphasised that while this debate helped generate
a climate of concern, the full range of medico-moral anxieties found only
very limited expression in the subsequent l e g i ~ l a t i o n . ~ ~
Factory inspectors’ reports give some indications of preoccupations
with women‘s work. Both Horner and his colleague, Robert Saunders
(responsible for the West Riding), emphasised the dangers of growing female employment in the mid-l840s, in terms that suggest an undercurrent
of exclusionist feeling; but a few years later Horner was emphasising the
drive to establish common working hours based on those for restricted
workers.
There i s also some increase in the frequency of references to female
workers in routine returns of prosecutions in Lancashire (the bulk of Horner’s
district). Most cases in these returns refer simply to a ’child’ or ‘young person’
being illegally employed, but those that do specify gender show a shift,
possibly associated with the extension of restrictions to adult women by the
1844 Act. Prior to 1844, 17 out of 54 summaries mentioning gender specify
the individual as female; in the period 1844-51, however, a higher proportion are specified as female (42 out of 82 cases mentioning gender), while
the recently restricted category of adult women accounts for 31 cases.71
Males are therefore either more often involved or more salient (whether to
Horner, his subordinates, or some Home Office clerk) at the earlier period.
This may be linked to the importance of schooling in enforcing the law;
female absences from school may have been more often overlooked, and
less likely to lead to some action under the factory acts. The apparent concentration on male workers probably also reflects the key role of spinners in
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993.
70
Gender and History
campaigns for factory legislation, with a consequent focus of attention on the
predominantly male spinning-room.
The 1844 Act incorporated adult women into the protected category of
young persons. Section 32 provided that females over 18 could be employed
only ’for the same time and in the same manner as young persons’: the
marginal gloss reads ‘women to be employed as young persons.’72 Most
other sections refer simply to ‘young persons’, as do subsequent Acts (which
were largely amendments to the permitted hours and arrangements under
the regulative framework established in 1833 and 1844). Robert Baker’s
widely circulated handbook on the Acts states under the heading ’workers’:
’children, young persons, and women, are the persons of whom the law
takes cognizance . . . women, of every age, are considered the same as
young persons.’ Baker’s text frequently shifts from the universal masculine
form of legal language to gender-specific use of female names in examples
of the various certificates and registers.73 Protected workers connote
femininity. All females over 13 are placed in a single category in most of the
official employment returns subsequent to the 1844
In practice, this
treatment of adult women as young persons did not extend to any specific
certification and registration procedures for adult women, although employing them ‘in the same manner as young persons‘ might be construed to
require this. The employment of women on the same terms as young persons
was mainly interpreted in relation to their permitted hours.
The safety regulations also introduced in 1844 were another aspect of state
intervention which provided a platform for anxieties about women’s work.
This is particularly striking, given that the accident returns indicate that
females in all age-groups were less likely than their male counterparts to be
involved in reported accidents (see table 1).
Several points should be made about these figures. First, they may reflect
differential reporting of the less serious injuries. Accidents were notifiable
if the injured person was unable to attend work the next day; women’s
absences may have been considered less significant in this context.75This is
of course unlikely to apply to deaths or major injuries. While the returns are
not categorised so as to allow much analysis of the severity of injury, the
figures for deaths presumably reflect real differences in exposure to risk. The
sex difference in deaths for the child age-group is particularly notable. It
suggests a sexual division of labour extending down to the earliest age of
employment. This i s borne out by employment records, which show a
tendency for the gender balance of children to reflect that of older workers
in the process or d e ~a r tm e n t.~~
Aggregate sectoral figures compiled by the
factory inspectors also suggest differences in the sex composition of child
workers related to that of the adult labour force. In 1850 the West Riding
worsted mills had a heavily feminised work force of 13 and over and a
majority of girls among its child workers, while Lancashire cotton and West
Riding wool had more adult male workers and more boys in the child age
group.77Finally, the marked difference in the incidence of accidents ‘not
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
71
Table 1. Industrial Accidents, 1845-55 (reported accidents per 7000 employed)
Young
persons
Children
All
employees M
F
M
Adults
F
M
No. of
accidents
F
Horner’s district:*
All accidents
Deaths
Amputations
Lacerations etc.
Not from machinery
Nos. employed
92.2 164.8 134.2
1.1
2.2
0.9
10.2 18.0 21.0
62.3 107.8 86.3
4.4
5.9 10.4
221437
170.7
1.9
17.9
1 1 7.3
11.1
124.7
0.4
15.4
88.2
4.0
9017
5424
87.8
122.6
2.1
14.9
78.1
13.3
15595 25573
27374 381 72
76.0
1.8
7.8
49.1
8.6
50.3
0.4
5.1
34.1
2.4
2041 2
238
2256
13800
1307
64242 77208
Saunders‘s and Redgrave’s district*
All accidents
Deaths
Amputations
Lacerations etc.
Not from machinery
Nos. employed
57.4
1.1
6.8
37.0
6.1
50.7
8.9
63.9
0.8
6.0
44.7
4.0
127138
8044
8494
1.0
11.2
63.7
0.6
7.2
42.5
5.0
50.1
2.5
6.1
29.5
8.1
27.0
0.3
3.2
18.8
2.6
7298
142
859
4690
772
27399 42033
Source: Accident returns in Reports from Inspectors, 1845-55; nos. employed as stated in Reports
for Nov. 1845 (Horner), May 1845 (Saunders).
*Homer's district comprised Lancashire, a few places in Cheshire and the West Riding, and the North
of England other than the West Riding; Saunders’s district comprised the West Riding, East Midlands,
East Anglia and South East. Lancashire and the West Riding accounted for the bulk of regulated
workers in these areas. Redgrave took over Saunders’s district in 1851.
arising from machinery’ should be mentioned. This probably reflects the
concentration of men in maintenance work on machinery and buildings,
fetching and carrying, supervisory tasks and non-routine jobs about the mill.
In the inspectors’ descriptions of accidents, no doubt produced partly with
a view to impressing public opinion, accidents ‘not arising from machinery’
include falls from heights, holes in the floor, being hit by falling objects, and
boiler explosion^.^^ Workers engaged in maintenance and general tasks
about the mill would have been more exposed to such events, and differential accident figures thus give a clue to both the male monopoly of such posts
as mill mechanics and overlookers (and also of juvenile employment leading
to them) and the relative freedom of movement about the mill premises of
those engaged in such work, as compared to the confined work-areas of
women engaged in routine production processes.
Safety provisions seem to have reinforced such job segregation. The Act
stipulated that children or young persons (and therefore women) should not
clean ‘any part of the mill-gearing’ while it was in motion, while the regulations about meal breaks required protected workers to vacate the room
during statutory
In Baker’s interpretation of the law, the ‘morning
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
72
Gender and History
set’ of child workers might clean stationary machinery, whereas women and
young persons could not, even if their lunch break was later.BoThese restrictions on women both reflected and reinforced male control over the maintenance, adjustment and repair of machines. Following the ‘fencing controversy’
of 1854, the inspectorate emphasised that cleaning and oiling shafts could
be done only by adult men, and suggested it might conveniently be undertaken after normal hours or on statutory holidays, ‘a practice common in
many mills’; whitewashing could also be done at these times.81
Public controversies over safety also provided the occasion for homilies
about the special dangers to women and the need to safeguard them from
the consequences of their innate ‘carelessness’. This was somewhat at variance with a preoccupation with preventing the destruction of male labourpower through avoidable accidents: safety measures were caught between
a construction of (implicitly male) labour as property, expressed in Horner’s
comment that ‘sound limbs are a main part of the working man’s capital’,82
and legislative and administrative practice organised around the protection
of those unable to take care of their own welfare. Despite the construction
of the law partly in terms of the ‘capital’ of the (adult male) workers, and
despite the lower female accident rate, discussion of safety was punctuated
by dire warnings of the threat to women. When the issue of safety was aired
at the parliamentary Select Committee of 1840-41, Ashley took occasion to
ask: ‘Do not you think that little children are exposed to very great hazard,
particularly female children, with their flowing garments . . .?‘The witness
was able to oblige with a suitable instance from his experience as a factory
superintendent (deputy inspector) at Stockport.83 In the orchestration of
opinion leading up to the 1844 Act, Horner’s reports mentioned six accidents to women and girls, dwelling on one where the victim was scalped
‘while . . . dressing her long hair’.84
The theme of hair or loose clothing catching in machinery recurred in
reports of accidents. The controversial attempt to enforce fencing of overhead shafts highlighted accidents (mainly to male workers) from clothing
entangled in these shafts. When mandatory fencing had to be abandoned in
favour of recommendations: ’Lord Palmerston recommends that none but
male adults should perform any operation which brings them near to a shaft,
and that they should always be clothed in some dress that fits close to the
body, without any loose parts or ends which could catch in . . . the
machinery.‘85 Descriptions of accidents often emphasised the carelessness
of juvenile and female workers. One young female, ‘playing [sic] with a shaft
. . . her slip got fast to the shaft’; a young male ‘called out to fellow-workers,
“Watch me do a trick’’ . . .’; in another case, the victim was ‘standing on a
stool, looking out of a window‘.86 The scalping of female workers seems to
have passed into popular images of the ‘bad old days’ before factory reform,
perhaps elided with stories of violent overseers wrenching out children’s
hair.87From the cruelty of men, attention shifted to the ineluctable risks of
the machine, against which prudent precaution must be taken.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
73
The concern with accidents keyed into wider debates about the physical
and moral dangers of the factory, and gave some scope for moralising
initiatives beyond the strict requirements of the law. Reporting an accident
to a girl caught by the handkerchief tied round her head, Robert Saunders
(the inspector for the West Riding) drew attention to the danger of such headcoverings, adding the authority of ‘medical men’ on hygienic grounds. Baker
(himself a medical man, and a subinspector in Saunders’s district) made
similar comments, under the heading ‘disease’, mentioning scaldhead and
recommending hair-nets as ‘far more simple, more cleanly, and more
comely’.88This was, no doubt, sound practical advice, but it carried wider
cultural connotations: simplicity, cleanliness and comeliness were cardinal
virtues of female working-class respectability.
Factory regulation and its penumbra of public discussion emphasised the
danger of unregulated encounters between femininity-signified by loose,
flowing clothing and long hair (or handkerchiefs or shawls covering it)-and
the machine. This was echoed in a wider discussion, in which the dress and
demeanour of factory women and girls were anxiously scrutinised for signs
of pollution and danger. This theme recurs, for example in Angus Reach’s
Morning Chronicle articles on the manufacturing districts. Mule-spinning,
significantly, was one danger zone; spinners and piecers went barefoot on
the oily floor, ’and it is really painful to see a pretty girl with toes and ankles
the exact colour of the dingy boards.’ The articles propose a hierarchy of
rough and delicate labour, mirroring the quality of the finished product. The
silk mills at Macclesfield were at one extreme, shoddy mills in ‘the mean
little town of Dewsbury’ at the other: ’at this species of work-the lowest
and foulest which any phase of the factory system can show-I found for the
first time, labouring as regular mill-hands, Irish women.’89
Much of this was in the eye of the beholder, and the path of respectability
was indeed a narrow one for working women. Too much attention to dress
and appearance would raise suspicions of frivolity (or excessively generous
wages), like the Oldham factory women who ‘would pinch hard rather than
go with a plain cap instead of a silk handkerchief‘; the text then immediately
switches to a discussion of child-minding and the neglect of infants by such
women.9oToo much practicality could connote equally dangerous threats
to female decency, like the trousers worn by pit-brow women.9’ Simplicity
and comeliness, as Baker put it, or ’unostentatious comfort’92 was the somewhat elusive object of investigative visits to the industrial north.
Public debate about the factory and the subsequent practice of official
regulation had helped stimulate this interest. There was a constant crossreferencing between the weighty tomes of official reports, platform and
parliamentary debate, journalism, visual representations, and fiction. The
meanings of the ‘factory question’ have to be traced out across this whole
cultural field. It is also important to specify the actual effects of legal
requirements. These did rather little towards the kind of moral surveillance suggested in periodic waves of public concern. But the practice of
(C Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993
Gender and History
74
enforcement undoubtedly provided some scope for ‘moral entrepreneurship’
by officials and concerned observers, and perhaps gave opportunities to
interpret potential ambiguities in the law in ways that placed further restrictions on women. Unlike male workers and employers, women operatives
did not constitute an organised pressure-group present on their own behalf
in the public debate and able to exercise vigilance over marginal interpretations of the law.
* * *
Struggles to regulate factory hours and conditions undoubtedly expressed
the interests of male workers, who felt directly threatened by changes in the
sexual division of labour, as well as of ruling-class figures, who saw the
family as the cornerstone of moral and social order. But there were also
divergences in location and outlook, within as much as between these class
groupings. Sectoral differences in the textile industries were important for
workers and employers in the industrial north, and had necessarily to be
taken into account by state officials trying to mediate social tensions. This
article has therefore emphasised the complexities of the factory question, the
varied practical interpretations which might be placed on a common set of
demands or enactments. If attempts to stabilise patriarchal power in the
context of waged work in the factory system were an underlying theme,
there was not, and could not, be any unitary programme or strategy to
achieve this. It is important to distinguish themes present in the rhetoric of
public debate from the actual provisions of the resulting legislation as it came
to be implemented. For example, although exclusionist rhetoric was one
feature of the language of agitation, short-time committees militantly resisted
the very course of action-substitution of adult men to work longer hoursrequired by the logic of excluding women by restrictions on their hours.
The characteristic pattern in textiles was not to be the exclusion of women,
but their continued, even increased participation under regulated conditions.
But there was also a gender and age division within these industries, and
exclusion from particular jobs and processes did occur. Jobs involving recognised ‘skill’, discretion and authority, such as mule-spinners, overlookers and
mill mechanics, were firmly established as male monopolies. The specific
provisions of factory legislation probably had some bearing on this process.
The 1844 Act, for example, coincided with a crucial transition in mulespinning and, by restricting adult women on the same terms as young
persons, discouraged the employment of female piecers. The safety clauses
of the same Act have been less discussed, but may have made a contribution
to the masculine identity of machine maintenance, adjustment and repair,
and the confinement of women to particular work areas within the mill. On
the other hand, some men were less successful in furthering their exclusionary aspirations. Power-loom weaving continued to grow with a mainly
female labour force, while any hopes of restricting factory development and
restoring the position of depressed male out-workers proved illusory. We
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
75
may perhaps conclude that the Factory Acts played some part in excluding
women from particular jobs, but generally this occurred in conjunction with
other factors.
The gendered form taken by the agitation had a wider significance, not
least in helping to shape cultural definitions of work in an industrial society.
Regulation embodied notions of ‘free’ and ‘protected’ labour. This may well
have been something of a legal fiction in the immediate context of textiles,
and some of the contradictions of this were sharply exposed in the battles
over interpretation of the 1847 Act. But it was a fiction that set the framework
for possible further legislation. The threat of renewed agitation to limit the
moving-power may, indeed, have helped persuade employers, politicians
and others to accept the de fact0 standard working day finally established in
the 1853 Act.
The measures formulated for textiles provided a general model in sub
sequent extensions of legislation, and gender-based restrictions which in
textiles meant the standard workingday could, in different industrial contexts, have a more strongly exclusionary effect. In glass-works, printing, blastfurnaces and various other trades, special exemptions for teenage ‘lads’
contrasted with the strict limitation on women’s
Night work and
overtime were less important in textiles, but significant factors in other
sectors; women compositors in Edinburgh were confined to the book trade
It is likely that politicians, employers’ presby restrictions on their
sure groups and the economic pundits were already, in the late 1 8 4 0 ~look~
ing over their shoulders at what precedents would be created for possible
future extensions of legislation.
The juridical distinction between protected categories and adult male
workers, which this opinion was so anxious to maintain, helped empower
men as they renegotiated the sexual division of labour. Aspects of public
rhetoric not directly embodied in legislation cannot be dismissed as epiphenomenal. The short-time movement belongs in a formative period in the
history of labour (largely coinciding with Chartism) and the language of
dependence and protection helped define the masculine public presence
of organised labour. The demand for free time as the condition of selfimprovement was represented in gendered terms: self-education and renewal of labour-power for men, domestic duties for women. The issue of
gender-specific restrictions and exclusions by no means exhausts the gender
dimensions of the Victorian Factory Acts.
Notes
*This article includes research supported by a Nuffield Social Science Fellowship and an
honoran/ Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester; this assistance, and that of
the Faculty research fund, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Portsmouth
Polytechnic, are gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to colleagues at Portsmouth,
0 Basil Blackwell Lrd 1993
76
Gender and History
Manchester and elsewhere for advice and encouragement, and especially to the editors
and readers of this journal for helpful comments.
1. See e.g. P. Hudson (ed.) Regions and Industries (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1989); P. Joyce, ‘Work’, in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 17501950, vol. ii: People and Their Environment, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 19901, pp. 131-94; J. K. Walton, ‘The Northwest’, in
Cambridge Social History, vol. i: Regions and Communities, pp. 355-414.
2. Recent studies include B. Harrison, “‘Some of them gets lead poisoned”: occupational lead exposure in women, 1880-1914: Social History of Medicine, 2 (19891,
pp. 171-95; A. john (ed.) Unequal Opportunities: women’s employment in England,
1800-1918 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1986); A. John, By the Sweat of their Brow: women
workers at Victorian coal mines (pb. ed., Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984);
J. Lown, Women and Industrialisation: gender at work in nineteenthcentury England
(Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990); K. McClelland, ’Some thoughts on masculinity and the
“representative artisan” in Britain, 1850-1 880’, Gender and History, 1 (19891, pp. 16477; C. E. Morgan, ‘Women, work and consciousness in the mid-nineteenth-century
English cotton industry’, Social History, 17 (1992), pp. 23-41; M. Valverde, “’Giving the
female a domestic turn”: the social, legal and moral regulation of women’s work in British
cotton mills, 1830-50’, Journal of Social History, 21 (1988), pp. 619-34; S. Walby,
Patriarchy at Work (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986).
3. For details of the Acts see U. R. Q. Henriques, Before the Welfare State (Longman,
London, 1979), chs 4-5; M. W. Thomas, The Early Factory Legislation (Thames Bank
Publishing, Leigh-on-Sea, 1948).
4. See R. Gray, ‘The languages of factory reform in Britain, c.1830-60’, in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. P. Joyce (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 19871,
pp. 143-79; R. Gray, ‘Medical men, industrial labour and the state in Britain, c.1830-50’,
Social History, 16 (1991), pp. 19-43.
5. M. Freifeld, ‘Technological change and the ”self-acting” mule’, Social History,
11 (1986), pp. 319-43; W. Lazonick, ’Industrial relations and technical change: the
case of the self-acting mule’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3 (19791, pp. 231 -62;
A. Fowler and T. Wyke (eds) The Barefoot Aristocrats: a history of the Amalgamated
Association of Operative Cotton Spinners (George Kelsall, Littleborough, Lancs., 1987),
chs 1-3.
6. Fowler and Wyke (eds) Barefoot Aristocrats, pp. 8-9; Reports from Inspectors of
Factories: L. Horner, Dec. 1841, App. 4, in British parliamentary Papers, Reprint Series,
Industrial Revolution: Factories, vol. 7 (Irish University Press, Shannon). Note: all
references to Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) will cite the IUP Reprint vol. nos except
for items not included in the series; and all the inspectors’ reports used are in vols 7-9
of the series and are cited hereafter simply as Reports (or Joint Report) followed by the
inspector’s name and the date. Gardner and Bazley, ‘Return of the number of hands
employed’, 15 April 1844, Haggas Bryan Coll., Bolton Reference Library, Ms ZHB/1/5.
7. See e.g. Gardner and Bazley, ‘Return of hands’; ’List of hands at Robinwood Mill’,
1851, Fielden Papers, West Yorks Record Office, Ms. C353/134.
8. K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters on Capital (New Park Publications, London, 19831,
p. 53 (Engels to Marx, 4 March 1858); notebook entitled ‘Robinwood Mill’, Fielden
Papers, entry of 15 January 1852, for an instance of problems with preparatory processes;
J. Montgomery, Theory and Practice of Cotton Spinning (1836) in Technology and Toil
in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. M. Berg (CSE Books, London, 1979), p. 62.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd.
1993.
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of jobs
77
9. M. B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1986), p. 70; 5. A. Weaver, John Fielden and the Politics of Popular Radicalism
(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 19871, p. 24.
10. 5. Moore, ‘Women, industrialisation and protest in Bradford, West Yorkshire,
1780-1845’ (PhD thesis, University of Essex, 19881, pp. 70-7.
11. Factory Commission (1833-4), Supplementary Report, PP Reprints, Industrial
Revolution: Children‘s Employment, vol. 5; and Moore, ‘Women, industrialisation and
protest’, p. 67.
12. See D. Gregory, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution (Macmillan,
London & Basingstoke, 1982); P. Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital: a study of
the West Riding textile industry, c. 1750- 1850 (cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1986).
13. Moore, ‘Women, industrialisation and protest‘, pp. 57-9, 85, 93-4.
14. C. Johnstone, ‘The standard of living of worsted workers in the Keighley area during
the nineteenth century’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 19761, pp. 271-2.
15. W. A. Abram, ’Social condition and political prospects of the Lancashire workmen’,
Fortnightly Review, new series, 4 (18681, p. 43 1.
16. See C. Hall, ‘The tale of Samuel and Jemima: gender and working-class culture in
nineteenthcentury England’, in E.P. Thompson: critical perspectives, ed. H. J. Kaye and
K. McClelland (Polity Press, Cambridge, 19901, pp. 78-102; W. Seccombe, ’Patriarchy
stabilized: the construction of the male breadwinner norm in nineteenthcentury Britain’,
Social History, 11 (19861, pp. 53-76.
17. M. Anderson, ’Sociological history and the workingclass family: Smelser revisited’,
Social History, 1 (19761, pp. 31 7-34; M. Edwards and R. Lloyd-Jones, ‘N. J. Smelser and
the cotton textile family: a reassessment‘, in Textile History and Economic History, ed.
N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1973); cf.
P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (Harvester Press, Brighton, 19801, pp. 54-7.
18. See, e.g., recruitment difficulties at the Fieldens’ Mytholmroyd Mill, in notebook
’Mytholmroyd Mill’, Fielden Papers C353/341; Gardner and Bazley, ’Return of hands’
gives occupations of husbands of married women employed.
19. See below notes 27-30 and relevant text.
20. See e.g. Valverde, ”’Giving the female a domestic turn”‘.
21. 5. A. Weaver, ‘The political ideology of short-time’, in Worktime and Industrialization: an international history, ed. G. Cross (Temple University Press, Philadelphia,
1988), pp. 77-102.
22. Fowler and Wyke (eds) Barefoot Aristocrats, pp. 30-1; I. R. Saunders, ‘Workingclass movements in the West Riding textile district, 1829-1839’ (PhD thesis, University
of Manchester, 19841, ch. 5; Weaver, ’The political ideology of short-time’.
23. Select Committee on the Labour of Children in Factories (1831-21, PP Reprints,
Industrial Revolution: Children‘s Employment, vol. 2.
24. Cf. Hall, ’Gender and working-class culture’.
25. G. Eley, ’Edward Thompson, social history and political culture’, in E.P. Thompson,
ed. Kaye and McClelland, pp. 12-49.
26. Hall, ‘Gender and working-class culture’, p. 94.
27. Moore, ’Women, industrialisation and protest’, pp. 151-4.
28. Poor Man‘s Advocate, 17 March 1832.
29. ’Alfred’, The History of the Factory Movement (18571, vol. I, p. 235.
30. ‘Alfred‘, Factory Movement, vol. I, p. 230.
B Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
78
Gender and History
31. C. Driver, Tory Radical: the life of Richard Oastler (Oxford University Press, New
York, 1946), p. 327; speech by J.Firth reprinted in The Justice Humanity and Policy of
Restricting the Hours of Children and Young Persons in the Mills and Factories of the
United Kingdom (18331, p. 75.
32. Select Committee on Labour of Children (1831 -21.
33. The Ten Hours Advocate, 26 December 1846.
34. Reports, L. Horner, May 1845, p. 15, Appendix & December 1848, pp. 15-1 7;
and cf. Walby, Patriarchy at Work, p. 121.
35. Reports, L. Horner, December 1848, Appendix; cf. j. Ginswick (ed.) Labour and
the Poor in England and Wales, 1849- 185 1: letters to the Morning Chronicle (Frank Cass,
London, 1983), vol. I, pp. 1 1 7-19.
36. See Gray, ‘Languages of factory reform’ and ‘Medical men’.
37. ‘Alfred’, Factory Movement, vol. I , p. 234.
38. K. M. Lyell (ed.) Memoirs of Leonard Horner (18901, vol. 11, p. 14.
39. See e.g. Poor Man’s Advocate, 10 March 1832.
40. McDouall‘s Chartist and Republican Journal (1841), p. 1 1 5.
41. Prospectus for Poor Man’s Advocate, bound with copies in Goldsmiths’ Library,
University of London.
42. [J. Leech], Stubborn Facts from the Factories, by a Manchester Operative (1 844),
p. 30.
43. The Truth-teller, 5 August 1848; published at Stalybridge, copy in Public Record
Office, Home Office files re disturbances, H O 45/2410B.
44. McDouall’s Journal, p. 1 1 5.
45. [Leech], Stubborn Facts, p. 12; The Ten Hours Factory Question: report addressed
to the Short-Time Committee of the West Riding (1842), pp. 4-9, 23.
46. john, By the Sweat of their Brow, ch. 2; Valverde, “‘Giving the female a domestic
turn”’; Walby, Patriarchy at Work, pp. 112-26.
47. The Ten Hours Factory Question, p. 5.
48. Cf. Gray, ’Languages of factory reform‘, pp. 150-2.
49. [Leech], Stubborn Facts, p. 30; Reports, L. Horner, December 1841, p. 29.
50. Ten Hours Advocate, passim.
5 1. Ten HOUNAdvocate, 24 October 1846.
52. B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (2nd ed., P. S. King,
London, 191 1).
53. Bolton Chronicle, 31 March 1849; Ten Hours Advocate, 3 & 24 October 1846.
54. Ten Hours Advocate, 24 October 1846.
55. For debates in governing and opinion-forming circles, see A. P. Robson, On Higher
than Commercial Grounds: the factory controversy, 1830- 1853 (Garland, New York and
London, 1985).
56. See e.g. Bolton Chronicle, 20 January, 31 March 1849.
57. Driver, Tory Radical, chs 37-8; j . Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1974), p. 233; Fowler and Wyke (eds) Barefoot
Aristocrats, pp. 45-6.
58. Valverde, ”‘Giving the female a domestic turn”’, pp. 626-7.
59. See Hall, ‘Gender and workingclass culture’, pp. 93-4.
60. The Address of W.J. Fox, Esq., MP, and Proceedings of the Public Meeting . .
Oldham 25April 1852, in scrapbook ‘Election Scraps, Oldham, 1852’, Oldham Reference
Library.
.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993
Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs
79
61. The Ten Hours Bill: the Factory Operative’s Guide and Labourer’s Advocate, 1 June
1853, copy in HO 45/5128; Report of the Speeches delivered at a Great Ten Hours
Meeting . . . [in] Over Darwen, 18 March 1853 (18531, p. 6, J. M. Cobbett Coll., Goldsmiths’ Library, University of London; cf. ]. S . Mill, Principles ofPolifica1 Economy (1848;
Penguin Classics ed., Harmondsworth, 19851, Book V, pp. 329-30.
62. See handbills etc. in Cassidy Coll., Stalybridge Reference Library, DD13 (I am grateful to Patrick Joyce for drawing attention to this source); Ashton Chronicle, e.g., 29 April,
19 August, 16 September, 2 December 1848, 13 January, 17 March, 21 April 1849;
Home Office files re disturbances: H O 45/2410B, HO 45/3131, HO 45/3139, HO
45/51 281.
63. Fellow Workmen, June 1853, broadsheet in Cassidy Coll.
64. The factory Operatives of Oldham, 4 July 1853, Cassidy Coll.
65. See above note 45; the comments on patterns of enforcement rest on research in
progress.
66. Valverde, “’Giving the female a domestic turn”’, p. 620.
67. See P. Bartrip and P. Fenn, ‘The evolution of regulatory style in the nineteenthcentury British factory inspectorate’, Journal of Law and Society, 10 (19831, pp. 201 -22;
W. G. Carson, ’The conventionalisation of early factory crime’, Internationa1)ournal of the
Sociology of Law, 8 (1980), pp. 175-86; 6. Martin, ‘Leonard Horner: a portrait of an
inspector of factories’, International Review of Social History, 14 (1969), pp. 41 2-43;
Thomas, Early factory Legislation.
68. Cf. P. Bartrip, ‘British government inspection, 1832-75: some observations’, Historical Journal, 25 (19821, pp. 605-26.
69. Gray, ’Languages of factory reform’, p. 151.
70. Cf. Gray, ’Medical men’.
71. Returns of Prosecutions: PP 1836 XLV, 1837 L, 1837-8 XLV, 1839 XLII, 1840
XXXVIII, 1841 XVIII, 1842 XXXII, 1843 XLII, 1844 XXXIX, 1845 XXXVII, 1846 XXXIV;
thereafter appended to Reports of Inspectors.
72. 7 & 8 Vict., c.14; cf. Robson, Higher Than Commercial Grounds, pp. 173-5.
73. R. Baker, The Factory Acts Made Easy (amended ed., 18541, pp. 8, 85-6, 116.
74. For example that cited below, note 77.
75. See P. Bartrip and S. Burman, The Wounded Soldiers of Industry: industrial compensation policy, 1833- 1897 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983), pp. 54-68.
76. See sources cited above, note 7.
77. % Male by Agegroups, 1850:
Young persons,
Children
adults
Lancs. cotton
Yorks. wool
Yorks. worsted
67
61
42
56
66
32
Return of number of persons employed . . . [etc.], PP 1850 XLII; the returns lump together
all females above 13 and males have been similarly aggregated for comparison.
78. Reports: Joint report on accidents, October 1853.
79. 7 & 8 Vict., c.15, 520, 36.
80. Baker, Factory Acts, p. 22.
81. Minutes of Meetings of Factory Inspectors, 8 March 1854, PRO LAB 15/3; Joint
Report, April 1854, p. 60.
82. Reports, L. Horner, October 1846, p. 442.
0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1993.
Gender and History
80
83. Select Committee on the Act for the Regulation of Factories (1840-1 ), PP Reprints,
Factories, vol. 1, p. 25.
84. Reports, L. Horner, July 1842, January 1843.
85. Joint Report, April 1854, p. 60.
86. Joint Report, April 1854, Appendix; see also Special Report on Accidents from
Machinery, PP Reprints, Factories, vol. 27, p. 33 (report from R. Baker); Manchester
Guardian, 23 October 1844 (report of case in Bolton).
87. Gray, 'Languages of factory reform', p. 74; F. Trollope, The Life and Adventures of
Michael Armstrong (1840; repr. Frank Cass, London, 19681, pp. 80-1 ; The Autobiography
of Thomas Wood 1822-80 (privately printed, 1956; copy in Keighley Reference Library),
p. 7.
88. Reports, Saunders, May 1845, p. 43; Baker, Factory Acts, pp. 32-3.
89. Ginswick (ed.) Labour and the Poor, pp. 15, 131, 162.
90. Ginswick (ed.) Labour and the Poor, p. 95.
91. Cf. John, By the Sweat of their Brow, pp. 137, 147, 174, 180.
92. Ginswick (ed.) Labour and the Poor, p. 17.
93. See summary of the various Acts in Commission on the Factory and Workshop Acts
(1876), PP Reprints, Factories, vol. 4, appendix H, pp. 213-17.
94. S. Reynolds, Britannica's Typesetters: women compositors in Edinburgh (Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 70, 84.
0 Basil
Blackwell Lfd. 1993